An Extraordinary God

“They ate and were satisfied. They picked up the fragments left over—seven baskets. There were about four thousand people.”

I don’t like Ordinary Time. To put it more accurately, I don’t like that there’s a season called Ordinary Time. Time was when we called the Sundays after the Christmas season “Second/Third/etc. Sunday after Epiphany” until we got close enough to Lent to give them the mysterious Latin names of Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and so forth up to Lent; then between the Sunday after Trinity and the beginning of the next Advent we referred to the “Third/Fourth/etc. Sunday after Pentecost.” Many of our Protestant friends still do this with those post-Pentecost Sundays, except that they count them “after Trinity.” Either way, it’s a continual reminder of one of the central events or truths of the Christian faith.
    The problem with “Ordinary Time” is that it tends to make God ordinary. It makes Jesus ordinary. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all in favor of seeing God in the ordinary circumstances of our lives and would never want to return to the days when God and religion occupied a separate compartment that impacted not at all on the other aspects of our lives—the complete dichotomy between sacred and secular. If I pursue my photography with a passion, it’s because it’s my way of reverencing God’s creation; it’s my way of praying. It’s not something that has nothing to do with my weekly attendance at Mass. Nor am I promoting that old mindset—a sort of misplaced or exaggerated high Christology, if you will—that regards Jesus as some sort of supernormal human being instead of as “a man like us in all things but sin.”
    But there’s the point. Jesus was normal. He wasn’t ordinary. Could an ordinary person have fed four thousand people with seven loaves of bread and a few fish?
    Seeing God in our ordinary everyday lives should not be confused with seeing God as ordinary. The “Ordinary Time” mindset drags him down to the ordinary, and the result is the invasion of today’s prevalent narcissism into our worship life so that First Eucharist services degenerate into school graduations that celebrate the kids, cantors are regarded as, and behave like, singing stars instead of servants of the Word, and—well, you can name your own examples, I’m sure. (I'd love it if you'd share some with me by posting a Comment.)  How many parishes do you know whose motto should be “It’s all about us”?
    What do you do to ensure that you regard God in awesome wonder instead of as ordinary?

Antiphon: Lumen ad revelationem gentium

"...You held in your arms Christ the Lord, the Savior of his people."

The week in which the month turns from January to February holds three of my favorite feasts. First, on January 28 we celebrate that most extraordinary intellect and mystic of the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas. Now, many of my Dominican friends rightly clamor for the return of Thomas's feast to its rightful place on March 7, the day on which Thomas died. But at the same time, there's something appropriate about its present position a few days ahead of my other favorite feasts, the Presentation of the Lord (February 2) and St. Blaise (February 3).  Here's why.
    Before there was Thomas, there was St. Anselm of Canterbury, "father of Scholasticism," a ground-breaking theologian who also authored some of the most exquisite prayers. Anselm sought to prove the existence of God, and he did so entirely within the reasoning of his own mind. In other words, his proofs, called the Ontological Argument, take place entirely as an exercise of logic and do not depend on or refer to any external experience. Trust me, explaining Anselm's argument to divinity students, even grad students, is an interesting challenge.
    Then along came Thomas. Thomas also sought to prove God's existence, but to do so he went to the natural world, to the realm of sensory experience. You can infer God's existence from what you see, hear, experience all around you. No wonder that Thomas had fought so hard with his family to be allowed to join the Dominicans, that earthy band of black-and-white-clad religious soldiers whose founder, St. Dominic, believed that God "had not created the world in vain," as it says in Isaiah 45. The earth is good, God meant it to be lived in.
  And indeed, God took a giant leap out of heaven to come to the earth he created, become a human just like the ones he made, and pitch his tent among us. We celebrated that event forty days ago, on Christmas. Now, on the Feast of the Presentation, we recall the baby Jesus being brought to the Temple by his parents to offer the customary sacrifices expected of all good Jews. And there Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph, were met by Simeon and Prophetess Anna, the two "senior saints" (see my blog for December 30) who had been anxiously awaiting the coming of the Messiah. Simeon takes the baby into his arms and calls him a "light of revelation to the Gentiles."
   Once again, light.  God is symbolized as light.  Light can be seen. Light helps us to see. When it's being produced by fire, light can be felt, as warmth.
    And so we celebrate the Presentation as a feast of lights.  It used to be called Candlemas Day, the "feast of candles." Even now, there is a solemn form of entrance for the beginning of the Mass in which the participants carry lighted candles and sing about Jesus as light of revelation. The 12th-century abbot Blessed Guerric of Igny has a wonderful sermon for this day on which he compares Christ to a candle and invites his Brothers now to light their own candles for the procession.
  And as February 2 gives way to February 3, candles are still with us--the special candles used to bless throats on the Feast of St. Blaise, venerated as patron of those suffering from throat disorders because he once saved a boy who was choking to death on a fishbone. The proper way to do this blessing is to hold the pair of candles, tied together in the form of an X, against the person's throat and pronounce the prayer of blessing. Alas, this is one of those time-honored, beloved customs that have largely gone by the boards in the last few decades. In the interests of time, or expediency, or some other excuse, the blessing is sometimes pronounced as a general blessing over the people at some point during the Mass--at the Intercessions or as part of the final blessing--and usually on the preceding Sunday, not the day itself.  Time was when you would line up after Mass on February 3 to have your throat individually blessed. One year when I was working in a parish in the NW Adirondacks I had the privilege of being dispatched, with candles and prayer card, to an apartment building that housed elderly and sick people to visit each of them and give them the blessing. 
    It's an event of the senses. Something that reminds us that our God is a God of the tangible--read Francis Thompson's poem "Kingdom of God." Now we've largely lost that. I don't think Thomas Aquinas would approve.