“I rise today
Through the power of Heaven,
In these forces seven:
Light of the blazing sun,
Radiance of the moon,
Splendour of the new fire’s run,
Sweetness of the wind’s tune,
Deepness of the boundless sea,
The hard earth’s stability,
Stone fixed eternally;
I rise today,
Through God’s strength to pilot me
Through power most mighty,
Invoking the Trinity,
Confession of one, belief in three,
The Creator of Creation!”[i]
These are words, originally written in Irish, which have been attributed to St Patrick and are part of a longer prayer called ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’. There are two things I really like about this section. The first is that it invokes the natural world as part of the protection that prayer of St Patrick asks for. The second is that the words used in this English translation, Sun, Moon, Fire, Wind, Sea, Earth and Stone, all come from old English rather than Norman French, Latin, or Greek. Just to be clear I have nothing against Norman French, Latin, or Greek, it’s simply that we still name these things in the everyday language of ordinary people of the middle ages. These ordinary things are being used to evoke the presence of God. It is important to recognise this because it all too easy to see God in the extraordinary and yet fail to find God in the ordinary.
It is July and we have passed in to the second half of the year. A few weeks ago we celebrated Whitsun, the feast of Pentecost which is the last great celebration in the Christian year (which begins with Advent & Christmas, takes us through Epiphany, Candlemass, Lent, Holy Week, Easter and the weeks after Easter leading up to Whitsun). The first half of the year is one of commemoration and celebration; it is what the historian Professor Ronald Hutton has called the Ritual Half of the Year. It represents the two great cycles of the Christian year, Christmas which is linked to the movement of the sun, and Easter which is linked to the changing phases of the moon, and indirectly to the movement of the sun. The second half of the year is ordinary time, but it is also the second half of the Easter cycle. The fact that it has its place in the great Easter cycle suggests to me that the ordinary is every bit as important as the extraordinary. Most of us are ordinary people living ordinary lives, and ordinary time can perhaps be seen as a commemoration and celebration of the ordinary, common place things of daily living. Moreover I think it points to the possibility that God is to be found in the ordinary things of life.
When we think about it, it’s extraordinary that you an I, ordinary as we are, are here at all.
“Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here”.[ii]
And that’s the extraordinary thing; We are here because of events outside of the ordinary person’s control, and decisions made by each preceding generation. I am only here because my parents met, and they would not have met but for the Second World War, and the massive movement of people from east to west, ahead of the Soviet advance into Eastern Europe at the end of the war; and they would not have met if they had not been at the same dance. My mother would not have been born if her father’s first wife had not died, leading to his marriage to my grandmother. And that is looking at just one line of descent through a couple of generations. Richard Dawkins is surely correct. “In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here”.
So ‘it’s strange to be here, the mystery never leaves you alone’.[iii] That mystery, the mystery of our extraordinary ordinary existence, is not so much about the unknown or the unknowable, but more about a depth of a knowing that will take eternity to fully realise; And that ‘knowing’ begins in the extraordinary ordinary of the everyday. And that, I think is where we begin to find God, seeing the eternal, extra-ordinary in the ordinary everyday stuff of being here. “You never enjoy the world aright, till you see how a [grain of] sand exhibits the power and wisdom of God: and prize in everything the service they do you, by manifesting His glory and goodness to your Soul…”[iv]
It is only in this world that we can begin to see and understand the mystery that is God, and see God in our response to the “Gleaming in the stars, pouring down in the sunshine, speaking in the night, the wonder of the sun and of far space. It is eternity now, [we are] in the midst of it, it is about us in the sunshine, [we are] in it as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing is to come, It is now. Now is eternity; now is immortal life.”[v]
[i] Gillian Bradshaw – Hawk of May
[ii] Richard Dawkins – Unweaving the Rainbow.
[iii] John O’Donohue – Anam Cara
[iv] Thomas Traherne – Centuries of Meditations
[v] Richard Jefferies – The Story of My Heart: My Autobiography
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