Ordinary

Dear Friend,

Let’s get this out of the way. There was a shift this week. Actually, it occurred last Friday, about a day before my last post. (To be clear, I wrote that post before shift, so there are truly no intentional hints in the last post. I promise you.)

What was the shift? A second seizure. I have not had a seizure in over thirteen months. The first one led pretty directly to the discovery of MLTF. After that, I was immediately prescribed anti-seizure medication, waited six month, had a neurological assessment and was essentially cleared to go about my business.

So what changed on Friday? Candidly, not much - at least not physically. The doctors didn’t seem shocked that there would be another seizure and were pretty quick to say, this does not necessarily indicate MLTF is waking up. It might be, and it might not be. We won’t know until we get the results of the next scan on the 10th. And no matter the results of the scan, the fundamentals have not changed. Not at all.

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But things have changed completely. Let’s not pretend this away.

I might have begun to fall into a false sense of security. Aside from a thirteen inch line across my scalp (which is mostly hidden by my hair which has, mercifully grown back), up to this point there has been literally no indication of illness at all, at least not that I am aware of, and maybe I was even beginning to imagine the diagnosis may not have been as cut and dried as I had originally believed, or that this particular tumor might be exceptional for all the right reasons. Either of those things may still be the case, but it’s harder to hold onto that possibility than it was the moment before the seizure occurred. And if that is true for me, how much more so for the people around me.

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I’ve quoted Joan Didion before. In The Year of Magical Thinking she wrote:

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

She may have also said this, but I can’t find it if she did:

And because there are so many ordinary instants, life is always changing. Always ending. And always beginning anew. It’s the ordinary moment of what is that connects what was to what will be.

This event might be a gift but if, and only if I can let it be one. I don’t want to silver-line the seizure. That would feel disingenuous and dishonoring and disrespectful to the people around me, who experienced it in their own way and through their own eyes.(Consider what it might feel like to see your spouse unresponsively twitching as you sit beside him or her calling their name and not really knowing what is happening.) But what if Friday’s seizure was a subtle (or not-so-subtle) nudge for me to remember to stop living in all the overwhelming pasts that have already come and gone, or in the countless and maybe even more overwhelming or glorious imaginary futures, and to remember instead to enter fully into each ordinary Holy instant, which is, after all the only place I can exist completely, and where Holy God waits for me. This is not to suggest that God is no longer in the past, or is not yet in the future. Rather it is to suggest that I can only fully be where my feet are. Nadia Bolz-Weber put it far better than I can. She writes (and I definitely recommend clicking the link and listening to the whole sermon in which she spoke this out loud:

So if I am absolutely certain of only one thing in the future, it is this: that God is already there. The actual potentate of time is already present in the future I am so busy worrying about.

Or, to extend last post’s metaphor, I can take both the past and the future out of my backpack. A friend reminded me this morning that God, both in and beyond time, can and does carry the past and future for me, but only if I let Him.

I definitely need reminding, and daily.

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Completely coincidentally, Kathryn has been reading liturgy of the ordinary. which seems to me a celebration of this very truth: that God’s love permeates every single instant, but maybe sometimes it takes intent and a willingness to linger to notice it, rather than urgently pushing through to the next instant. This is completely counter to my default setting, which is always urging me to Do the next thing before I’ve done the current thing.

The book spans a single day from waking to sleeping, and every instant in between (Making the Bed, Brushing Teeth, Losing Keys, Eating Leftovers, Fighting with our Spouses, Checking Email, Sitting in Traffic, Calling a Friend, Drinking Tea), and celebrates the moment-by-moment hereness-nearness of God and invites me into the stillness that allows me to recognize it.

David Byrne (yes, that David Byrne) wrote:

Don't you miss it, don't you miss it
Some of you people just about missed it

How often am I one of those people who just about missed it? Only every time I jump from one ordinary instant to the next without savoring the presence of God.
And of course, that happens often. Fortunately, there is plenty of grace so I don’t have to hang my head in the shame of the past - of my past, and I can come fully into the current instant, where God is - already and always.

Oremus,

Ć

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Alpha Omega,

You are there at the very beginning, and you are there at the end, just as you are now, inviting me into the grand poem that you write line-by-line, ordinary instant-by ordinary instant.

May it please you in your unfailing grace to remind me, moment-by-moment, that you are the potentate of time. 

Because only in this instant, and no other, can I sense you, and only with the stillness that leads to knowing.

For you are I am.

Amen.