Immanent Grace

A Liturgy for Ordinary Time

Now is the holy not afar 
In temples lighted by a star, 
But where the loves and labors are. 
Now that the King has gone this way, 
Great are the things of every day

—Edwin Markham, “The Consecration of the Common Way”

Ordinariness gets a bad rap in our high-stakes marketing culture. To call a book or a movie “ordinary” is to say that it is not worth our time. Referring to a student or a job applicant as “ordinary” in a recommendation letter suggests that they are barely able to dress themselves. No university I have ever encountered would draft a mission statement promising all its students an “ordinary educational experience.” And few churches advertise themselves as “ordinary spiritual experiences for ordinary people living ordinary lives.” And yet, the vast majority of the time we spend on earth consists of doing ordinary things: eating, sleeping, shopping, doing dishes, mowing lawns, and chauffeuring children. Most of us will experience only a very few extraordinary moments in our lives. When we do, we will only know that they are extraordinary by comparing them to the many moments that are not. 

We have a hard time celebrating ordinariness because, for solid evolutionary reasons, our brains crave novelty. New experiences are likely to contain threats we must pay attention to and opportunities to help us survive and reproduce. Our own brains reward us with generous amounts of dopamine when we seek, find, and pay attention to the new and exciting things in our environment. Ordinary sensations and experiences—things unlikely to pose new threats or present new opportunities—fade into the background so that we barely notice them. This way, we can focus the bulk of our attention on new potential threats and opportunities. It is all part of the efficient and ironclad logic of natural selection.

But the efficient and ironclad logic of natural selection does not care whether or not we are happy. It has no interest in our personal fulfillment, spiritual growth, or peace of mind. It cares only that we survive long enough to reproduce, which is the lowest bar imaginable for a happy life. Human flourishing does not require novelty, excitement, or exceptional experiences of any kind. It occurs in the orderly accumulation of ordinary moments. “How we spend our days,” writes Annie Dillard, is “how we spend our lives.”

Ordinariness is actually a profound human need. The word “ordinary” comes from the same root as the words “order,” and “ordain.” An ordinary life is one in which everything is in order, exactly the way it should be. An ordinary life is the kind of existence that God has ordained for human beings. In some religious traditions, an “ordinary” minister is a person who has been ordained to a specific task, while an “extraordinary minister” can only perform the task in a dire emergency. And if we really think about it, “ordinary times” are the best times to be alive.