News from Julie
Ordinary? Hardly!
During Holy Week, I shared several excerpts from Joan Chittister's reflections on The Liturgical Year. Here is a portion of her reflection on that which I was taught to call 'Ordinary Time,' the season between Easter and Advent, when nothing much seemed to happen. Sister Joan would disagree with me on that one - read on!
It doesn't take a lot of living to realize that life is more than a series of highs and lows. By and large, existence as we know it is not a display of moments marked either by excitement or despair, by dazzling hope or formidable tragedy. It is, in fact, basically routine. Largely uneventful. Essentially predictable. Life is, by and large, more commonplace than exciting, more usual than unusual. And so, not surprisingly, is the liturgical year.
Because the liturgical year is a catalog of the dimensions of the spiritual life, it is not unlike life itself. It, too, is made up of the habitual and the common coordinates of what it means to live a spiritual life. What's more, it is precisely this holiness-as-usual that is the ultimate measure of the quality of a soul.
It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person. It is what we believe in the heart of us that determines what we do daily. It is what we bring to the nourishment of the soul that predicts the kind of soul we nurture. It is what we do ordinarily, day by day, that gives an intimation of what we will do under stress. It is the daily - the way we act ordinarily, not rarely, that defines us as either kind, or angry, or faithful, or constant.
No doubt about it: the daily, the normal, the regular, the common is what gives clarity to the essence of the real self.
So important is this notion of shaping the interior life, of interiorizing what we commonly, even casually, declare publicly that we believe, that two periods of the liturgical year are made up of no earthshaking mysteries of the faith at all. These periods call for no rigorous fasts. They develop around no overwhelmingly impressive feasts. It is simply the continuous, faithful, weekly attention to what is means to live out daily what we say we believe when we're at those mountaintop moments of the spiritual life.
But the truth is that there is nothing ordinary - if by ordinary we mean inferior or less important - about a period such as this at all. This, on the other hand, is the extraordinary period of coming to see the world through the eyes of Jesus. It is the period when we determine how we ourselves will act from now on. It is the period of catechesis in the faith, of immersion in the Scriptures. It is the time when the implications of Easter and Christmas become most clear to us all. It is decision time: will we take Christmas and Easter seriously or not?
Yours in Christ,