While it’s important to understand what the Church means by “Ordinary Time,” it’s also necessary to recognize that, for most of us, most of life is lived in ordinary time, that is, ordinary in the normal sense of the word. In other words, most of our lives do not consist of tremendous highs and deep lows, peaks and valleys. We usually live somewhere between these poles. At least for me, a Monday in late summer is about as ordinary as it gets.
Even so, we live in a society that seems to wage war on the ordinary and the small. This is easy to detect in the language we hear, read, even sometimes use. Specifically, the use of superlatives, interjections, and exclamations. Growing up, excessive use of interjections, exclamations, and superlatives was discouraged in both speaking and writing.
To wit: when everything is “magnificent,” nothing is magnificent. When everything and everyone are “the best,” nothing is the best. In religious terms, the demise of the word “awesome” is lamentable. When everything is awesome, nothing is awesome. Our God is an awesome God, but this golden calf is pretty awesome too!
Everything, it seems, must be either terrible or superb, the worst or the best. We’re having none of this in between, ordinary nonsense. This is even true of faith and religious experience. Our first reading today, the story of the golden calf from the Book of Exodus, shows us the origin of this impulse. Let’s just say, its origin isn’t divine.
After lamenting to God that he fears those who seek to take his life, the prophet Elijah (considered the greatest of the Old Testament prophets) was directed “to stand on the mountain before the LORD.”1 As he stood on that mountain, Elijah experienced a wind so strong that it broke rocks, but God wasn’t in the wind. He then felt an earthquake, but God wasn’t in the earthquake. Next, there was a fire, but God wasn’t in the fire. Finally, there was what is best translated as “a light silent sound.” God was in this “silent sound.” We can bear the contradictory language because a more or less immediate experience of God is not really communicable through words, no matter the language.
Mustard seeds
Day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year, encountering God is mostly just paying attention. As a colleague used to sarcastically remark: “Ninety percent of situational awareness is knowing what is going on around you.”
You don’t have summon God like genie. You don’t have to impose a preconception to find God. No matter where you’re at and regardless of your circumstances, God is always already there.
The spirituality given to the Church through Saint Ignatius of Loyola founder of the Society of Jesus (a.k.a. the Jesuits), whose feast we observe on Thursday, is best summed up in the phrase “Finding God in all things.” Finding God in all things is an invitation to look for and find the triune God in every circumstance of life, not just in explicitly religious activities like prayer, going to Mass, and not just in private, solitary moments (though certainly in all of these, just not limited to them).
All of this is built on the conviction that God is everywhere present and, while invisible, can be “found” in all aspects of creation and in every circumstance of life, even in, maybe especially in, the small things that occur during life’s ordinary times.
1 See 1 Kings 19:10-13.↩
No comments:
Post a Comment