July 31, 2005: Consecrating the Ordinary

+THE EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME


I hope you were listening to our Scripture readings today because they’re filled with tantalizing promises.

Isaiah says: Come to the Lord! You don’t need money. Out of love, he’ll feed you richly and bless you with life.

St. Paul adds that nothing—nothing at all—can break the permanent connection of God’s mighty love for you.

And finally, Jesus demonstrates this divine compassion by feeding the hungry crowds starting with nothing more than five loaves of bread and a couple of fish.

Well… all of this sounds great sitting in church on a Sunday morning… but what about tomorrow when life is back to the “same ol’, same ol’”?

Don’t you agree that this is one of the greatest challenges of the Christian life? How do we take the great stuff we hear in mass and bring it alive in our everyday lives?

Actually, this is something that even the greatest saints have struggled with. For instance, take the great 16th century Christian mystic, St. Teresa of Ávila. She had a hard time bringing the life of the spirit into the dull tasks of her Carmelite convent: washing pots, sweeping floors, folding laundry. How could she do it?

With God’s grace, Teresa found that those very ordinary, mundane chores became a kind of prayer for her—a way she could experience being permanently connected to God’s mighty love which is the source of life. Through gentle meditation and conversation—“Look, Jesus! I fold this perfectly just for you!”—Teresa began to see the face of God in the folded sheets.

Most of us find it easy enough to recognize mystery when it presents itself in dramatic ways. Think about a very sick person who is miraculously healed when all hope is gone… the person who is visited by an angel, like Mary or Joseph or John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah—or maybe even someone you know… the person who experiences a coincidence that completely changes their life.

It’s true; most of us seem to be able to hear God best when he shouts. Even Moses required a burning bush… and as we see today, even Jesus’ disciples needed him to feed multitudes with a bit of bread and two small fish.

Yet the beauty of the life of permanent connection to God is that mystery can be anywhere and everywhere… even in the tiniest, run-of-the-mill things of daily life. The secret is developing eyes to behold it. It takes a bit of dedication and practice.
For some of us, it takes a miracle to get our attention. For others, it takes a crisis. But the wonderful news is that we ALL can learn to see God in the folded sheets.

I want to tell you about the little vegetable garden I planted after I was ordained a priest. It was a tiny garden, but I enjoyed it a lot. I especially loved the lettuce I planted in a tight square. Almost every night I harvested my dinner salad from the leaves at the edges. One evening, I had gone out to pick the salad as usual and I ran my hand lightly over the crisp green square of lettuce leaves. I marveled at its vitality, almost as if it were bubbling up out of the ground. Suddenly, words of the mass came flooding into my head… words that I said every day, that I knew by heart… but words that I now heard for the first time:

Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become for us the bread of life.

Far from being the usual mechanical recitation—maybe even a mumble—these words were suddenly a potent description of something real… a statement about grace and the mystery of life itself. From a handful of tiny seeds and a patch of dirt came this bountiful and very alive source of delicious food! Of course I knew what the words meant, including all the religious truth behind them… but I really had no first-hand experience that these familiar words were simply a description of something true. I had never witnessed them happening in the world before.

And that is the way that we generally deal with rituals and routines in life: automatically. Life can simply become a habit… something done without thinking.

Living life this way doesn’t awaken us or grab us, BUT any of our routines and habits CAN break through the ordinariness of the day.

I think an easy way to start to experience this mystery is through the Scriptures. Read a little of your bible—slowly, meditatively—and see if some phrase or image captivates you. Take it as a sign that God wants to reveal something to you in the course of the day… then look for it. You might find it when you’re taking out the garbage, filling the gas tank, cutting the grass, setting the table for dinner. Try to consciously offer these simplest actions as your gift to God and see what he has in store for you back.

You see, nothing can separate us from the love of God—not evening doing the most common, non-churchy things in the world.

And nothing can draw us more into experiencing that love of God than simply looking for him just where we are and in what we’re doing here and now.




Today’s Readings:
Isaiah 55: 1–3
Psalm 145
Romans 8: 35–39
Matthew 14: 13–21