Burning Bushes and Green Grass

The shift into ordinary time in the liturgical calendar can feel a little anti-climactic. After the joy of Pentecost, and the excitement of baptisms and confirmations on Trinity Sunday, with the church shifting from red to white and gold, a long run of green seems like a return to “business as usual”.

I was older than I’d like to admit when I learnt that “ordinary time” does not mean “usual” or “when nothing special is happening at church” or even, dare I say it, boring. Rather it comes from the Latin ordinalis, meaning "counted" or "ordered”; a cognate of ordinal numbers. As we count the weeks following the Easter/Pentecost season, we focus on spiritual growth and on the stories of Jesus's daily ministry. Or, to put it another way, green is for growth, as we grow deeper in love and holiness and closer to the person and example of Christ.

I am reminded of the famous quotation by the late Jesuit writer Gerard W. Hughes, from his 1997 book God, Where are You?: “God is in everything, closer to me than I am to myself. God is in every fact, every moment. Everything and everyone is sacred. Every bush is burning, if only we have the eyes to see.”

The idea draws upon imagery from the 1856 verse novel Aurora Leigh, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in which she declares, “Earth's crammed with heaven,/ And every common bush afire with God”.

Even in the ordinary, green grass of our daily lives, when we take a moment to look we will see that God is closer than we realised, closer even than ourselves. It is in the ordinary time that our love for God and each other deepens, as our awareness of God’s love for us intensifies. The ordinary is extraordinary, and even the boring days count.