Ordinary Time

Some formal Christian Church calendars label this period “Ordinary Time.”

While ordinary is a reference to numbering, I also suppose that it just feels ordinary coming after the extraordinariness of the Church’s Pentecost celebration.  Originally an ancient Hebrew harvest celebration, Pentecost - in some Christian calendars - commemorates the flame, wind, Spirit, voice, and transformation which moved through individuals and community.

There are some who believe the creation - the making of the world is ongoing.

I think Pentecost (or we may simply say, flame and wind sweeping through the world disrupting our spirits until voices rise calling for, calling forth transformation) might be ongoing.

A year ago fire and gales swept both wildernesses and city streets (I had a son bear witness to the flames of Minneapolis’ Lake Street).  

A hundred years ago flames consumed the Greenwood “Black Wall Street” District of Tulsa, Oklahoma.  A hundred and one years ago in Duluth, Minnesota, three brown-skinned bodies swung from light posts in the winds off Lake Superior — in the forces of racist mob mentality. 100 years after the fact, silences are being broken, stories are being remembered and taught, in some cases reparations are offered.  Transformation?  Repair? Pentecost?

As a brown-skinned mama I heard the replay of George Floyd crying for his mama in his last minutes; I've imagined the brown-skinned mamas of the sons lynched in Duluth, or the dead-in-the-street sons in Tulsa.

So I know a bit about fire disappearing to smolder in one’s marrow. I know a bit about how even a breath or a carelessly spoken word can become the wind that draws the unexpected blaze.

Fire transforms. Something structured becomes ash.  Hope and innocence can become fear and insatiable anger.  Fear and rage can become purpose and action.

This plays through the cycle of our seasons as the tree becomes firewood, firewood becomes winter heat, which yields ashes, which yields nourished soil, which yields life-giving food. Or perhaps it takes one hundred or 400 impossibly difficult years to dig through the ashes and find the greening and spark of transformation.

I know a bit about how to stand as bones and spirit become brittle from the long smoldering. How one holds her spine erect, muscles taut, and powers through what life requires.

But I am beginning to know that it can be the ordinary that might repair.  The ordinariness of flesh and its needs.

After 18 months of distance and beloved faces relegated to computer screens, I’d forgotten the ordinary and its gifts — even handling soil and seed as if they were a duty, a task to check off my to-do list. 

And then my mama - smaller, softer, more fragile - is in the circle of my arms, against the shield of my heart.  And then my niece - who almost lost life at birth ten years ago - taller, wigglier, squealier, and intensely vulnerable… to Covid, heat, and change - presses in, wrapping me with both her strong arm and her weak arm.  

It is not until I am back home, waking the next day that I notice the gentling of my heart, my stance, my view of the world.

Now, doing the ordinary — which is not at all ordinary in pandemic time —

   making of bed for Mom for her first visit to Diaspora Gardens in two years, 

   holding the weight and slowness of Mama on my arm as she ever so

     carefully places one foot, then the other for each step,

   lotioning her feet after they soak, salving the skin on her back,

I feel the breakable in me grow more supple, quiet, and resilient.

I feel the split-open radish seed differently as I press it into the damp soil.

And the furred warmth of dog and sun-weathered skin of spouse.

And the curve and damp heat of newly laid egg.

So that’s it - small gentling ordinary times to at once repair and strengthen the fire times, 

     the voicing times, 

          the Spirit times, 

                the this-world-can-never-be-the-same times.

   ~rmlaroche ©2021 www.DiasporaOnMadeline.com