An ordinary day towards the end of the school holidays.  Blue sky, cotton candy clouds, a gentle breeze, walking on sunshine.  A day still to be scripted, played out, had fun with.  An ordinary day in this strange and willful summer of grizzly grey days and sandy swashbuckling ones; an ordinary day before the working year resumes and we clothe ourselves in readiness for the busyness and business of our employment.

We are now also in what is officially known as Ordinary Time in the Christian Church.  There are thirty-four of these weeks throughout the year, a sort of sacred breathing space between the liturgical seasons that punctuate the year of faith for those who believe; a simple unaccented stretch of time that builds towards the solemnity of Lent and, ultimately, the joy of Easter.  It also happens to be Australia Day, a secular feast day that celebrates our unity as a people; a day many of us believe in because it bonds us in a common goodness as one people.  We might come from different lands and have different customs and strange accents and other gods and spicy cuisines, but we have much to share.  We share the daily task of making a living, looking after family, attending somehow to the beating heart of society.  Despite the siren songs of the corporate and consumer gods, compassion and good will and neighbourly kindness are still what make us, as a nation, tick.  We come from near and far; a jigsaw puzzle of togetherness with our tribes and allegiances and different cultural aesthetics.  We share a desire to live decent lives and to do the best we can for those who come after us.  We are good sports, ready to lend a hand, able to laugh at ourselves as we somehow promote an egalitarianism that means the tradie can chat to the teacher, the surgeon to the surfie, the accountant to the apprentice and that we all have a place to belong.  We still believe in mateship which is really about looking after each other through thick and thin, a laconic Aussie version of the Good Samaritan.  We saw this most profoundly this time last year in the wake of the bushfires that ravaged the countryside.

On Australia Day, we are reminded that our narrative of inclusion is what makes us special in the great island continent at the bottom of the globe.  However, we still need to acknowledge that we are a migrant people living on sacred land aeons old; land known and loved by those indigenous custodians who were here first, and known and loved by the many of us who have come after and now call Australia home.  Ours is a shared story, to be cherished and retold, with new chapters created as we reimagine our future togetherness in this Great South Land of the Holy Spirit.

Australia Day effectively marks the end of the school holidays.  It is time for the year to really begin to shape up, to thrust its way forward as it reclaims its workaday self, whether that will be a resumption of old practices and commuting or the new paradigm of working from home.  Ordinary folk will resume the business of being anonymous good citizens, doing our bit, whinging only occasionally about the price of petrol, politicians’ perks and our footy team’s prospects this year.  We will work 9-5 or on shift or roster, full-time or casually or on contract or just helping out in a fix or volunteering at Vinnies.  We’ll get things done for bosses or by a deadline and mostly reach sales targets.  We’ll buy and sell and save for the next regional holiday and laugh with colleagues over bureaucratic bungles and watch The Block, bemused as to bespoke butler’s pantries and kitchens that look too pristine to entertain the ramshackle reality of the ordinary muddling suburban family.  We’ll have barbeques and go to Bunnings and know that we are blessed in this sprawling city where we can live our lives in relative safety and enjoy the culture, cuisine and coffee for which we are renowned. 

In Melbourne, the theatre of life, in all its colour and diversity, its vim and vibrancy, its capriciousness and coincidence, is played out daily at the local shopping strip, at a school or hospital, in a park or industrial estate or a CBD office.  We all have our small walk-on roles and occasional cameos and most of us happily participate in the crowd scenes that are the moving wallpaper of life in a metropolis of 5 million.  We are part of a great heaving, humming urban ensemble.

And so we spend most of our lives in Ordinary Time.  This must not be dismissed as unimportant because it is prosaic, mundane, uneventful.  For it is through the grit and grind and grace of the ordinary that the light of the extraordinary shines.  Without the routine we would not know the revelatory.  And there is much to be said for holy holding pattern of the ordinary; the daily, unnamed, unbidden goodness that transpires between father and son, teacher and student, nurse and patient; the goodness alive when strangers on a tram chat about Melbourne’s weather, when we laugh good humouredly or cry with sympathy because we share a common bond; when we gather in respectful silence at dawn on Anzac Day or join in the full-throated roar as the ball is bounced at the MCG on that one day in September; when we are reminded of all those good Australian stories of heroism and resilience and gratitude that colour our individual and communal lives.  We will all mark 2020 with an asterisk knowing that Covid-19 and its impact globally has made us less certain of some things and more sure of others.  Many of us have worked out what really matters in the immediacy of our day-to-day lives.

As we enter this New Year of 2021, we are reminded more than ever of our interdependence and near-neighbourliness as we negotiate life post-pandemic and ensure that we continue to act for the common good in adjusting some of our grander expectations.  This is the best of us in action for each other.  These are the times of our lives, both ordinary and extraordinary, and we are asked to be both cautiously optimistic and realistic as the days unfold and we resume a vacillating normal that may yet test us.  We are reminded, as a people of faith, to Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the Lord.  Let our hearts be charged with courage and compassion as we journey together through the joys, surprises and challenges of the year ahead.

By Ann Rennie