photo: “Spring Rain” by A. Furchert
The whole week monsoon-like rain poured down here on our little town in MN, drenching all and everything under layers of liquid. It started on Pentecost when the flood gates of heaven opened after a week of humid heat, sometimes hard to bear. After it was finally over blue skies appeared like nothing had happened.
As I love the fresh snow I love the refreshing rain. It leave everything brimming with metaphor and new life.
And what better time than the time of Pentecost, to open the flood gates of heaven refreshing our exhausted spirits? For the church year it is also the time when the Easter season ends and we enter back into "ordinary times".
And though we have not been in church forever I find it's seasons always helpful to help us structure the year:
As Christmas is not a day but a season thus it is with Easter. And for many wise people both feasts carry the same soul movement:
We enter a stage of preparation, Advent or Lent.
We enter into the feast day through the night.
We ponder the stable or the passion, our birth pangs and our losses.
We walk inside ourselves, (re)visiting our heart's heart to find the sacred within.
For all who have walked with us through these sacred times you know by now that honoring and facilitating this movement of soul is what our Cloister Seminars are about. And thus they live from repetition just as the church year does. And as the seasons of the year do.
But repetition is a challenge. It can feel boring (where is the new stuff to learn here?) or un-inviting (what, doing the same all over again?). At times it can feel exhausting, especially when we get trapped into the attempt to do it "right."
Thus the heavy rain storm. As I understand it was not all too pretty when God's spirit came over the people. It was kinda chaotic, almost as they were drunk.
And as our potted plants on the stoops are now drunk with more water than they can possibly use we also have to grapple with the gifts from above, as they all too often appear like blessings in disguise.
So how do we enter this new season of the soul? How do you enter the next stage of your life? Are you feeling dried out from a long journey through the desert or drenched from a monsoon rain? And what is the "ordinary life" about in the first place? Is there a way to celebrate it?
I like how the monastics think about the ordinary, namely that it is an invitation to sanctify what is normal. What ever ordinary thing we do, if it is done with the right heart we can make it holy. What a feast that could be!
And if Pentecost reminds us of anything, it is that we need Divine help to do it "right" the "right" way. To do it the way of the heart. Coming back to the place, even taking refuge in it, where the ordinary and the holy mingle.
Nursing my toddler, working the gardens, emptying some moving boxes (finally!), getting back to the less exciting parts of my work.
What will it be for you?
May be the task of ordinary times is to sanctify the life given to us, even what is hidden in the shadows along side it?
So let us enter us “ordinary times” together with a blessing":
And may God's good Spirit
rain on you
abundantly
and drench your ordinary times
with the holy spark
of new beginnings
anew again
and again.
Yours, Almut & family