The Gift of Ordinary Time

At the high school where I used to teach, we held a brief prayer service for the seniors just before the graduation ceremony. As the senior-year religion teacher, I was always given the opportunity to speak. And each year, I began my remarks by sharing a few excerpts from one of the first articles they had been assigned to read:

The ancient Christian church described days of the liturgical year that were not feast days – the Mondays and Wednesdays of our lives … as belonging to "Ordinary Time." The liturgy of Ordinary Time is unchanging; prayers are always the same.

On a secular American calendar, Sept. 10 [2001] belongs irretrievably to ordinary time … It was a day for errands and sluggish freeway traffic and paying bills and running late …

I think of late summer evening descending across America on Sept. 10, I imagine televisions lighting windows and telephone conversations filling the night …

I summon Thornton Wilder, the playwright who was one of the greatest inventors of America because he portrayed ordinary time for the stage. His play "Our Town" is about what happens in an American town on an ordinary day, very much like Sept. 10 …

Emily, a young woman, recently deceased, yearns to revisit the living. She is cautioned by Mrs. Gibbs, a neighbor, long dead, to "… choose an unimportant day. Choose the least important day of your life. It will be important enough." …

There is much to learn about America from the boredom, the freedoms, the mundane achievements and routine pleasures of … Sept. 10 …

This is what Emily learned in the end of "Our Town." …

"I didn't realize. So, all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye; Good-bye, world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners … Mama and Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking … and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths … and sleeping and waking up …"

Richard Rodriguez, "The Day Before", Los Angeles Times

My final, and perhaps most important, lesson to my students, on their final and most exciting day of high school, was to encourage them to recognize and celebrate the grace they received from the most boring and routine moments of the last four years of their lives. I offer this same lesson today, with Thanksgiving on the horizon and the start of another Advent close behind. It is so easy to ignore the gift of Ordinary Time, especially when we find ourselves face to face with the grand and the glorious, but to surrender to that temptation is to miss the point entirely.

"Look out your window … What do you see? Trees, hills, grass, concrete, metal bars, trash, crap, and all the other debris of modern life? No, you see something wonderful, something magical and wondrous … You see our reason for existence, our life's work and mission: to be a song of praise about life itself. Our grand and glorious purpose on earth: simply to be here, right here, right now."

We were created to be living witnesses to the truth that nothing is mundane. So let us proclaim that each and every day is the most wonderful time of the year.

Monthly Reading Links

"To be prophets of life is to demonstrate God's uniquely personal love for every human life. If we can understand God's love for the least among us – for the poor, the vulnerable, the unborn, or the disabled – we can understand his love for all of us. If we can witness to the dignity of disabled lives, we're likely to witness deeply to all human dignity. Our dignity is rooted not in what we can do, but in how much God loves us."

Fulfilling Our Prophetic Mission

James Conley, First Things

"Sissy Goodwin is out shopping … He walks through a mall, a linebacker-sized figure in a pink skirt, lacy yellow blouse and five-o'clock shadow; a gold lamé purse slung over his shoulder and a white bow affixed to his receding gray hair. The 67-year-old college science instructor looks straight ahead, ignoring the stares and the catcalls … Back in the car, the object of such scorn puts on pink sunglasses adorned with a tiny red plastic bow. 'I got them in Reno,' he says. 'Aren't they cool?'"

He's tough enough to be a Sissy in Wyoming

John Glionna, Los Angeles Times

"I felt selfish for finding love when the man I once knew as my dad was disappearing, and for thinking about my future when my stepmother's own true love was receding into the past. But with every visit to New Mexico – barbecuing burgers, chopping firewood, shoveling snow off the roof – David stitched himself deeper into our lives. Every time he left, I missed him more."

Alzheimer's bittersweet tangle of love, loss and timing

Tanya Ward Goodman, Los Angeles Times

"The easy way to look at TOMS is to praise their charitable work. The harder, more troubling way … is to acknowledge [TOMS] as an example of how corporations have assumed work most often associated with self-identified religious organizations: building community, engaging in charity, and cultivating morals … So it is worthwhile to risk looking behind the appeal of charity to the transformed meaning of consumer spending … that occurs in the background."

TOMS Shoes and the Spiritual Politics of Neoliberalism

Lucia Hulsether, Religion & Politics

"When I remember that Blue Ridge panhandler, I always end up thinking of Lazarus and the rich man. The story is a very disturbing parable … There is none of the information we like to have when deciding when or even whether to hand a dollar to someone. We know only that [the rich man] ate sumptuously and dressed well, and that Lazarus was hungry and sick, with no one but dogs to bathe his lesions. That is all we are told of the two men and that, Jesus seems to say, is all we need to know."

Lazarus at Blue Ridge

Russell Saltzman, First Things

"Like a Third Testament, the changes of the natural world … reveal God's unfolding work of creation. This book of nature, with its seasonal chapter headings, surprises me with each go-around. More than any other, the chapter on autumn stirs the mind and heart to higher things – look how few pages remain! Autumn reminds us that this created beauty is ours, but only for a little while longer."

Autumn Is Ours, But for a While

Joe Simmons, The Jesuit Post

"According to the New Mexico Chile Association, about 78,000 tons of chile were harvested in New Mexico in 2012 – a crop worth about $65 million … The people who pick it, however, barely eke out a living, and some of them can't even afford their own lodging. Sin Fronteras Organizing Project's shelter in El Paso, Texas, opened in 1995 to house farmworkers who don't earn enough to rent an apartment."

The Chile Harvest

Joseph Sorrentino, Commonweal

Follow me on Twitter, @jwbidwell, for additional reading recommendations.

Listening to Francis

It's been a little over a month since the big interview with Pope Francis was released to the world. And in that time, a mountain of spin and hype has been produced, from which the following comment is perhaps the greatest nugget of truth:

Breaking – Francis said something and most people are convinced it proves them right!

Sometimes, we really just need to sit down, shut up, and simply listen to the wisdom and experience of our siblings. This was one of those times. Unfortunately, it seems that most of us are so hell-bent on advancing our various agendas that listening to the pope took a back seat to mining his words for ammunition. Corporate religion thrives, because we continuously choose proof texts over grace. What is wrong with us?

Of course, who am I to talk. If I hadn't been quite so determined to write something profound about the interview, maybe this post would have been published on time. But giving up on that goal would have required meditating more than I care to on Francis' warning about "the lurking danger of living in a laboratory." What is wrong with me?

Yes, the act of listening, especially to someone like Pope Francis, is a grave threat to one's peace of mind. It's much safer to focus on proof texting.

Monthly Reading Links

"As it's come to be understood in the 21st century, the papacy is really an impossible job. A pope is expected to be the CEO of a global religious organization, a political heavyweight, an intellectual giant, and a media rock star, not to mention a living saint … Yet at his six-month mark … Pope Francis is drawing better reviews on those five scores than anyone might reasonably have anticipated back on March 13."

Francis at the six-month mark seems a force of nature

John Allen, National Catholic Reporter

"It was on this day … 120 years ago, that Swami Vivekananda created a sensation by his address to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago … In retrospect it seems to have been one of those pivotal moments that brought a possible hope vividly before the eyes of people in that era of a slowing dawning global society … Noting this does not take away from the sorrow of 9/11/2001, but it does remind us that violence is neither the beginning or end of our human destiny."

9/11/1893: A Day of Interreligious Hope

Francis Clooney, America

"Somewhere in there, between the physical and virtual clutter, we are losing the ordinary qualities of home – the solitude to recollect, the time for families to talk … We are losing the 'nothing much' that is home. The room for tumult and quiet, for passing the time with friends, for the ordinary pleasures of a day well lived."

An American dilemma: Your clutter or your life

Howard Mansfield, Los Angeles Times

"In an old cemetery, where few headstones have been added since the '50s, a large crowd gathered … for a memorial that was 65 years in the making … 'Today we are here to right a wrong,' said Fresno Roman Catholic Bishop Armando X. Ochoa."

'Deportees' who died in 1948 plane crash finally have names

Diana Marcum, Los Angeles Times

"As citizens of the United States (indeed, of the world) continue to debate the morality and legality of strikes in Syria, I find myself thinking through the arguments for and against, and reflecting on them in the light of faith … In many ways the conflict I feel in my discernment is represented in this old photograph." [Of the author's grandfather, a "realist", interviewing Dorothy Day, a pacifist, in 1940.]

What would Dorothy Day say?

Emily Reimer-Barry, Catholic Moral Theology

"And so it is, as I remember my parents on their Yahrzeit, that I have come to the conclusion that perhaps God did not hide His face from them after all during the years of the Shoah. Perhaps it was a divine spirit within them that enabled them to survive with their humanity intact. And perhaps it is to that God that we should be addressing our prayers during these Days of Awe and throughout the year."

The Days of Awe and the years of horror

Menachem Rosensaft, The Washington Post

"Any one of these falls would have been enough. Yet God grants us a hundred or more in one place! It is too much… too much to take in, too much to ever hope to make a return, too much to do anything but fall down in worship … In the midst of such insane, awe-inspiring generosity, I prayed: 'Thank you. I accept.' The response I heard was the booming, raucous belly laugh of God as the falls crashed around me; the laugh of a delighted giver who simply cannot or will not stop giving."

It Would Have Been Enough

Chris Schroeder, The Jesuit Post

Follow me on Twitter, @jwbidwell, for additional reading recommendations.

A Delicious Madness

One of the joys of experiencing a good TV show or book for the second or third time is that familiar lines arrive with new depth and meaning. Such has been the case for me recently as my wife and I have watched "Battlestar Galactica" and my thoughts have dwelt on a particular quote whose truth has become strikingly apparent:

To know the face of God is to know madness.

"I open my eyes and I see you … I close my eyes and I hear you … I cannot escape you; but why would I want to? You are beauty, glory, joy, ecstasy, and the shiver up my spine when I feel your touch upon my soul … You radiate in birth and death, in moans of pleasure and cries of agony, in our happiness and our pain … I feel this every moment and it overwhelms me. It pushes me to the brink of sanity and I am not sure I want to step back. I cannot escape you, and I do not want to."

This is not the faith of corporate religion or conventional wisdom. They prattle on about it being sensible and normal. They associate it with tradition, conservatism, and order. What fools we all are! The Church tells us that God became human, so that we could become God. Is that sensible or normal? What sort of order could possibly come from encouraging humans to take in the view from our Parent's eyes?

"From your perspective, you see love and hate, good and evil, right and wrong. I see what is and what will be, and what I see is love and good, always."

Ever since I embarked on this journey, I feel like I have been falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. I lived with this revelation for so many years, but only started to live it after freeing it from its cage in my head. Each day, my vision becomes more and more wonderfully disoriented. And each day, the human perspective seems sillier and more superficial. Perhaps that is why I have such a difficult time finding the right words for this blog; for I am tasked with translating sacred murmurings into a language from which I find myself increasingly disconnected. But how could it be any other way?

"In that moment, in that very moment, whether it lasts a second or a lifetime, you know that you have touched the face of the divine. Whatever name you want to call him or her or it, you have touched that face and you will never be the same. Nothing will ever be the same again. You may try to bury the image, pretend it doesn't exist, but there it will be, forever and ever. Always lingering, always waiting, always hoping."

"I cannot escape you, and I never will. Thank you my friend."

Will you join me in this most delicious madness?