My heart sank when the pastor welcomed us, addressing the faithful “on this beautiful morning, as we celebrate the 27th Sunday of Ordinary Time.”
Celebrate? Ordinary Time? For the 27th straight week? I think we need to punch up the names of these Sundays a bit. In the Catholic liturgical year, there are some high points-Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter-but it’s all packed into a four- or five-month stretch, December through March or April. After that, you enter the great spiritual grassland of “Ordinary Time.” How does one “celebrate” the ordinary? It’s like being caught in some liturgical Groundhog Day, endlessly repeated.
Once Jesus rises from the dead, the liturgical year loses a lot of its pizzazz. We’ve still got seven more Sundays before Advent starts. Thirty-four Sundays wandering in the desert between Easter and O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. It reminds me of a greeting card I once saw (and sent) with a quote attributed to Chekhov: “Any fool can get through a crisis. It’s this day to day that’s killing me.”
Welcome to ordinary time.
Or maybe not. The powers that be are telling us we’re in economic crisis. A crisis is, by definition, no ordinary time. Everyone’s wondering, how will this meltdown change my life? How will we get through it?
In an extraordinary time, ordinary looks mighty appealing. If fools can get through a crisis, then fools probably put us there. Most of us have acted foolish enough over a long enough stretch of time to land us in this quagmire of consequences. It follows, then, that the way to solve our crisis is to stop acting like fools.
But that will take time-ordinary time, time for common-sense and coming to our senses. Not such a bad thing, all things considered. Scaling back, deflating, a return to sanity and simplicity.
We’re also less than a month away from an “extraordinary” election. All elections are extraordinary-when conducted properly. Democracy itself is extraordinary in that ordinary people, by the millions, cast a vote based on their education or lack of it, biases or lack of them, wisdom or lack of it, advantages or lack of them. Almost every adult is eligible, no matter how ordinary. You’d think only people who know what they’re doing would be allowed to decide who gets to lead us. That’s what fascism preaches. Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Let us rule. We know better. But democracy says we’ll take our chances-even with citizens of limited capacity and questionable judgment. It’s extraordinary.
Church, too, is extraordinarily ordinary. People from all walks of life and socio-economic status file up to take communion, listen, pray and get whatever benefit people derive from communal devotion.
On this 27th Sunday of Ordinary Time, in his epistle to the Philippians, some otherwise long forgotten residents of Asia Minor, St. Paul said, “Fill your minds with everything that is true, everything that is noble, everything that is good and pure, everything that we love and honor, and everything that can be thought virtuous or worthy of praise.”
Then Father Larry, an extraordinary parish priest and pastor but an ordinary homilist, climbed into the pulpit and, midway through meandering about in symbolic vineyards-based on parables of an extraordinary man who frequently referenced his era’s economics-asked an extraordinary question, “Is your life fruitful or is it barren?”
As it happens, I’d been asking myself that same question of late at some subterranean level, needing only the right words to nudge it into consciousness and in the general direction of prayer. Please … God … whoever you are, whatever you are … help me lead a more fruitful life.
Amidst the ordinary, we find the extraordinary.
How will we get through our current crisis? Working at it, day by day, helping one another, accepting help when needed and offered, praying, staying connected.
In other words, through communion.
Amidst the extraordinary, we rediscover the ordinary.
