Image by Alexey_Marcov, Pixabay
By Holly Gustafson
I’ve said it many times before: I love a fresh start. I love the new year with its promise that this year I can get everything right, or September with all its potential – I even don’t mind Mondays for the newness that they bring to every week. And at the start of every Liturgical season, I’m always eager to re-commit to prayer and virtue and spiritual reading – this Lent, or Easter, or Advent, or Christmas, I will become holy.
It’s the ordinary time I don’t do so well.
Even now, in late January, with Ash Wednesday still weeks away, I’m already thinking about Lent. What will I do, how will I pray, what will I read, how will I grow? Meanwhile, ordinary time passes me by. Sometimes I’m so busy wondering what God has in store for my future that I forget to ponder what He wants for me right now.
So instead of spending the next few weeks praying and planning so that I’m perfectly prepared for the upcoming liturgical season, I’m going to try to living in the here-and-now-ness that is ordinary time. Jean-Pierre de Caussade calls this this practice the sacrament of the present moment – each day is a sacrament, a sign of God’s presence in my life, and every day, no matter how ordinary, is a chance to begin again to ponder His love, and embrace His will. I don’t have to wait until the next big feast day or the start of the next liturgical season to commit to growing closer to Him.
Here are some things that I’ll be doing to patiently rest in the present moment of ordinary time:
Surround myself with light.
I’m always surprised at how dark the living room suddenly feels when our pre-lit Christmas tree is finally taken down. To dispel the post-Christmas/mid-winter darkness, I fill my house plants with fairy lights, and light candles during prayer time when before I might not have bothered. It marks the time between Christmas and Lent as a time of hope and light.
Read a good book.
This is a good time to read a good saint biography, or a good secular self-help book to grow in virtue, or a book with Catholic or Christian themes. (Try the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy by Sigrid Undset, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, or read The Kitchen Madonna by Rumer Godden as a family.)
Spend cozy evenings with Our Lady.
Catholic author Frank Sheed describes the heart of Mary “like that of the bird’s nest, built in a round warm ring to receive the little bird, rounded to the shape of humanity.” What better way to spend a cold mid-winter evening than bundled up with a blanket and a rosary? Enticing the kids, even teenage ones, is easy: just add hot chocolate.
There are many more beautiful devotions and rituals to embrace and begin during ordinary time (start learning about one particular saint, start every day with a warm breakfast and a family prayer, or get outside together every day), and it doesn’t really matter what you choose to do to mark this in-between season. What matters is to not wait until Sunday, or Monday, or the first of the month, or the next liturgical season to begin. God is in the present moment, which begins today.
Holly Gustafson lives with her husband, James, and their five children, in Regina, where they attend Christ the King Parish. Holly received her Masters in Linguistics at the University of Manitoba, and now pursues her love of language through art, writing, public speaking, and unsolicited grammatical advice. The best advice she ever received was from her spiritual friend, St. Faustina, who told her that when in doubt, “Always ask Love. It advises best.”
