Welcome to June, the month of warmer temperatures and longer days! Summer in the Western Hemisphere is a season that most of us still like to celebrate despite the ever-present reality of wildfires aate warming.  In many ways, the time we are living in seems anything but ‘ordinary’.  But for those who follow the Christian liturgical calendar this season is indeed known as Ordinary Time. The word ‘ordinary’ in this context originated with the ‘ordinal numbers’ used to count the weeks that come between the two great seasons of Eastertide and Christmas and their respective preparatory seasons of Advent and Lent.  Much like the way we tend to count the days until our next vacation or the minutes until our favourite TV show, this season seems to be very much about waiting, or how we occupy ourselves in the ‘in-between’ times of our lives. So perhaps it is worth sitting awhile with the concept and reflecting on what our contemplative hearts might be telling us about the value of this season.

First, many of us may think of ‘ordinary’ as something that is boring or lacking excitement.  And indeed much of the waiting we do in contemplative life can be perceived as such.  For example, how many times have you glanced at the clock during a Centering Prayer sit and wondered if it would never move?  And from the early desert mothers and fathers through modern day mystics we learn that a contemplative life might also result in having far fewer ‘to-do’ things on our list as we are gradually freed from the unconscious compulsions that keep us wrapped up in more exciting endeavours like planning our next vacation or vying for the next job promotion.  So yes, the contemplative life can be seen as boring or lacking excitement indeed.

Yet there is a fullness or sense of expansion that happens during this time of slowing down and emptying that can be called anything but ‘ordinary’.  As Thomas Keating says:

Contemplative prayer is the world in which God can do anything. To move into that realm is the greatest adventure. It is to be open to the Infinite and hence to infinite possibilities. Our private, self-made worlds come to an end; a new world appears within and around us and the impossible becomes an everyday experience.

So this summer, may we embrace the ‘ordinary’ as a way to make room for the infinite that is already within us.  No need to wait for Advent or Easter: a new world is possible right now as we wait in expectancy for the new world already arising.

In this newsletter, we are excited to announce an upcoming retreat with Heather Ruce from September 8-12 at the Sorrento Centre in the beautiful Shuswap region of BC. in this Wisdom School offering, Three Centered Presence and Transformation of Consciousness, Heather will invite us to deepen our experience of the ‘wisdom way of knowing’ through a daily rhythm with periods of silence, centering prayer, teaching, conscious conversation, Gurdjieff Exercises and Movements, chanting, mindful work, lectio divina, and contemplative free time.

This newsletter also announces the release of both MP3 and video recordings of the Faces of Mary,  an on-line retreat with the Reverend Matthew Wright hosted by TCS on April that took place on April 20, 2024. Find out more below!

Summer Blessings!

Thomas Esakin

The Contemplative Society