The Seemingly Ordinary

Episode 3
By Maureen McKenney

“Create and contemplate beauty—learn to see and appreciate beauty, learn to stop and admire something beautiful” (Laudato Si #112, 215).

My husband built a deck this summer (to be fair, he had help from friends). My sole contribution was to feed the brave, generous souls on their lunch breaks, and keep the drinks cold, so he deserves all of the credit so far as our household goes. (While he would be heartbroken if I told him the deck was anything less than stunning, worry not—this is more a story of contemplation of beauty and less one of creation.)

When we first started talking about rebuilding the deck on our house, my husband and I had these wonderful, grandiose ideas—visions of dinner parties with friends, fire pit bonfires surrounded by laughter, and warm evenings spent sipping wine under the stars. In reality, despite the hours of hard work poured into making our visions a possibility, this summer was spent much like my summers past—with 90 percent of my time outdoors spent on the daily trip from the parking lot to my office, and back again.

As such, as the summer started coming to an end, I realized I was far overdue to spend some quality time outside. Over the course of the following week, I spent each evening outside on the deck, engrossed in quiet reflection, finally pausing long enough to both see and appreciate the natural beauty that surrounds me every day. Watching a blue bird and cardinal chase each other around the yard, noticing the pine cones high up in the neighbor’s tree beginning to turn brown, harvesting tomatoes from our vegetable garden, and listening to crickets sing shortly after a light rain—these all were perfectly simple and simultaneously eye-opening moments.

In this ever-moving, ever-changing, often endlessly busy world, it can be dangerously easy to develop tunnel vision towards the next item on our to-do list, and altogether miss the wonder and beauty of God’s creation around us. The calm that comes with taking a moment to pause and look around us in silent reflection may be all the reminder we need that God is truly present with us in a daily and tangible way.

If nothing else, I have found it to be a great reminder that God is not always revealed in loud or extraordinary ways. More often than not, God’s presence shines through the quiet, the seemingly ordinary, and the naturally beautiful.

Maureen McKenney is Assistant Director for LGBTQ Student Initiatives in Notre Dame’s Gender Relations Center.