Ordinary time is the longest season in the church calendar.
It begins with a rather extra-ordinary day: Pentecost (and in many calendars, the subsequent weeks are marked as the _th Sunday after Pentecost)… So our “ordinary” moments begin with the Spirit of God showing up in our world. Ordinary time began way back in May, and continues all the way till Advent begins. It begins in spring and makes its way through all of summer and most of fall before shifting into a different season, one of anticipation, of the story beginning all over again.
So often, the “ordinary days” go unmarked, unnoticed, unseen. We forget some of the sacred rhythms we have found in Advent or Lent or Easter. Summertime comes and goes, and we begin to orient ourselves around the school year or a work schedule, and lose sight of being present to the gifts of every holy moment.
If attention is something you are wanting to cultivate in your own soul and its experience of the world, consider joining us on a creative (ordinary) journey into this next season.
Each of us will keep a sketchbook/journal with the intention of being-present to our lives in the reality of them. If that is tears and mess or unexpected blooming and the delights of harvest, it all matters. It all is worth noticing, worth naming.
Part of what attending to our senses does is ground us in the present moment, so this kind of attention is helpful particularly in the midst of seasons that seem to bringing up old trauma, fears, and grief…but also just in the dailiness of living as an embodied soul.
We live in a beautiful, broken, dark, holy, bright, colorful world.
We are going to take a page from Ignatian spiritual practice and spend our autumn ordinary time “finding God in all things.” So, when we notice the way the edges of the petals begin to brown, or the shimmer of the beetle’s wings, or our toddler’s messy hands, we can pay attention. We can see God there, even there. And then we’ll find ways of recording these gifts of noticing in our sketchbooks. You might sketch a plant that strikes you with its beauty or stability or fragility. You may take a photo of something that is ever in motion (like a bird…or a child…) and spend time with that still frame later, too (whether by printing the photo, drawing from it, or even writing some words about that experience). You may find your expressiveness coming out as descriptive fragments, or even whole poems!
When we take enough time to draw or write about something, we see it differently.
We know it more intimately after we’ve looked long and let our hand attempt to capture what we see (however skilled or unskilled we may be at that process, it’s worth doing, even just for the attentiveness to the present moment—the moment God is always present in!). You do not need to be an artist. We all need practice seeing. (Also, if it helps, we will also have some specific instruction around beginning sketching with pencil and/or ink—and marker/watercolor, if desired—to help bolster whatever is latent in our creative memory from childhood!)
We will have daily one-word prompts to invite our awareness a certain direction, to discover what the gifts of today are that are “golden” or “sticky” or “soft” as we make our way through our moments. It will be a like a scavenger hunt—noticing where you are drawn, and where God might be in the midst of the gifts you discover. If that last part feels hard to name on your own, we will also be having groups each week, to gather and reflect on the gifts of our ordinary time, making space to be present to where God is and has been. The groups will be formatted similarly to group spiritual direction, where we will have some initial centering meditation or poem or blessing, before entering more deeply into each other’s experience.