Cast into the Mundane

 

In extraordinary fashion we have been cast into a caldron of the ordinary. And so as we live day in and day out in ways which we never before thought possible or desirable, we ponder things like meaning and measure time. What if the ordinary is the extraordinary? What if the mundane contains sprinklings of the heavenly? 

Yesterday in the church marked the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, an expected and ritualistic fulfillment of the routine laws of Judaism. Yet there was nothing ordinary about it! With open heart and contemplative mind, Simeon and Anna “recognized” the Christ in a typical baby! New sacred illumination flooded the sanctuary and the ordinary, the expected, the earthly, was understood as sacred and profound. This all came about through the act of blessing upon recognition of divine substance. 

Re-cognize, new cognition, new ways of seeing and believing, come from these simple moments when blessing is offered to ordinary aspects of our lives and we invite the Holy Spirit to illuminate that which is holy, that which is extraordinary, that which is possible.