We have come through the drama. The Advent waiting, the Christmas celebration, the Lenten fasting, the Holy Week intensity, the Easter explosion of Alleluia, and Pentecost’s fire. The liturgical calendar has given us months of high-intensity spiritual experiences — preparation, anticipation, grief, joy, transformation.
Now we are in Ordinary Time. The liturgical colour has shifted to green. The Sundays stretch out week after week with no major feast days to punctuate them. If the Church year were a novel, we have just finished the exciting plot developments and entered the chapters where characters go about daily life.
And this, precisely, is where most of us actually live. Not in the dramatic moments but in the ordinary ones. Not Christmas morning but Tuesday afternoon. Not Easter Sunday but the third Wednesday of the month when nothing special is happening. Ordinary Time is the longest season of the liturgical year because ordinariness is the longest season of our lives.
The question becomes: Can we find God here? In the laundry and the commute, the spreadsheets and the dishes, the ordinary conversations and unremarkable days? Or is God only present in the special moments, the spiritual highs, the dramatic encounters?
The Church’s answer, embedded in the very existence of Ordinary Time, is clear:
God is found most consistently not in the extraordinary but in the everyday.
And, learning to recognise God in the ordinary is perhaps the most important spiritual skill we can develop.
The Sacredness of the Mundane
There is often the tendency to elevate the extraordinary to the point where we miss the sacred in the common. We chase peak experiences — intense retreat experiences, grand feast celebrations — and then return to Monday feeling like we’ve left God behind at the mountaintop.
But what if the mountaintop experiences exist primarily to teach us how to see God in the valley? What if the Advent preparation and Lenten fasting and Easter celebration are training our eyes to recognise what’s always been true: God’s presence is everywhere and in everything, especially in the ordinary?
Teresa of Ávila famously said: “God walks among the pots and pans.” She wasn’t being dismissive of contemplative prayer or mystical experiences. Rather, she was insisting that the same God encountered in ecstatic union is also present in the kitchen, in conversation, in administrative work, in the mundane tasks that fill our days.
Nobody understood this better than Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, a seventeenth-century Carmelite lay brother who spent most of his religious life working in the monastery kitchen. He wasn’t a priest. He didn’t lead worship or preach sermons. He washed dishes, prepared meals, scrubbed pots — work that was repetitive, unglamorous, and easily forgotten.
But Brother Lawrence arrived at a great spiritual insight that he called “the practice of the presence of God.” He learned to recognise God’s presence not just during formal prayer times in the chapel but constantly, throughout every mundane task. Peeling potatoes became prayer. Washing dishes became worship. The kitchen became a sanctuary as sacred as any cathedral.
He wrote: “The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.” This is the fruit of sustained practice; of training one’s attention to recognise what was always true: God is here. Now. In this ordinary moment.
Lawrence’s method was simple: continually turn your attention to God throughout the day. Not in complicated prayers or lengthy meditations, but in brief, repeated moments of awareness. While chopping vegetables: “Lord, I’m here with you.” While washing a pot: “Thank you for this moment.” While moving on to the next task: “You’re here. I’m here. That suffices for me.”
Over time, this practice transformed everything. Not because the tasks became less ordinary but because Lawrence’s awareness of God’s presence became more constant.
The ordinary remained ordinary. But it was imbued with sacred presence.
Training Our Attention
The challenge of Ordinary Time is that nothing forces our attention toward God. Advent and Lent provide structure. Christmas and Easter create peak experiences. But Ordinary Time? There’s no drama, no urgency, no special practices. Just day after day of regular life.
This is precisely the training ground we need. Because most of life is ordinary. If we can’t find God here, we won’t find God at all; or, we will find God so rarely that our faith will feel like a distant memory punctuated by occasional spiritual highs.
When we practice recognising God in the ordinary, we stop dividing life into sacred and secular. We stop thinking we need to escape to a retreat or attend a prayer meeting to encounter God. We discover that every moment is potentially sacred if we bring awareness to it.
This doesn’t make the ordinary extraordinary in the sense of spectacular. Dishes remain dishes. Spreadsheets remain spreadsheets. But they become infused with meaning, with presence, with the awareness that you are never alone, never outside God’s loving attention.
Brother Lawrence scrubbing pots in his monastery kitchen proved that you don’t need dramatic spiritual experiences to live in constant communion with God…
You need only to practice presence; to return your attention, again and again, to the God who is already and always here.
Ordinary Time isn’t the boring part of the Church year we endure until the next exciting season arrives. It is the essential practice ground where we learn the skill that matters most: finding God not just in the mountaintop moments but in the valley, in the everyday, in the now.
If you desire to explore the rich diversity of Christian prayer traditions, we invite you to join our School of Prayer Course on the Forms and Traditions of Prayer.
This programme is designed to immerse participants in the diverse and beautiful prayer practices of the Christian tradition. You’ll enrich your experience of the spiritual life by drawing on the mystical wisdom of the Church’s great traditions, and in this way, empower yourself to discover new pathways to encounter God and deepen your experience of Divine Love. Learn more and register here.