"Ordinary Time"

These are my comments to students today during assembly.

So the mid-quarter report cards were last week, and the quarter ends on October 12, with 3 weeks of school between now and then. The “newness” of the year has probably rubbed off, and maybe you’re feeling the grind.  We’re in mid-season form now for football, volleyball, cheerleading and cross country—and practices, I am sure, are beginning to feel on occasion, like drudgery. We are in what our Church calendar calls “Ordinary time,” the time in between major celebrations such as Christmas and Easter. 

One of our tendencies in our culture is to focus our attention on the big events—the extraordinary moments in our lives—In a school culture, perhaps, Homecoming, Prom, Graduation. We look forward to these things, we long for them, and there’s nothing wrong with that, except if in our longing, we forget the here and now. 

When I was a junior at McGill, there was an English teacher who would call on us randomly at the beginning of class to lead the class in prayer. Because we weren’t very good at it, we’d often revert to praying for the same thing over and over, and I remember one of those prayers was “Lord, help the weekend get here quickly.” After about the 15th time in a row we prayed for the weekend, our teacher said, “You know, you’re praying your life away. What about now?” 

That was 40 years ago, but I still think about that comment. There’s truth in it. Our culture lives for the weekends. There was even a bad song that came out in the 80’s, called “Everybody’s working for the weekend.” But if our focus is only on the weekend, then what about Mondays and Tuesdays? If it’s only about the big events in our future and not about the now, we can miss the extraordinary things within the ordinary—the chance to reach out to a friend and be a good listener, the chance to make someone’s life better, the chance to improve ourselves precisely because we’re willing to do our homework well or practice hard. 

My mother used to have a plaque above the kitchen sink with a saying from St. Therese: “God moves among the pots and pans.” I think St. Therese was making this exact point—we may look for God in the big things, the miraculous, but miss him in the ordinary day to day, like doing the dishes, interacting with our family, in preparing for our classes, in being kind to someone during lunch. It's in these ordinary occurrences that God is present. 

So let’s keep that in mind this week. Happy Monday! May you work hard today, and may you sense God’s presence in all that you do, all the people that you meet, and all the chances you have to become better students, better teammates, better persons today.