Do you have a “bits and bobs” day in your weekly schedule? An “odd jobs” or a “pootling about” sort of day where nothing happens in a particular order or with any great urgency, but a few things get done along the way? Mine is normally a Monday. Being a minister, I can take Sunday off very often, and I often find that once Sunday is finished, I am a bit slow to get going the next day, so I take it easy. Make a few phone calls, load the washing machine, sort the recycling…
This led me to think again about something which I have occasionally pondered: Where was Mary when the angel visited her to tell her that she had the opportunity to become the mother of Jesus, and she said: “I’ll take the job”? I often think of her in the kitchen, slicing onions until her eyes were puffy with tears, or perhaps plucking a chicken, kneading bread or rinsing out the breakfast bowls. In other words, doing ordinary things in an ordinary kitchen as many of us will have done already as this week begins, perhaps in a Monday hurry for the kettle to boil so we could get off to work in time after that snooze button was hit perhaps once too many…
The image of Mary in the midst of her ordinary life, visited by an angel, gives me great comfort. It speaks to my heart about how we don’t need to wait until we are in a church or a chapel to meet with God. We don’t need to be at the next stage of holiness, on a week-long silent retreat or at the top of a mountain to encounter God. Instead, God comes to meet us in our ordinary lives. In the car, in the garden, in the shed, in the office – while we look after our children, our parents or our animals. Even, as in the case of Mary’s fiancé Joseph, while we sleep.
It makes me able to breathe a bit better as I sit her surrounded by what is left over from my Advent Wreath making efforts and my coffee mug which will need to go in the dish washer, that our ordinary human lives are given that sort of importance. They are made special, sanctified by moments of prayer and awareness of God. They matter.
I read somewhere on the internet one of those little stories that are meant to inspire. “Why”, one woman lamented, “do I never get to go on those great adventures that men go on, those great pilgrimages where they go to meet God, those mountaintops where they sit and pray? I never have the time, there’s always a million things to do, children to care for… It’s easy enough for the men!” (I don’t know, by the way, that is easier for men, I am sure men have more than their fair share of pressure too, but this was the story told from a woman’s perspective). And another woman, presumably older and wiser, said to her: “My friend, men have to go off to meet God somewhere else, but because God knows women and their obligations, God comes to us – in the kitchen, in the home, in our gardens.”
And one of the messages of Christmas is that God comes to us all wherever we happen to be. Jesus is called “Immanuel” – God-with-us – and just as the angel came to Mary in the middle of her to-do list for the day, so God comes to us all, whispering in the wind, smiling across the table, wrapping the promises of the Bible around us like a blanket, humming the words of an old hymn inside us, granting us peace when we are anxious. When we stop for a moment to tune in, we might just hear God’s heartbeat behind all the things we need to get done, so whether we are on a tractor, working at our desks or busily retired, let us try to listen…