Skip to content
In Stillness the Dancing
In Stillness the Dancing

Connecting life, scripture, and poetry

  • Subscribe!
  • About Me
  • Lent
  • Theology Threads
  • Resolutions, Goals, Words
  • Notes from the Gospels
In Stillness the Dancing

Connecting life, scripture, and poetry

giving the ordinary life soul

Beth Ferguson, February 10, 2009

Our life is ordinary, 
I read in a crumpled paper
abandoned on a bench.
Our life is ordinary, 
the philosophers told me.

Ordinary life, ordinary days and cares, 
a concert, a conversation, 
strolls on the town’s outskirts, 
good news, bad—

but objects and thoughts 
were unfinished somehow, 
rough drafts.
~Zagajewski

Interesting … our lives are rough drafts.  In school we are always asking students to polish their work … necessarily so … and yet in life, we don’t get that opportunity very often.  Instead … we live in the ordinary, the typical daily events of life … and once done … it’s done without the chance, the opportunity to edit, re-do, or polish … we are rough drafts.  With that in mind, we need to recognize God in the ordinariness of life … because otherwise we will miss him … there is little opportunity to edit, re-do, or polish … to add him back in … once done, the moment is gone.

We can bring religion more closely in tune with ordinary life by immersing ourselves in formal rituals and traditional teachings; but we can also serve religion’s soul by discovering the “natural religion” in all things.  The route to this discovery is art, both the fine arts and those of everyday life.  If we could loosen our grip on the functionality of life and let ourselves be arrested by the imaginal richness that surrounds all objects, natural and human-made, we might ground our secular attitudes in a religious sensibility and give ordinary life soul.  ~Thomas Moore

Lord! Give me courage and love to open the door and constrain You to enter, whatever the disguise You come in, even before I fully recognize my guest.  Come in! Enter my small life!  Lay Your sacred hands on all the common things and small interests of that life and bless and change them. Transfigure my small resources, make them sacred.  And in them give me your very self.  Amen ~Evelyn Underhill

Share Button
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Related

Reflection

Post navigation

Previous post
Next post

Leave a ReplyCancel reply

Connect with me!
LinkTree
Instagram
Twitter
Pinterest
Math Blog

 

Recent Posts

  • Random Travel Thoughts 2025
  • Trying out Substack
  • Be the One to Ask
  • The Way Through the Jungle
  • The Lost Lamb
  • Reading, Listening, Following, Shared!
  • Joy is not a crumb
  • The Rest We Need

Categories

Archives

©2025 In Stillness the Dancing | WordPress Theme by SuperbThemes