I've posted again on Renovaré's blog site. The link to the original post is here, but I'm reposting the original in its entirety.
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I don't know about you, but I'm stumbling into the first day of Summer. Work at retreats, overseas travel, family weddings and a health crisis caused the last two months to be anything but Spring-like in my heart and mind. Instead of living into the season and the beautiful revelation of God's resurrection power through the budding of the trees and grasses around me, my world was made small by the immediate, urgent and sometimes painful. Because of our schedules, we even seemed to jump from Winter to Summer; we returned to our home after weeks away to find the tree in our front yard transformed from barren to leafy, and the seeds we'd carefully planted in our vegetable garden had become almost full-grown plants.
Last week, God set me aright. I was listening to my morning prayer (I find it easier to absorb and interact with Scripture when it's read aloud), and the speaker said, "This is the eleventh week of Ordinary time." I was shocked out of my wandering train of thought. Eleventh week?! It's been eleven weeks since Easter? When did that happen? How did that happen?
In my disrupted schedule and overwhelming circumstances, I'd forgotten to pray. Oh, I'd prayed for my circumstances, for others, regularly enough. Heart prayers, desperate prayers. But I'd forgotten the regular stopping to pray that monks have done for centuries—a practice of the Divine Hours—and I've participated in for a few years now. Easy enough to do when away from my normal circumstances, but it had soulful implications.
So, today, as I enter the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time—for those not familiar with the liturgical calendar, Ordinary Time is the long period between Easter and Advent, a time of "ordinary," a space for rest and renewal—I invite you to journey along with me. My hope and intent is to stumble my way back into a rhythm of life, back into the peace of prayer for prayer's (and God's) sake.
Hopefully, the next time my life—or yours—gets overwhelming, I'll cling to the rhythm which reminds me there is peace in the storm and a story that is much larger than my own.