Prayer Reflection

Ordinary Time

The very term that we use for much of our Church year can be somewhat deceptive: Ordinary Time! For some this has resonances of "humdrum, ho-hum, not much special, here we go again" time. But this sense demeans the beauty and importance of this time.

Many celebrate the "big" events, the "big" seasons like Christmas and Easter. Great! But most of our lives are, let's admit it, pretty ordinary. But the ordinary is where we most often find God.

A sunrise happens every day in that sense it is ordinary. People fall in love every day, so that is ordinary. Babies are born - ordinary. Men and women spend time in prayer - ordinary. People give of themselves for others - ordinary. We celebrate the Eucharist - ordinary!

But the ordinary is alive with the power and the grandeur of God - if only we take the time to see!

In a famous fictional account of the life of Jesus someone comes to Jesus and says:    "Perform some miracles to make us believe in you. Otherwise, shut up!"
   "Everything is a miracle, old man," Jesus replied. "What further miracles do you want? Look below you: even the humblest blade of grass has its guardian angel who stands by and helps it to grow. Look above you: what a miracle is the star-filled sky! And if you close your eyes, old man, what a miracle the world within us! What a star-filled sky is our heart!"

May we have the eyes to see that, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes:

THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
   It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
   It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
   And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
   And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
   There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
   Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs-
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
   World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.