Everyday God

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Paula Gooder. Everyday God

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Everyday God

Paula Gooder is a freelance writer and lecturer in biblical studies. She is Canon Theologian of Birmingham Cathedral, a Reader in the Church of England, and a member of General Synod.

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This is also one of the themes that R. S. Thomas was exploring in his poem, ‘The Bright Field’ (on page 1). The poem recalls Thomas’s experience of seeing sunlight breaking through onto a field but only subsequently realizing that the field contained the treasure for which he yearned, so constrained was he by hurrying onwards to a ‘receding future’ or ‘hankering after an imagined past’. We might add to this list looking upwards to heaven (or our modern equivalent) and waiting for a grand divine display of magnificence. What R. S. Thomas is reflecting on is that we all too easily hurry past the pearls of great price that lie along our way because we simply don’t recognize them for what they are. Our vision remains so dazzled by an imagined future glory or a rose-tinted memory of the past that we fail to notice what lies before our very eyes.

One of the great dangers of becoming too sucked into a culture that glories in everything new, bigger and better is that it can – indeed it seeks to – take the shine away from what we already have. If ‘special’ is what we aim for, then by extension ‘ordinary’ is disappointing. The problem with this is that sometimes – often in fact – the special is embedded deep within the ordinary but it takes a well-trained eye to notice it.

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