c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin Press.)

UNDATED _ In Catholic worship, the current weeks rolled out across the summer and deep into the fall are referred to as Ordinary Time.

Better than poetry, this designation matches most of us ordinary people and our efforts to pray. No visions are granted to us, we are neither slain in the spirit nor borne aloft in transports of the soul.

We are not beautiful or handsome either. We are, well, ordinary. So Ordinary Time is our time much as F. Scott Fitzgerald writes as a midwesterner of the snow that drifts down on Minnesota as”our snow.” But ordinary is not bad. We apply it to plain things that stand up to a great deal of use, to what is undecorated but durable. It is a word for things that last.

It seems right that the priest should wear green vestments every Sunday in Ordinary Time. The green of grass in its long growing season; the green of the sea in certain light on long voyages; the green of the passing summer that yields to transforming autumn; the green of everyday when we are doing the unmarked and seemingly unexceptional work of our existence.

Ordinary Time sings softly of this long haul of the year that symbolizes the long days and nights during which we carry out, without anybody noticing, every crucial and ultimately saving human activity.

The trouble with Ordinary Time is, of course, that it seems so ordinary. Nobody classes it as romantic or sensational and some, restless for distraction and excitement, consider it dull. Yet in Ordinary Time we sign our names to our lives and justify our unique existences. In very ordinary ways, each of us becomes spiritually extraordinary.

The great virtues _ faith, hope, and love _ are meant to be expressed in the days so like each other they blur into one. You just cannot find or activate them except in what Saul Bellow calls those”long afternoons”that constitute a lifetime.

During each 24 hour period _ limit it to eight, if you will _ we find how, in ways so routine that even the devil himself might deem them unfit even to be occasions of sin, we practice virtue. In ordinary moments, we keep faith, kindle hope, and give ourselves away in love.

Keeping faith does not mean punching some time clock of belief in religion or fidelity in marriage. It requires our living truthfully, without hypocrisy or pretense, in sacrificing the best of ourselves to our beliefs in practice rather than in the abstract. Our religion is not tested by some divine inquirer who wonders if we can recite the decrees of the Council of Trent.

Our faith is tested so simply we can barely remember afterwards when it took place. That is because Ordinary Time plunges us into an unending cycle of ordinary events. But life’s glories and tragedies are spun from such apparently unremarkable fabric. Each moment offers us a small responsibility for our faithfulness to ourselves, our work, our spouse and our families.

Our spirituality is transmitted not on high voltage wires but on ordinary lines. It resembles sitting around more than it does skydiving.

It infuses each goodbye in the morning with heroic virtue whether we are off to school, to an office or a sales trip. Each separation is a small death and only simple and unremarkable faith sustains us through them. In the same way, each return from slaying the plain dragons of the day’s small temptations is a resurrection. There is more of us alive afterwards than there was before.

Ordinary Time, then, is a long season in which we average persons can learn again _ as if for the first time _ life’s plain lessons: the way we are true when unobserved; how we are honest when nobody can tell if we are lying; how we love when it asks us to dig deeper into ourselves than we ever supposed we would or could go.

It helps to remember George Eliot’s words in”Middlemarch”:”If we had a vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we would hear that roar which is the other side of silence.”

MJP END KENNEDY