Before you lies my strength and my weakness; preserve the one, heal the other. Before you lies my knowledge and my ignorance; where you have opened to me, receive me as I come in; where you have shut to me, open to me as I knock. Let me remember you, let me understand you, let me love you. Increase these things in me until you refashion me entirely.
Saint Augustine of Hippo, The Trinity
We do not call these Sundays ordinary:
transfigured by revelation, by mystery,
they stand apart.
By these days we set
our calendars, and, in the old days, we said,
In Hilary term, or, Before Trinity.
Order is set by extraordinary.
Order in all things,
and yet, in all ordinary things –
some unexceptional people gathered,
music played, some prayers prayed,
some words spoken, some soon forgotten –
extraordinary creeps in, is always the silent witness.
What Augustine knew, we often forget:
community right at Godhead’s heart,
found, reflected, in our meagre parts,
a knowledge too rich for understanding,
coming, and standing,
where we stand. O hold us now;
for nothing else
makes sense unless You remake us.
The Consolations of Writing 