It is somewhat of a misnomer when we say that liturgically we have entered “Ordinary Time.” In daily usage the term ordinary has come to mean common, eventless or run-of-the-mill, and it is often used in a pejorative sense. Who wants to be ordinary? But the Church traditionally calls this time (right now, between the Christmas season just passed and the Lent to come) “Tempus Per Annum” or “time throughout the year.”
If we look back at older connotations of the word, we see that “ordinary” can be used as a noun. An ordinary is one who is “ordained,” or called forth, to an office or to fulfill especially an ecclesiastical role. But ordinary comes from the word order. Order has to do with one’s relationship to the world, to others and, of course, to God. One of our old and exquisite proofs for the existence of God has to do with the design of the universe. It is mathematically and philosophically impossible for our world – from the incredible extravagance of ocean life and the brilliantly responsive ramifications of weather systems on earthly life in all its myriad forms, to the befuddling intricacies of animal existence and the wondrous workings and neurological poetry of the human mind – to be some giant happenstance of chance.
Our instinct for ethical signposts, our intention for goodness, speaks of a natural order that can only have been created with purpose and meaning. The world strives for truth and harmony. The world desires order. Of course, Advent and Christmas and Lent and Easter are perhaps akin to the great festivals of life. But leading up to each of the festivals we attend is our day-to-day existence. We sometimes call it the mundane, sometimes the profane. Holy Mother Church, however, calls it sacred. To the Church, if there is one thing Ordinary Time is not, is ordinary! In fact it is, or should be for us all, extraordinary.
There is no doubt that today much that is in the media, in the body politic and in the astounding and frightening divisions in American culture, is also extraordinary – extraordinarily immoral. The opposite of order is chaos. And we live and breathe the fumes of this chaos every day. Godlessness is, by its very definition, chaotic. The idea that mothers should have the right to kill her unborn child if she doesn’t want them is a notion serving the demonic, chaos at its most profound. To slur our fellow humans with vulgar and demeaning epithets in the name of social activism is the action of preposterously chaotic and misguided hearts. Hatred in all forms is the product of chaos repressing conscience.
In these days we are tempted mightily to embrace the language of W.B. Yeats in his famous poem “The Second Coming,” written in the aftermath of World War I, the first few lines of which are:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
We can easily get the sense that things are falling apart, that the center is not holding. Yet, as Catholics, we are called to see the sacred in the profane. We are called to carry the joy of Christmas throughout the year; we are called to bring Easter Sunday into every day. To me, one of the saddest scenes in Scripture is in Psalm 137 when the Jews, exiled in Babylon, were called upon to sing their tribal songs for their captors but, instead, hung their harps in the willow trees by the banks of the river and wept. We are called to claw our way through the hanging strands of chaos around us and find the most orderly, beautiful essence there is: the mind of God. We are called to continue singing in this our exile. We are called to stand for the sanctity of human life, from conception to natural death; we are called to reach a hand out at every turn to the sick and the poor. We are called when our institutional Church fails us or our bishops lose their courage or their vision, to understand that we are more than an institution; we are a Mystical Body, a herald, a sacrament, a servant, and we, clergy and laity alike, should act accordingly. We are called to see the face of Christ in the lowliest among us, in our families, in all who are suffering and, yes, in our enemies.
There is absolutely nothing ordinary about our calling as a people. This particular liturgical time, this Ordinary Time, can help us put one step in front of the other, knowing Christ is with us in our daily struggles as He is in our joyful tidings. And when He is with us, in the Eucharist and the sacraments, in the Church’s teachings, liturgies and devotions, in our outreach to others, in the eyes of a spouse, the raising of children and the care of elders, in the smallest moments of a day and the prayerful petitions of a night, in our tears and in our laughter, if we keep Him with us in this “ordered” time, chaos doesn’t have a chance and Ordinary Time is, indeed, extraordinary.
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.