The cicada bug’s song is always a dead giveaway, if the heat and humidity are not: we are in the dog days of summer. The days have lengthened, the cold of winter is long in our review mirror, though some of you, in complaint of the heat, would welcome it back, if not for good, at least for an afternoon of reprieve!! In Church speak, in the calendar of the liturgical year, we are in the long season of Pentecost, what the Church also calls “ordinary time,” that is the time between the feasts of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, and Easter.
Ordinary time is a season devoted to the slow, patient growth of discipleship, of growing in Christ together. Paul’s metaphor of being rooted and grounded in love in his letter to the Ephesians (3:17-18) makes some palpable and tactile sense in these summer months of abundant growth.
Yet, growing in the love of Christ is not about becoming super-Christians, it is about becoming ordinary Christians; it is about growing into the ordinariness of our lives fully aware that even the ordinary, nay, especially the ordinary, is shot through with the extraordinary glory of God.
On one level, I think we’re taught and socialized from a young age to eschew the ordinary, the mundane, the boring, and the simple.
We look elsewhere for the extraordinary—in the exciting, in the sensational, and perhaps even in the extreme. In my experience, those places generally lose their lustre after you scratch the surface.
We are taught to strive for greatness (imagine if the people of Babel were simply OK with being ordinary! We are schooled to live as large a life as possible, leave a legacy, be special, be somebody. And so, many of us can go through life striving for greatness, or at least for the next rung on the ladder, and we miss the beauty of the simple things, blind to the graced splendour of the most routine and humdrum parts of our lives.
When Paul encourages the Ephesians to be rooted and grounded in love, he is encouraging them to understand the scope of God’s love, to know just how wide and deep and high and long the love of God, in Jesus, really is. Paul prays that God the Father, in the power of His Spirit, and with the love of His Son, Jesus Christ, will fill the Ephesians with the fullness that He is, with the love that He is. God is love.
No wonder Paul says this love is incomprehensible. Not only did God, in Jesus, come alongside the “nobodies,” He also never eschewed the ordinary. The incarnation of Jesus is God coming into the ordinary minutes and hours of a span of time in history. In Christ, God’s love inhabited time—days, hours, and minutes—and in that time, pointed to the ordinariness of life, from birds, to trees, to bread, to wine, as signposts of the kingdom of His Father.
This love that Paul prays will fill the Ephesians will not make super-Christians. Rather, it creates the body of the baptized—a people who know that the love of God breaches and infiltrates the days, hours, and minutes of their ordinary lives. It creates a people who are changed in that filling, faithful to the call of growth and grounding in the love of God.
In her book, The Liturgy of the Ordinary - sacred practices in everyday life, Tish Harrison Warren says this: “The new life into which we are baptized is lived out in days, hours, and minutes. God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.”
Instead of looking to the extreme or the sensational, let’s turn to the small, to the simple, to the ordinary—that is the stuff of formation, that is the stuff of growth. As Jesus Himself showed, we are rooted and grounded in the love of God through the small, simple habits of our days in and our days out, habits of thought, speech, and action.
In and through what Kathleen Norris calls “the quotidian mysteries” - -those daily chores and habits and ways of life that shape our existence-- our faith is deepened, and our lives are more firmly anchored in the life we are given and given to.
In these dog days of summer, in your habits of prayer, of meditation on the Scriptures, of corporate worship, give thanks to God for meeting you in the ordinary stuff of your life. Lean into the regular patterns, into the truth of your life. However, know that these ordinary things are, by the power of the Holy Spirit, embers of God’s gracious giving, ready to set the world afire with His love.
In the words of Emily Dickinson in her poem Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
The Rev. Dr Patrick McManus (PhD, W2025) is Rector at All Saints Kingsway Anglican Church in Toronto and Regional Dean for Etobicoke-Humber Deanery.
