Welcome and Greeting

By Andrea Lingle

What is something you do every day without thinking? 

Laundry? Dishes? Brushing your teeth?

Is there anything that you do that is unremarkable?

Commuting to work? Filling the car? Grocery shopping?

Are there moments that are so bland that they slip by without being counted?

Filling out medical history forms? Waiting on hold? Sitting at stoplights?

The next seven weeks fall in a little slip of ordinary time tucked between Christmastide and Lent. It is a narrow band of weeks that are easy to dismiss as just the little pad of time between the things that matter. Just a blip between Birth and Death. I struggled a little to figure out what to put in this small time between Things, and finally it hit me. Fill Ordinary time with the ordinary things of life, but make it liturgical. We will live a Liturgy for the Mundane. 

Our ordinary days are filled with ordinary things that add together to make our lives. If we do not cherish the ordinary times, living only for the High Holy days, we will miss most of our passage through this wild, mysterious layover. Since none of us remember where we were before we burst into this life, covered in the blood and water of birth, shrieking at the shock of it, and none of us know, empirically, where we are bound; we should probably embrace what we have. 

I can imagine that a weary sigh just escaped you. I know you are trying your best. I am too. What if we didn’t try to make the boring stuff significant? What if we created a container for the boring stuff and called it our spiritual practice? A spiritual practice for ordinary time and ordinary people doing ordinary things.

How does your day begin? 

Hitting snooze? Brushing your teeth? Showering?

For this Liturgy of the Mundane, we will begin with a Welcome and Greeting. 

This week, we will begin with waking. We all know that these moments are hard to pin down. That is why they slip by. They are unremarkable. How did you respond to your alarm three Tuesdays ago? We don’t remember. These are ordinary moments. Don’t try to make them extraordinary, just help yourself acknowledge them. If you use a smartphone for your alarm, name it Welcome the Day. If you don’t, put a sticky note on your alarm clock. Go ahead and grumble about getting up, I know it’s hard, but then widen your arms and eyes to the day. Next, on the mirror (or wherever you brush your teeth), scribble a note to yourself (dry erase markers work perfectly on mirrors), “Hello, Self, know that you are beloved of God.” As you scrub your teeth, ponder that. Two minutes foaming and beloved. 

Waking and brushing. 

Welcome and Greeting. 

An ordinary liturgy for ordinary time.