An Ordinary Life of Worship

A Rule of Life makes space for us to integrate the spheres of our everyday work and relationships into one ordinary life of worship. As we pace our Rule of Life to the seasons of the church calendar, we might wonder what to do with expanse of days set apart by the church as Ordinary Time. A helpful place to begin answering this question is by prayerfully considering the parts of Christ’s life that scriptures tell us almost nothing about. You could say that the years between his toddler days, which were spent migrating to various parts of the world as his parents sought refuge from Herod, to the beginning of his more formal ministry, marked by his baptism in the Jordan River, were the Ordinary Time of Jesus’ life, as they make up the majority of all of his days on earth.

What does it mean that half of our calendar is left open to the ordinary? What does it tell us about the God who created and gives purpose to our lives? If the historic liturgical calendar teaches us to number our days to gain a heart of wisdom, there must be a lot of wisdom to be gained in our regular working, resting, and worshiping lives. Let’s consider the familiar pathways of our ordinary lives as the exact place Jesus is inviting us to join him in work and rest, and the place we joyfully offer the quotidian bits and pieces of our days to God as an act of worship (Romans 12:1).

ROUTES AND ROUTINES

I learned a long time ago that as soon as I figured out a routine for one part of my life, another thing would quit working altogether. I began to put the word routine in the same category as tips, techniques, and Spanx—all have their place, but they also have a limited lifespan. But the word route I can get behind. A familiar pathway, a preferred direction from one point to another—I can work with that.

With every move we have had to make in the thirty-plus years of our marriage, I’ve spent almost as much time scoping out the walkways around each potential house as I have the number of rooms and bathrooms and kitchen cupboards in the house itself. It’s not just that I want to know what resources will be available to us in any given neighborhood, but subconsciously I’m trying to discern what story we’re potentially moving into. We’ve been blessed to move into a full range of storied living arrangements—from the quiet suburban backyards where our kids spent hours each day jumping on a trampoline with their friends, to the places we moved within walking distance of school to save on car and fuel expenses, to the loft apartment in a nineteenth-century corset factory whose front door led to a large parking lot where we regularly congregated with dozens of neighbors in the middle of the night because of a glitchy fire alarm system. Nature essayist Scott Sanders gives me words to describe my compulsion to forage for meaning outside the front door of each home we’ve considered:

The likeliest path to the ultimate ground leads through my local ground. I mean the land itself, with its creeks and rivers, its weather, seasons, stone outcroppings, and all the plants and animals that share it. I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one; I cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place.

When we realized the loft apartment in the corset factory wasn’t quite the right fit for our family (pun intended), God provided us with a rental house in a neighborhood whose “local ground” surpasses everything I’ve ever dreamed about: friendly, unpretentious houses and multifamily dwellings, vibrant coffee shops and quirky bars, three parks within walking distance, two of which curve around the rocky shoreline of the Long Island Sound. Our friends, who moved from the lonely neighborhoods of pandemic-era Manhattan, in part so they could be our neighbors, use the words of the psalmist to describe this area known as Black Rock: “The boundary lines have fallen for [us] in pleasant places . . .” (Psalm 16:6, NRSV).

Year-round we walk the boundary lines of this “pleasant place,” reconnecting the spiritual ground of our lives with the geographical ground of our neighborhood. No matter the season, when I walk our neighborhood, I become a recipient of so much goodness. Almost immediately, I greet the fresh air in my lungs and reinvigorated blood pumping through my body like sleepy co-workers who just got caught napping on the job. Every part of me snaps to attention, noticing new color, smells, and sounds like someone has just autocorrected the brightness level of my sensory filters. On particularly good walks, I notice a stirring gratitude and desire to pray for others and the earth itself. I pause at the little free libraries that dot our neighborhood, smile at the dogs wearing ridiculous sweaters, admire the anonymous art installations that pop up in chalk drawings and stone cairns along the shoreline, and chat with elderly neighbors sitting alone on park benches. On summer Saturday mornings, Brian and I walk a few blocks to the farmers market, sometimes pushing our grandson in his stroller, which we then fill up with armfuls of corn on the cob that tickle Julian’s face with their silky stalks. We get to know local creators and cultivators and learn to appreciate their skill in growing the ingredients we’ll add to our salads and roast on the grill. As September arrives, we buy less fresh produce and more apple cider doughnuts, because living in New England demands it.

But we also meet our neighbors and hear the stories they care about on any given week. The interaction often moves us into practical action as we discover ways to become invested in our local businesses and care for the natural resources of our neighborhood; we sign up to help clean the beaches at the neighborhood park, over tip at the coffee truck, drop money in the buskers’ hats, and leave with a bouquet of wildflowers that we bought to support the nearby food shelter.

The routes we walk—rhythms of embodied presence and prayerful listening to the small world outside our front door— help me to notice the small, and not-so-small, shifts in our season of life. Like the winding pathway of a prayer labyrinth, the familiarity of the route around the neighborhood invites me to engage my body while freeing my heart and mind to reflect and pray.

During a period when our family experienced prolonged and intense suffering and grief, I was holding my breath emotionally, just trying to get through the day without feeling too much anxiety or anything else. I didn’t fully realize I was living this way until I was midway through one of my walks. The sights that would usually rouse a sense of hope and gratitude—happy gulls dropping clams on the rocky shore when the tide is out, the briny whiff of the sea air making my eyes water, or the chatter of neighbors resting on park benches shading their eyes from the sun reflecting off the water—felt flat. More than flat—heavy, burdensome even. In that moment, I became aware that I’d been keeping my head down, trying to just get through the walk while resisting the beauty around me, and that this had significant consequences for my spiritual life.

Beauty invites in us equal parts longing and contentment—neither pair well with trying to press the pause button on our emotions. Realizing this didn’t lift the pain, but it did elicit a sense of tenderness toward myself: I realized I was deep in grief and needed mercy. For a long season after that, my walks mostly consisted of me asking God to make me able to sense the merciful mystery of Christ’s presence ahead, behind, above, and below me, even though I was too sad to savor the beauty. As this awareness grew, gratitude again stirred in my weary heart. I felt grateful.

The routines of the walk change with the seasons, but the route always grounds my story in the story of this place. I don’t know how long we’ll be given to live in this neighborhood; we don’t own the house we live in, but if the day comes for us to find another neighborhood, I’ll be searching out the story lines of a new place, finding the route that will lead me home.