Reflection - Ordinary

By Steve Hall

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/061320.cfm
1 Kings 19:19-21
Matthew 5:33-37

Unless you have been paying close attention, you may have missed the fact that, according to the liturgical calendar, we have been in ordinary time since the celebration of Pentecost. According to the customary Church practice, if a Sunday is not part of a specific season of celebration — Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Advent and the like — then it is part of ordinary time. It would be an ordinary mistake to assume that the term ‘ordinary’ has the same sense as common or routine. But that is not so. In the Church’s usage, the derivation of the term is itself ordinary. It has the same root origin as ‘ordinal’ as in ordinal numbers: first, second, third and so on; and those Sunday’s not part of specific season are designated by their ordinal numbers as in “Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time.” But for this reflection let’s consider the ordinary sense of the word. For that, the thesaurus is a great little book.

Ordinary: Average, common, commonplace, cut-and-dried, everyday, garden-variety, normal, prosaic, routine, run-of-the-mill, standard, standard-issue, unexceptional, unremarkable, usual, workaday.

A discussion about calling our present time ‘ordinary time’ could easily end up with a bit of vocal dissension. But then, what doesn’t these days. Some might insist that current events are exceptional or novel, even unheard of. But consider:

My grandparents endured World War I, the dust bowl years and the Great Depression. My parents came of age during World War II, and then lived through the introduction of the atomic bomb and the days of the Korean War. My generation caught the fallout from an obsession with bomb shelters, the Vietnam War, civil rights protests, anti-War protests, satellites in space, and the reverberations of the Age of Aquarius. Subsequent generations have had their own events to come to terms with. Among the more interesting: Moonwalks, three wars (or is it four), a Great Recession, the rise of a new World Order, the fall of Soviet Russia, computers — desktop, laptop or handheld — incipient AI, more protests, more marches, smarter bombs, the rise of the nones, governmental spying, a major worldwide pandemic.

Their times and our times are ordinary times. Check back through history if you think they’re not.

On the other hand, all of the human experiences noted above are, or have been, struggles for entire populations. But it would be easy as well to address ourselves to the ordinary, the common, the usual incidents of individual lives which similarly disrupt the flow of life as we have come to expect it, but which are only unexpected because we didn’t expect them. Obviously we might here cite loss of a job, a death in the family, divorce, being uprooted.

Thus far this reflection has been focused on the problem areas of life, probably because the events of the day are so in-your-face (or mask) and are reviewed as extraordinary and unprecedented. They may be different from those that affected other generations; but it would be remarkably easy to find historical parallels to each and every one. My conclusion, of course, is that these events are average, common, commonplace, cut-and-dried, everyday, garden-variety, normal, prosaic, routine, etc., etc., etc. Still, we follow their unfolding; and we discuss them ad nauseam.

In his play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare wrote: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. So let it be with Caesar.” The line might well be applied to the evil events and the good events of our lives. The ordinary evil we remember precisely because it affected us adversely and we struggle against it, and so it lives on. The ordinary good we willingly absorb into our lives, imbedding it in our very bones — or more accurately, in our hearts.

So what then do we identify as the spiritual ordinary? Once recognized, ordinary evil is persistently before us, e.g. our own temptations and sinfulness. The evil infecting the communal whole offers greater challenges to our recognition, and, therefore, it is imperative that we listen closely to the prophets the Lord has placed in our midst today. And even discerning them is most often impossible without prayer.

But what about ordinary good?

We might read the story of the two prophets Elijah and Elisha, and observe what an extraordinary or unprecedented thing has here happened. The prophet Elijah has passed his cloak, and with it his office, to Elisha. If our thoughts move in such a direction, then we’re forgetting our history; for every Christian since before the word ‘Christian’ was coined, has been Baptized as priest, prophet and king. All are called to witness to what God has done; and that is probably easiest if we focus on what God has done for me in my life.

Similarly, we could take the excerpt from Jesus’ teaching as given in today’s Gospel, noting well the extraordinary and unprecedented thing that has happened as the teaching of two thousand years is brought to perfection. Again, if our thoughts move in such a direction, then we are forgetting our history. Centuries before we were told this would happen.

“I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” (Jeremiah 31:33)

Spiritually, the extraordinary has become ordinary and the unprecedented has been foretold.

Are we still spiritually living in the average, the common, commonplace, cut-and-dried, everyday, garden-variety, normal, prosaic, routine, run-of-the-mill, standard, standard-issue, unexceptional, unremarkable, usual, workaday.