Articles - From the Vicar

Dear Friends,

On 7th June we celebrate Trinity Sunday which gathers up the great themes of the Christian story, the belief in God as creator, the experience of salvation in Jesus Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit to share our lives and make us more like Christ. Following on from Trinity we enter what is known in the church as "ordinary time". No great festivals or seasons just ordinary time. In church the liturgical colour becomes green, the colour of growth, suggesting the steady slow journey of our spiritual lives. I think this is as stroke of genius. Life is not all high days and holidays, and hopefully not awful, tragic days either. Most of life is just plodding along. It is about the ordinary things of life, "the daily round and common task" as one of the hymns puts it.

Yet it is the sheer ordinariness that is wonderful. The story of Jesus is about people finding God woven into the fabric of ordinary humanity, and this has been the experience of people ever since. George Herbert, the poet, called prayer "heaven in ordinary". It is about having our eyes opened to see the glory of God in the colour of a leaf, the cooking of a meal, the challenges of office life. It is about having our ears opened to hear God speaking to us through the rustle of the leaves, the kind words of the stranger, the cry of a child or the chords of a symphony or rock song.

If God was only in the special days - be they wonderful or awful then most of life would actually be God-forsaken boredom. But in truth, heaven and earth are interwoven, so the ordinary can become extraordinary, and even the boredom can be redeemed. So thank God for ordinary time!

With prayers and good wishes
David

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay