Seasonal Reflection: Ordinary Time, Winter 2017
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The Christmas season has ended and Lent is
weeks away, and so we return to Ordinary Time for a
little while. Somehow this Ordinary Time doesn’t
seem so ordinary, however. Only a week into it, we
are witnesses to one of the most extraordinary
presidential inaugurations in American history. We
don’t know for sure what other extraordinary events
are to come. We can only pray (and act) to insure
that they will be for the best of humanity here at
home and across the globe and for all of creation. One great idea of the biblical revelation
is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the
actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete
incarnations of life. Our experiences of ordinary
life will transform us if we are willing to
experience them fully. This is quite different from
much of religion’s emphasis on being pure, perfect,
or correct to find God…. We see this “ordinariness” reflected in the
seemingly laborious and boring books of Joshua,
Judges, Kings, Chronicles, Leviticus, and Numbers.
We hear in these books about sin and war, adultery
and affairs, kings and killings, intrigues and
deceit, and the ordinary, wonderful, and sad events
of human life. Those books, documenting the life of
real communities, of concrete ordinary people, are
barely “religious” at all….. God’s revelations are through the concrete
and specific…. Revelation is not something you
measure, but something—or Someone—you meet! This
pattern of incarnation reaches its fullness in one
small place on the planet, in one short period of
history, in one very ordinary man named Jesus…. The biblical revelation is saying that we
are…spiritual beings…. The Bible tries to let us in
on the secret, by revealing God in ordinary human
affairs and conflicts. That’s why so much of the
text seems so mundane, practical, specific, and
frankly unspiritual! Adapted from Richard
Rohr, Things
Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (Franciscan
Media: 2008), 16-17. As we pray and act during this time, let us be sure to find God in the ordinary.
When we consider your
world, O God, We always seem to be aware
of the bizarre, The out-of-kilter, the
extraordinary. Only occasionally do we
marvel at day following night, At the repeating cycles of
birth, growth, decay and death, At the consistency of the
phases of the moon, Give us the grace to wonder at the ordinary. by Doris Donnelly in The Fire of Peace: A Prayer Book, published by Pax Christi USA
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