I LOVE all the Christmas decorations in my house – the trees, the lights, the great-smelling candles, all the festive red and green, the Christmas china. But never fail, even though every year I can’t imagine EVER wanting to take it all down, sure enough, come about January 2, I start getting antsy to “undecorate” and get it all put away. Even with the mild sadness that I feel as it all goes back in the boxes for another year, even with the slightly stark and empty look the living room has when it’s all gone, I’m strangely driven to get it done and get back to “normal”. And it ALWAYS surprises me that there’s a sort of serenity that comes over me as I look at my home afterward.
It surprises me because I have such wonderful memories of choir and staff parties in my home, warm and fuzzy times in front of the fire with my kids all home, and beautiful Christmas music playing all the time. One would think that it would cause more than mild sadness to see all that go for another year. And yet, I really do welcome the simplicity, and getting back to the mundane routine of “normal” life.
Could this be what “Ordinary Time” is all about? We have a short stretch of Ordinary Time now in the Christian calendar, after the Baptism of our Lord and before Lent. The term “Ordinary Time” has always sounded kind of depressing to me, as if it’s dead time between the really exciting times in the liturgical calendar. So it surprises me that there’s something in me, and I suspect in all of us, that welcomes it. I wonder if on some level it’s some part of us knowing what Richard Foster wrote in his book Prayer, Finding the Heart’s True Home: “The discovery of God lies in the daily and the ordinary, not in the spectacular and the heroic. If we cannot find God in the routines of home and shop, then we will not find Him at all.” After all, the moment before Mary was confronted by the angel was Ordinary Time, wasn’t it?
And what does it have to say to us as organists? For me, I know that I’ve always really enjoyed planning and playing for Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. But I can too easily slip into short-changing the time and energy I give to “Ordinary Time” Sundays. Remembering that my primary purpose is to be help people worship, from now on I hope I will appreciate that in Ordinary Time I’m helping people worship a God who speaks especially “in the daily and the ordinary”.
Andrea Handley
Dean