Today is the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time sounds kind of romantic--or unromantic, depending on your perspective--but it simply means counted time. It is the time we count in between the penitential seasons and high holy days. It is one week, two weeks, three weeks, four. It is so simple as to be almost unremarkable, and almost, if we’re not careful, unnoticeable.
Every time I’ve thought, over the past 17 weeks, of writing this post, it has seemed almost too straightforward. Life with young children is almost unrelentingly ordinary--counted. It’s the sixth week of my daughter’s school career. It’s the third day of illness. It’s the 101-degree temperature. It’s 20 minutes past bedtime. It’s the fourth trip to the store this week. It’s a birthday, or a half birthday, or a how-many-days-until-my birthday. It’s first steps and first words and first heartbreaks. It’s the four hundred and seventy-seventh time I’ve told you no.
And life with young children is also ordinary in the other (ordinary?) sense of the word. It is chock full of the mundane to the point of weariness, even to the point of boredom. Of course, life with young children also has its high holy days of jubilation and its penitential seasons of worry and loss; it is not all ordinary all the time. But much of the day to day is counting, and breathing, and taking the next step.
Ever since I was a teenager, my relationship to faith has been complicated. At times, I have longed to leave but found myself strangely rooted; at other times, I have longed to believe but found myself unutterably weary of trying. But between the high holy days of assurance and the penitential seasons of self-examination and despair, I have spent most of the last 10 years or so in a kind of ordinary, counted time. I have attended church. I have observed the seasons. I have recited the prayers and creeds, taken part in the sacraments, and made my life with the faith community. In ways, this has been my salvation. I have discovered that the community can hold faith for me when I am finding it awkward and unwieldy to carry alone. I have found that the liturgical seasons offer rhythm and repetition that ring true in ancient ways, that sync with the primeval depths of me that circle the years with the sun and cycle the months with the moon. I have found the stories to be true in ways that aren’t limited to history or even fact; in moments when I have been convinced, in my loneliness and hubris, that no one has ever been where I have been, the stories have come to find me. They have surfaced in my mind like a song long forgotten. They have reminded me that people have been asking these questions for thousands of years. They have reminded me that I am ordinary; what a relief.
I’m having trouble, today, staying in ordinary time. All of my doubts and fears about God, about the future, about the life of faith, seem to have woken out of sleep with me this morning. It feels more like a Lent or Advent of the soul, a time of acute waiting, a time of darkness deep enough to imagine I’m alone. I’m trying to stay put. I’m trying to find the touchstones of my ordinary time, my counted, daily rhythms set to keep me moving forward, one step, one day, one breath.
Part of our family’s ordinary time is that on Sunday afternoons, following church and lunch and naps, I leave to write. This is a rhythm that gifts me, that reconnects me to myself and to my work. And then, when I return two hours later, it reconnects me to my family. I have renewed energies to pack another lunch for the start of another school week. I am ready to read to my son, to listen to my daughter’s stories of the playground, to exchange backrubs with my husband while we watch Louie before heading to bed. And all of these rhythms, welcomed and resisted, are making me into someone new, someone better equipped for mothering, for loving, for working, for resting. Maybe even better equipped for faith, for believing in something that feels so impossible, and yet so impossible to leave alone.
