Wednesday, Week 5 - God in the Ordinary

"Bless the God of all, who everywhere works great wonders, who fosters our growth from birth, and deals with us according to his mercy" (Sirach 50:22).

    Too often we separate our spiritual life from the rest of our life. It is so easy to put it aside for more seemingly urgent or significant aspects of our days. These external aspects seem more urgent, yet are often empty without benefit of inner refreshment and nourishment. We can so easily give in to discouragement or forget our vision and our dreams when we do not take time to integrate our outer world with our inner world. We remain fragmented instead of drawing together all the pieces into a wholeness that gives our life meaning.
    This integration is accomplished by taking time to look at the very ordinary parts of our day, to pray them by holding them up to the light of the scripture, to celebrate them in the deptsh of our being by pausing to reflect and reverence them, knowing that the God of graciousness is always there, immanently present, active, drawing us into a deeper love relationship.

    There are some days at work (like today) that leave me searching for stuff to do. The nature of the company I work for is that some weeks may demand 60 hours of work, while other weeks I have nothing to do but kick around on a computer and see what I can find. On these days, I usually make a regular stop at YouTube to see if I can't find anything interesting to watch. Today, I stumbled across a video from the 1950s in which doctors are testing the reaction of a normal housewife who has been given LCD (acid). The main point of the video, of course, is to laugh at the silly things the woman says after taking the LCD. However, there is an element to this video which relates quite well to the message above:
    The woman, after the effects of the LCD had set in, was in awe of everything around her -- the air, the "technicolor" of the world, her hands... everything. The world had taken on a new beauty for her. Of course, I am not condoning the use of hallucinogens, but it occurred to me that there are certain realizations that can be made (ideally without the stimulation of drugs) about the world around us and its beauty that we generally take for granted.
    At one point, the woman told the man who was busy asking her questions about her reaction: "I feel sorry for you." And truly, as I watched her recognize the beauty of the air in front of her face, I was in fact longing to see the beauty of the ordinary.