May 25, 2021
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, as we return to “Ordinary Time”, we pray with Psalm 50.
Gather my faithful ones before Me,
Psalm 50: 5-6
those who have made a covenant with me by sacrifice.
And the heavens proclaim the Lord’s justice;
for God is the judge.
It’s been quite a journey, hasn’t it?
We left Ordinary Time in mid-February to walk the annual road of the Paschal Mystery. Throughout Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide, we assiduously laid the pattern of Christ’s life over our own experience, praying to be stretched into its redemptive wholeness.
Now we enter a new time as new people. Our readings restart with a few weeks of:
- advice from Sirach,
- some stories from the delightful apocryphal Book of Tobit,
- and the middle of Mark’s Gospel during the journey to Jerusalem
These passages invite us to return to a graced dailyness which realizes that nothing is ever really “ordinary”.
Psalm 50, particularly as it is interpreted here by Christine Robinson, inspires us to carry the grace of Pentecost to our ordinary tasks:
Spirit is everywhere In the eternal circle of sunrise and sunset In the beauty of the earth and in the power of her storms In the laws that are written in our hearts, and in the voice of conscience that marches us to goodness. God is spirit. We may need ritual, but what God wants is Our hearts open in gratitude, or in a cry for help, or in willingness to treat our neighbors decently seek the truth live in love. These ways bring us to God.
So, in our prayer today, let’s reignite this “ordinary time” with the insight of Abraham Heschel who wrote:
Our goal should be to live life
in radical amazement.
….get up in the morning and look at the world
in a way that takes nothing for granted.
Everything is phenomenal;
everything is incredible;
never treat life casually.
To be spiritual is to be amazed.
Poetry: Morning – Mary Oliver
Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.
Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.
The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.
Then laps the bowl clean.
Then wants to go out into the world
where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,
then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.
I watch her a little while, thinking:
what more could I do with wild words?
I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.
Lavish Mercy 