The Ordinary is Extraordinary

A Thought on Sunday

The Ordinary is Extraordinary

From the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters, cp

Sunday 24th May 2014

When I was about fourteen years of age, I read George Eliot’s “Mill on the Floss” and I remember savouring it, the story and the language, and for the first time appreciating what real literature was. And I wrote down some of the lines in a notebook which I still have. They spoke to me then and they speak to me now. In fact, they speak to me now with a new intensity as I rediscover my childhood delight in the earth and nature:

“We could never have loved the earth so much if we had no childhood in it – if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass – the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows – the same redbreasts that we used to call “God’s birds” because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known.”

We are now moving into the weeks when the Irish countryside is at its most beautiful. We have thousands and thousands of miles of hawthorn hedges that erupt at this time into the greatest floral display our landscape knows. And the real beauty of the season is that it reaches its peak as the furze comes into its great summer-flowering. A beauty that hasn’t been much captured by poet or artist! And why I don’t know. Is it because the hawthorn is so ordinary, so familiar, that we don’t even notice it very much?

Our motorways have not only speeded our journeys up and down and across the country but they’ve also revealed this May paradise reaching the horizons on every side. It looks like the whole thing was carefully planned but it’s rarely remarked upon. You would think it should be promoted as a tourist attraction. But then you would probably need small planes or helicopters to view it all. Doing so from cars could be as dangerous and distracting as the mobile phones – appreciate and admire but not while driving!

There’s a radio ad from the Mater Private telling us our hearts beat 100,000 times a day but if they begin to wobble or complain, the Mater Private will be delighted to help us! Imagine 100,000 times a day for eighty, ninety or even a hundred years! What a marvel that is. And just as marvelous if we can see and hear and walk and breathe deeply for all the years.

But it can happen that we only become aware of the wonder of it all when there’s a wobble or a breakdown. I think I’ll adjust George Elliot’s words like this: What novelty is worth the sweet monotony where everything is known and loved and keeps working all the years!” Or in the words of Psalm 39:

“I thank you, Lord, for the wonder of my being, for the wonders of all your creation” and especially for the hawthorn!