Ordinary times

How not to be special

When I was a child, I secretly thought I might be special. Maybe you did too; maybe it wasn’t so secret with you. I believed this, even though nothing in my life led me to believe I was. I certainly wasn’t told I was special: or when I was, it was the wrong kind. I was too slow, too bookish, too noisy and too quiet, too unfriendly, too weird, too embarrassing.

All the same, I believed that one day my specialness would emerge. I was going to be famous, I secretly thought, back in the days when being famous was as unattainable as going to the moon. I would be an actress - yes, despite my ugliness and my weirdness, I would somehow transform into a butterfly, and be beautiful and graceful and never fall over while walking in a straight line (an habitual occurrence of mine). I would be on the cover of the Radio Times - no higher accolade there was.

And then - and then - everything in my life would magically be all right.

That idea of specialness is the knowledge that all of us are a child of God.

We’re born with that golden halo, into a world that doesn’t always treat its actual children well. A world where this backstairs knowledge, combined with the reality of the world we grow up in, gets translated into seeking the approval of our peers. Of being admired and venerated. Of being raised above, of being turned into a mini-god, bathing in the sunshine of attention.

The dislocation we feel when we don’t get that approval, that admiration, that attention, is in reality a rupture of the truth that we’re a pure child of God, and loved exactly for who we are.

As we get older, we learn of the tragedies of fame. And we believe ourselves better off for not being world famous. I’d rather be rich than famous, I enunciated hopefully many times throughout my twenties and thirties. But I think we’d be lying if none of us ever felt the lure of being admired, venerated, made golden, even - or especially - within our sphere of influence.

My dream up until the age of 39 was to have a novel published by a mainstream publisher. Rather: I wanted a career as a novelist, published by a big name.

I didn’t want a small-scale cottage industry publishing. I didn’t want self-publishing, once that became a thing. Or a digital-only version, once that also became a thing. No: I wanted the full fat version - beautiful front cover, a national (or even internationally) well-known brand, my name in tooled letters.

Spoiler: that’s what happened.

Still on the shore

My novel - the fifth I’d written, after years of attempting to get published, was bought by the head of Michael Joseph at Penguin Books. Many people at Penguin and my agency told me how much they loved it.

I was told it would be marketed properly, I was given an induction into how to use Twitter, and in the week of publication in September 2014, I got taken out to lunch at a fancy restaurant by my editor and they talked about the themes of the novel as if it was a set text for A-level.

That childhood notion I had - that I was special - well, I wasn’t on the cover of The Radio Times, but I was on the front tables at Waterstones! I was in WHSmith! People kept telling me how much they loved the book. I was special. I really was. I really, really was.

So why, then, did my life feel exactly the same?

I find it shameful to admit that, at the age of 39, I had unconsciously believed that achieving my decades-long ambition would somehow catapult me into another universe. Even though I’d long derided the desires of those who wanted to be famous, I still wanted my version of it: to be admired, to be venerated, to receive the golden light of attention.

It came, it washed over me like a tide, and then it retreated, and I was still on the shore.

And with it, the knowledge that I was just as ordinary as I’d always been. Yes, I could write, yes, people liked - even loved - my book. Yes, I’d been paid money for my words. Well? So what?

A year after publication, in 2015, my life again catapulted: this time in the other direction.

In late 2017 I was living in a new town, feeling as if I had a pane of glass and the rest of the world. One Sunday morning I walked into a church for the first time, filled with despair and rage and defying a God I didn’t believe in to help me out, because I could no longer help myself.

The vicar gave a sermon about ego, about letting go of the idea that we think we’re special. But also about learning that we’re special in a completely different way: of humbling ourselves before God, and of leaning into that embrace.

It would take me another two years before I even conceded the idea that God might exist, but even back then, my first time in church, I found myself sobbing, as if someone had turned the tap on my truth and was letting it all flood out.

Jesus and the ordinary

In the Christian year the period between Pentecost and Advent, the beginning of June to the end of November, is known as Ordinary Time. It can also be known as the time of the people of Jesus.

That might be the ordinary people Jesus encounters in the Gospels, or it might be you and me, for we’re all people of Jesus, whether we know him or not.

Jesus made a beeline for ordinary people. Fishermen, tax collectors, a woman by a well. He gathered them up and transformed them with his presence. Whoever they were before, however special they might have wanted to be, they found a different kind of specialness here. A return to the knowledge that they were a child of God - but so was this person, and that person, and their enemy, and the collaborators, and the centurions, and the robbers, and the ones who hung Jesus on a cross.

We’re all ordinary. But some people are at peace with their ordinariness. And others are still striving to be special. Bathing in the light of attention, they want more. Front cover? Make it two front covers; three, four. A hundred likes? Make it a thousand, a million.

Some are at a place where it doesn’t matter whether the attention is positive or negative: it’s all light being shone. And without it, they feel they don’t exist. For who are they, beyond the golden glow of others’ eyes? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps (whisper it) ordinary.

Ordinariness gets a raw deal in a society that values the special. But it’s ordinariness that gets things done. Ordinariness puts the bins out, collects the rubbish, cares for the young, soothes the sick, turns up on time, mends the clothes, finds the food, cooks the dinner, fixes the roads, welds the pipe, mops the floor, does all this every day and without praise or attention because that’s what being ordinary is.

For Jesus, the best thing we can be is ordinary. From that baseline, we can then reach out towards God and allow ourselves to be embraced in the heavenly presence.

We can let go of the idea of being special. We can celebrate all that is ordinary about our lives: for there’s so much drama in the world, so much tragedy and war and needless hurt, that anything remotely ordinary is a precious jewel to be polished and placed in the light.

I am ordinary. You are too. We are living in Ordinary Time: this is our time. We are here and now and magnificent in our ordinariness. Let us elevate that; let us venerate it, equally, together, the ordinary people of Jesus. You, me, the fishermen, and the woman at the well.