Ordinary Time

This week the Church left the season of Christmas behind and began Ordinary Time.  “Ordinary time” is rare in our busy lives. Instead of speaking about growth in prayer by using different prayer styles or through the discipline of a daily prayer time maybe the first thing we all need is to feel in ourselves the desire to live in "ordinary" time – to live peaceably and enjoy the fact that time is God’s.  Such a desire may help to make everything in our lives a prayer. 

 

The following is taken from Fr. Ron Rolheiser:

The term "Ordinary Time" sounds bland to us, even as we unconsciously long for precisely what it is meant to bring. We have precious little "ordinary time" in our lives. As our lives grow more pressured, more tired, and more restless, perhaps more than anything else we long for ordinary time:  quiet, routine, solitude, and space away from the hectic pace of life. For many of us the very expression, "ordinary time," draws forth a sigh along with the question, "What's that? When did I last have 'ordinary time' in my life?" For many of us "ordinary time" means mostly hurry and pressure, "the rat race," "the treadmill."

Many things in our lives conspire against "ordinary time;" not just the busyness that robs us of leisure, but also the heartaches, the obsessions, the loss of health, or the other interruptions to the ordinary that make a mockery of normal routine and rhythm and rob us of even the sense of "ordinary time." That's the bane of adulthood.

Many of us, I suspect, remember the opposite as being true for us when we were children. I remember as a child often being bored. I longed almost always for a distraction, for someone to visit our home, for special seasons to celebrate (birthdays, Christmas, New Year's, Easter), for most anything to shake up the normal routine of "ordinary time." But that's because time moves so slowly for a child. When you're seven years old, one year constitutes one-seventh of your life. That's a long time. In mid-life and beyond, one year is a tiny fraction of your life and so time seems to speed up - so much so in fact that, at a point, you also sometimes begin to long for special occasions to be over with, for visitors to go home, and for distractions to disappear so that you can return to a more ordinary rhythm in your life. Routine might be boring, but we sleep a lot better when our lives are being visited by the angels of routine and the ordinary.

Today there's a rich literature in both secular and religious circles that speaks of the difficulties of being attentive to the present moment, of meeting, as Richard Rohr puts it, "the naked now." The literature agrees on one point: It's extremely difficult to be attentive to the present moment, to be truly inside the present.  It's not easy to live inside "ordinary time."

 

Fr. Neville O’Donohue, S.M., Pastor