Back to Boring
2nd Sunday of the Year
It may have caught you by surprise as you walked into church to find that the Christmas season has come, rather unceremoniously, to an end. Most years, the Epiphany which we celebrated just last weekend would be followed by the Baptism of the Lord on the next Sunday; however, when the calendar doesn’t quite work out, Baptism is celebrated the Monday after Epiphany, as it was this past week. And so, we return, without pomp or circumstance, to that season of the year called, rather uncreatively, Ordinary Time. People have done their best to give ‘ordinary time’ a spiritual meaning; but in this case ‘ordinary’ simply means those Sundays of the year designated by ordinal numbers — i.e., first, second, third, etc.
So it is with the Christmas season — suddenly and surprisingly, the world returns to normal and everything becomes boring once again. The decorations come down, diets and workout regimens resume, and belts and shoes must be worn again. We resume those weeks of the year not marked by holiday parties and family gatherings but by the routine, mundane responsibilities of daily living. As it happens, the Church’s liturgy seems aware of the transition back to the ordinary and the boring we have just undergone, as today’s readings offer us a couple of points worth our reflection.
First, we have been reading at daily Mass this past week from the First Book of Samuel, and a fuller version of today’s first reading was read at Mass on Wednesday. The version we heard moments ago omits a few verses from Wednesday’s text, including some important context that sets the scene. We should have heard the story begin, “During the time young Samuel was minister to the LORD under Eli, a revelation of the LORD was uncommon and vision infrequent.” So, the simple reason why Samuel could not identify the voice waking him from sleep and why it takes Eli being woken up three times before he could connect the dots, is that the Lord’s voice had become unfamiliar. God wasn’t showing up as often or as obviously as he used to; and so, when God speaks, he sounds a stranger. It seems to me that this description — a time when revelation was uncommon and vision infrequent — is particularly apt to describe how we feel as we drudge through our habits and routines, having left the Christmas season behind and thoughts pertaining to God with it.
I know it is not always easy, amidst all the distractions, for the Christmas season to be a time to think about God; though I do hope you all had the occasion to have at least one or two holy moments in the past few weeks. For me personally, it was on Christmas Eve that the mystery of the Incarnation was incarnated, as it were, in two very tangible ways. For one, I was overwhelmed at the sight of over 2,200 people in the Cathedral for the 4pm Mass. In each of those faces, and especially in those who I presume are distant from God and the Church, I saw God breaking into their lives and bringing them, through whatever circumstances brought them to the Cathedral, to worship him here that night. God drew them adore him in the flesh so that he might dwell with them. From there, I drove to visit my grandparents and said Mass a couple hours later in their apartment, as my grandmother has been recuperating from some time recently spent in the hospital. It was more than apparent, as I held the Host in my hands, that bringing the Christ the Lord, born in Bethlehem, to be born again upon their kitchen table was more meaningful to them than the entire world (and more than made up for forgetting to get them a card). I share those two experiences with you, not only because they are beautiful in themselves, but because once Christmas Eve and Day were finished, and the calendar turned to December 26, those wonderful, holy moments already seemed a lifetime in the past. I returned, quickly and against my wishes, to as it was “During the time young Samuel was minister to the LORD under Eli” — a time of the ordinary and routine, without those extra-ordinary reminders of God’s faithfulness and love.
But this brings us to today’s Gospel, which is an all-important passage from the first chapter of John. John, I think, is the most careful of all the biblical authors with the details he includes about what happened, where, when, why, and to whom. In this passage, we find John the Baptist pointing out the Lamb of God to Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, and to John himself, the author of the Gospel. The two disciples follow Jesus and stay with him the day at his house. As if writing in his diary, John writes, “It was about four in the afternoon.” I have never been all that curious to know what deeper meaning could be hidden beneath this reference to the four o’clock hour; and I do not doubt that a plethora of interpretations are out there awaiting my research. But for me, that John knows and remembers the time simply tells me this moment so decisively changed his life that he never let it fade from view. Because of his encounter with Christ the Lord, John knew that even through the trials that would come there would never be another time, another minute in which “a revelation of the LORD was uncommon and vision infrequent,” for he himself “had beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, “full of grace and truth.” John held on to what happened that day, “about four in the afternoon,” for the rest of his life.
My spiritual director is a Jesuit priest, and thanks to his guidance the vocabulary of St. Ignatius Loyola has been re-entering my way of thinking and helping me to make sense of the ups and downs of my own spiritual life. St. Ignatius calls the kinds of experiences on Christmas Eve I described ‘consolations’ and the times of young Samuel ‘desolations’; and Ignatius offers a number of practical rules to navigate through the ebb and flow between them. As I’ve found with most things in the spiritual life, what I’m about to say is not all that complicated and you have probably heard it before, just as I did before my spiritual director so kindly reminded me. But what we are to do when we are experiencing a desolation is simple. We should recall that it will pass and consolation will return. God gives us the gift of our memory so that remembering the consolations we have experienced will sustain us through our desolations until God grants us the grace of being consoled once more. Think of how deeply John cherished his first encounter with Christ that he remembered the time it happened down to the hour. How tightly he held onto it as he suffered to watch Christ suffer his agony and death. How much it meant to him throughout the life of the early Church and as he took Mary, Jesus’ Mother, into his home.
Consolations come and go, and desolations do too. Our daily living is bound to be marked by both. Yet we can all practice, as did John and as did all the saints, recalling our consolations, giving thanks for them, and allowing them to continue to inspire and encourage us through the throes of life that come our way. The transition from one to the other is often as unexpected as the switch from Christmas to Ordinary Time; and though we may be caught off guard, what will preserve us from being completely overwhelmed by desolation when it befalls us is making it a point now to cherish the moments we have seen the Lord and beheld his glory. It is not a bad spiritual practice to keep a dairy, to write down like John the day and the hour and context in which you meet Christ. Many of the saints have left theirs behind for our benefit. But however you choose to remember, as the days and weeks pass and life resumes, do not forget that you have found the Christ, the Messiah, in whom is light and life.
Homily preached January 13/14, 2024 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen and St. Thomas Aquinas, Hampden.