Still alive

Elizabeth H Fitch at the
Kanuga Photography Retreat
during her illness
(image by KB Johnson)

The funeral of my friend, Elizabeth H Fitch was to have been at St Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in Atlanta this past Tuesday.  Given the weather and all the resulting travel problems and given the number of mourners from places other than Atlanta who wanted to attend and needed the airport, the service was postponed until today. 

I had Elizabeth on my mind this morning while Tal and I drank coffee, read the newspaper, ate breakfast, those wonderful early morning rituals of which both of us are protective.  Later in the day it seemed uncommonly right to come across these words from Mignon McLaugheon: 

The death of someone we know always reminds us that we are still alive -- perhaps for some purpose which we ought to reexamine.

Still alive, I am.  And taking pictures. 

The day was bright and almost warm in the sun.  Tal and I bundled up and took advantage of this marvelous turn of events with a long, rambling walk.  We both managed to get dirty.  He slid down an incline on his rear end and into a ditch trying to reach an abandoned golf ball.  Successful and unhurt, by the way.  Getting this shot of a sweet gum ball I had to stretch out flat, resting my chin on the still very damp ground. 





Soggy knees and elbows. Fair photograph.  Unaccountably happy. Still alive.

Rest in peace, Elizabeth.  And, thank you for blessing my life with your presence.



Ordinary time

Back in the twenty years I spent bound up in parish life I used the calendar of the church year, or the liturgical calendar, almost as much as I used the daily/weekly/monthly/yearly one I carried. There is a rhythm to the church year, seasons of intensity and seasons that are less intense.

It is one of those less intense seasons that is the longest -- running from the Feast of Pentecost (about Memorial Day) to the beginning of Advent (shortly after Thanksgiving). Interesting is the fact that the liturgical color (that is, the color of the fabric hangings in the church's worship space and of the priest's garb) is green. Also, interesting? That long season is called "ordinary" time.

Green, the theologians say, helps the faithful remember that they are in a period of time dedicated to learning about the church and focused on spiritual growth, as opposed to celebrating the singular events of Jesus' life, the birth, death, resurrection, ascension. The scripture the church hears during ordinary time is about Jesus' life, how he worked in the world, what he did, who he talked to and what he said. That is, the getting up, the going through the day, the retiring for the night and the doing it all again the next day. Yup, Jesus did that, too.

Of course, the church doesn't have the corner on ordinary time. We all have ordinary time in our lives. In fact, just as it is for the church's liturgical calendar, we have more ordinary time in our lives -- the day-in-day-out stuff -- than we do special occasions -- birthdays, anniversaries, vacations.

Today was a wonderful day for me; it was comprised totally of ordinary time. Laundry, cleaning house, picking up a commissioned wedding gift from a favorite artisan (Jane Bess, an Edgefield potter), getting a few things from the grocery store, lunch for Tal after a round of golf, playing ball with and delivering treats to Whitby and Belle, checking and responding to email, planning supper. Just ordinary tasks, ordinary tasks that constitute supremely satisfying work. Like ordinary time in the church, our personal ordinary time is truly the stuff of life and provides us the time and space to work out who we are, what we're going to do, how we are going to spend our minutes and days -- our lives.

At the end of the day, at the end of one of these ordinary days, we can know we have, if nothing else, kept it together somehow, that, barring disaster (not ordinary time, by the way), tomorrow will come. How we handle ordinary time matters. It's what provides the foundation for the extraordinary -- both to deal with it when it comes and to process it after the fact.

Ordinary time is real life. I have loved this day.