June 9, 2002

After Trinity Sunday, the rest of the liturgical year is "Ordinary Time." It is hard to imagine anyone getting emotionally stirred by that title. You could get the impression then that most of the Church's life is ho-hum.

Breathing is ordinary, but without breathing there is no living. Like artificial respiration to regular oxygen, the feast days accelerate the ordinary days. In the Book of the Acts, Peter is ordered never to call common anything God has made. That is why now we can eat shrimp, which were not thought highly of then. Jesus saw splendor in the wild flowers of Galilee; he said that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these. He did not search out any Solomons to be his apostles. The Twelve were decidedly ordinary men. Jesus himself used ordinary figures of speech and was disregarded for having come from an ordinary village. His fellow villagers ushered him out of their synagogue when they thought he was claiming to be extraordinary.

But when Jesus called himself the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy, he did not claim to be out of the ordinary. He showed the meaning of order. God is not so much extraordinary as he is more ordinary than ordinary. I do not mean that in the pantheistic sense of everything being God. There is only one God and He is totally different from creatures. But God created order and he orders all things. Disorder is contrary to God's creation. That is true of every irregularity from sickness to Satan. God is more ordinary than ordinary in that He is the source of the principles that govern being, whether they be the laws of nature or the laws of morality. Sin is disorder. Holiness is order. The Resurrection, which a disordered world finds unbelievable, was actually the most ordinary thing, for it ordered death to stop destroying life.

One modern Christian writer said that once he had realized the mystery of ordinariness, he could not walk down the street without stopping to wonder at the splendor of each lamppost. The lamppost was his urban equivalent of a wildflower in Galilee. Worshipping God in Ordinary Time is the most splendid thing we can do. "Mere routine" is not to be discounted for being mere or routine. We could unctuously say that there are no ordinary people, but it is more precise to say that God wants each of us to be gloriously ordinary. To be ordered by God and to follow his order, is perfection itself. The ancient Romans sensibly said, Age quod agis Do what you are doing. The sacraments give strength to do what we are doing in the most gracious way. They make us perfectly ordinary, like our Blessed Lady upon whom God looked in her lowliness.

Fr. George W. Rutler