Let's Not be Ordinary

Written for the Conference of Catholic Women at Ascension Church, Boca Raton, FL, January 2023

At first, I was uncertain what to talk about this month. There’s really not much special about January; it’s just an ordinary month, in ordinary time – that’s it, ordinary time!

Yesterday was the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time. But that’s really a bit of a misnomer. The Church seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter are punctuated by Ordinary Time, so called because we number the Sundays with the ordinal numbers of Second, Third, Fourth and so on. But there is nothing ordinary about the time of the Church calendar.

How could we call any day of the year ordinary when we reference the Church? Consider that every hour of every day, it is very likely that somewhere in the world, a Mass is being celebrated; every hour of every day, the miracle of the Incarnation is, in a sense, reenacted by the changing of the simple substances of bread and wine becoming the Body and Blood of Christ. In each Mass, in each Eucharistic prayer, we celebrate the Incarnation, the Passion, the Death and the Resurrection of the Lord. The Eucharist, both source and summit, celebrated over and over again, countless times since the beginning of the Church.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states “The Eucharist is "the source and summit of the Christian life." "The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it. For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself. . .The Eucharist is . . .  sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity of the People of God by which the Church is kept in being. It is the culmination both of God's action sanctifying the world in Christ and of the worship men offer to Christ and through him to the Father in the Holy Spirit.” [B]y the Eucharistic celebration we already unite ourselves with the heavenly liturgy and anticipate eternal life, when God will be all in all. . . The Eucharist is the sum and summary of our faith: "Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking."

We get complacent; we think that we can be less attentive to our religion when we are in “just ordinary time.” But, truly, there is no time in our relationship with God when we are in “just ordinary time.” Christ was incarnated, became man for us and for our salvation. Christ suffered for us and our salvation. Christ died on the cross for us and our salvation.

I’d guess that, deep down, none of us think of ourselves as “just ordinary.” And nothing Christ did for us was or is ordinary. He gave up himself for us – and gives himself to us in Communion. He died for us, and he rose for us.

Let’s challenge ourselves this month, and every month, to do all that we do not for ourselves, but for him. We are his only hands, his only mouth. Let us all strive to live each day for him: through him, with him and in him, in union with the Holy Spirit.