As I write this, we have just begun that period of the Church's year known as ‘Ordinary Time'.  Since the end of November last year,  the start of the season of Advent, we have spent nearly all our time observing special seasons and celebrating special days - Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Eastertide, and Pentecost.  But from now till the end of November again, though there may be the occasional special Sunday such as All Saints, there is no really major festival, and no protracted period of special time, whether penitential, like Lent, or joyful, like Easter.

We call this ordinary time because the Sundays in it are referred to by ordinal numbers - that is, the first, second, third......twenty-fourth Sundays after Trinity.  But for us, ordinary has another meaning in common speech: everyday, mundane, humdrum, nothing special.  So it's tempting to think of Ordinary Time in the Church as ‘time off': we've spent seven months at a very intense level of religious experience; we've waited in the darkness of Advent and seen the light of the Incarnation; we've walked the way of the Cross and the Emmaus Road.  We have seen the mighty works of God in the birth, life, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, but now it's time to have a bit of a rest, religiously speaking.

In fact, in Ordinary Time we enter what may be the most challenging period of the Christian year.  For in Ordinary Time, we are called to discover God and the action of God in the everyday, humdrum ebb and flow of life, in short, to find heaven in ordinarie.  (The strange spelling, incidentally,  is because the phrase comes from a poem by the seventeenth century poet George Herbert.)

It is, I suppose, easy to see the presence of God revealed in the quite extraordinary events which we have been celebrating since Christmas.  More difficult is to perceive the presence and action of God in ordinary, insignificant, even rather boring, things.  The poet William Blake wrote of the ability 

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour

And Saint Theresa said "God walks among the pots and pans".

In this season of Ordinary Time, may God give us eyes to see his image, ears to hear his word, and a heart to sing his praise, in the day-to-day ordinariness of our lives.

Having said all this, there is one very special thing happening in the parish this month.  I refer of course to the fact that Revd Carol Wilson-Barker begins her ministry among us as Team Vicar.  Don't forget her Service of Licensing and Installation on Tuesday 3^rd August, at 8.00 pm in St George's (which will be followed by a reception in the Church Room), and the Parish Eucharist at St George's on Sunday 8^th August, at 10.00 am, at which Carol will preside and preach for the first time.  We hope to see many of you there.