ORDINARY TIME
(Anything but ordinary)
From Advent to Christmas, a brief space of time, and then the forty days of Lent followed by the fifty days of Easter and a few feasts following Easter – Trinity Sunday and The Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, and we have the busiest part of the Church year celebrated. Ordinary Time consists of 34 weeks when we are not in one of the four seasons of the Church – Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter or celebrating a special feast.
As Advent looks at the original time before the birth of Jesus, it reflects upon all of the prophecies about a Messiah who would one day come to save the people from sin. It leads to the celebration of that event in the feast of Christmas. The season of Lent makes us pilgrims who follow Jesus through the desert of forty days and nights stripping ourselves of all those things that make following Him more difficult and troublesome. Easter, following the Great Three Days (Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil) allows us fifty days to unpack the great mystery of Christ’s rising from the dead, culminating in His ascension into heaven and the giving of the Holy Spirit in the Feast of Pentecost, just celebrated last week.
So, the beginning and the end of Jesus’ earthly life are found in these special seasons and feasts of the Church year. But what about Ordinary Time? Isn’t this just the periods of time when there is nothing special to celebrate? No!
Ordinary Time, is the majority of the Sundays of the 52-week calendar when we look mainly at the three years of Jesus’ public ministry with His gathering of disciples, His teaching and preaching, healing and miracles. This is the stuff that makes a Christian people and the Church He founded and draws the characters in the stories of Jesus. We see our lives in the whole of salvation history – but it is far more than mere history – it is the recollection of our spiritual lives and our inheritance as the adopted children of God.
The “Ordo”, a small soft-cover book found in every sacristy and church across Canada, is published each year to serve as a manual to the entire Church-year to inform priests, deacons and lay ministers of the appropriate readings, which Mass to celebrate, the feast days and even the colour of the vestments to be worn on certain days. In its introduction to Ordinary Time (pg. 229) it states the following -
“In his apostolic letter approving the Roman calendar (14 February 1969), Pope Paul VI noted some important facts about the liturgical year:
X Over many centuries, Catholics had become accustomed to so many special religious devotions that the mysteries of redemption lost their proper place. This was due to the large number of vigils, holy-days and octaves, and to the growing dominance of various seasons over the Church year;
X St. Pius X and Pope John XXIII restored Sunday to its former dignity, so that everyone should once more consider it as the Church’s original feast day;
X The popes restated the traditional teaching of the Church: The celebration of the liturgical year has a special sacramental power and force which nourishes and strengthens the life of Christians. The Church year is not merely a recalling of the historical events by which Christ won our salvation;
X The reason for the restoration of the liturgical year is to help believers through their faith, hope and love to share more fully in the entire mystery of Christ as it is unfolding throughout the year.
Ordinary Time has resumed once again (following the Feast of Pentecost) when the priests and deacons will wear green vestments and altars will be adorned with green cloth, the colour of Ordinary Time. We will remain in this season until the Feast of Christ the King (Sunday November 21, 2010) just before we enter Advent once again. In the seasons of the Church are found the seasons of our lives and living. One leads to another and so it goes with us. The point of all of this is the wonder of the journey in following Jesus Christ, the One to whom all of the Church’s life and seasons point. He is our beginning and our end and everything in between. That “in between” called our earthly life will lead us to being with Christ forever where there will be no time, no seasons to mark our place, but fullness with Christ forever. (Fr. Charles)
THE SACRAMENT OF THE SICK
When people are asked to recall and identify the seven sacraments of the Church, they will rhyme off Baptism, Reconciliation, Eucharist, Confirmation Marriage, Priesthood, and Last Rites, and rightly so. [Speaking of Last Rites, a few years ago I received a call from a staff member of a funeral home who told me that they were at the home of a man who was dying. She explained that the since the man was not dead yet but was expected to go at any minute, would I come to the home and read the man his last rights? Can you believe it? Read him his last rights? Obviously she had watched too many police shows. I pictured in my own mind the scene with me going to the man’s house and stating: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you in the law court of heaven....”.]
Well, back to what I was saying…. People might not expect to find the Sacrament of the Sick or Sacrament of Anointing, as it is also called, among the seven sacraments, but it is there.
In the Catechism of the Catholic Church it states that:
“From ancient times in the liturgical traditions of both East and West, we have testimonies to the practice of anointings of the sick with blessed oil. Over the centuries the Anointing of the Sick was conferred more and more exclusively on those at the point of death. Because of this it received the name “Extreme Unction.” Notwithstanding this evolution the liturgy has never failed to beg the Lord that the sick person may recovery his health if it would be conducive to his salvation.” (CCC 1512)
So the sacrament of the sick is linked with ‘Last Rites’ but only in that it is for those who are seriously ill. A person with a hangnail does not constitute a person with a serious illness. The recipient of the Anointing of the Sick need not only be a person at the point of death but one from among the faithful who “begins to be in danger of death from sickness or old age”. CCC 1514
Cases where the Anointing would be requested and administered would be before an operation or procedure or upon a diagnosis from a doctor or specialist of a disease or terminal illness.
The administration of the sacrament entails the laying on of hands and the anointing on the forehead and hands with blessed oil. The sacrament recalls the words of the Lord through St. James when he stated:
“Are there any among you who are sick? Let them send for the priests of the church, and the priests will lay hands on them and anoint them with oil. And the prayer of faith will save the sick person and the Lord will raise them up, and if they have committed any sins, their sins will be forgiven them.” (James 5:14)
The priest, after laying his hands on the sick persons’ head, anoints the person on the forehead and on the hands while saying the words,
“Through this holy anointing may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you and raise you up.” (from Pastoral Care of the Sick)
This is a powerful sacrament and one that is often either misunderstood or underestimated. Jesus can do anything and works miracles in our own times just as He did when He walked the earth two millennia ago. People are often not healed and never consider healing from the Lord because they simply don’t ask for it or never even consider it. Lazarus, Jesus’ friend, became ill and yet Jesus purposely stayed away. Once word had come that Lazarus was in fact dead, only then did Jesus lead his disciples toward the town of Bethany where Lazarus lived, just a few kilometers outside of Jerusalem. Martha, Lazarus’ sister, met Jesus as soon as he arrived in the town and she asked him to do something even though it seemed it was beyond His help. She said, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died, but I know that, even now, whatever you ask of God, He will grant you.” What Martha didn’t know was that she, in talking to Jesus her friend, was talking to God! Yet she had faith in Him that told her there was still hope and still a chance that something could be done for her brother even though he had already been dead and in the tomb for four days! Now, Jesus didn’t anoint Lazarus, He raised him back to life from the dead! There are so many accounts worldwide of people who have been given only a few short months to live and then, against all odds and the wisdom of their doctors, fully recovered.
God does not always heal. The greater good in suffering is realized in what it gives to the one who suffers and offers it up. We know that Christ suffered – He who knew no sin and was and is God. His followers would know what suffering was from the Apostles right down through the ages to the present.
When we are sick or seriously ill, even near death, we can feel like we are all alone and may fear we are slipping away from the world as we know it. Jesus tells us to trust in Him with a radical, believing trust that comes from the knowledge that God can do anything. It requires child-like faith.
I think of the story by the Jesuit priest, Fr. Armand Nigro, who wrote the following parable:
Out of the farmhouse and across the fields she ran to where her father was digging a new well. “Daddy, are you down there?” “Yes, I’m here.” “Mamma says dinner is ready.” “Okay”, replied her father, “but first jump and let me catch you.” His little daughter peered into the well, saw only blackness – and trembled. “I’m afraid to jump – I can’t see you!” Her father answered, “I know you can’t, honey, but I can see you. Now, jump and I’ll catch you.”
In our relationship with Jesus we often can’t see where we’re headed and what is to become of us, but by learning to trust Him we can learn to let God catch us. His sacrament of anointing is trusting in being caught and held in the hands of love. (Fr. Charles)
It’s All About Life
There are few things in life and fewer topics on the radio that can get me going as much as the topic of abortion. The word abortion has become a dirty word not only because of what it means but because it is a word that has become synonymous with controversy, strong disagreement and anger.
The other day while listening to a program on CBC Radio on the topic of abortion, I started to talk back aloud to the radio when I heard the most preposterous things being said by a guest who is definitely against protecting the life of the unborn. She spoke as if she represented the good of all women, though of course, she doesn’t. If I heard a man on the radio speaking on behalf of all men I would have been just as outraged. If you talk about a procedure, if you talk about rights and if you seem to be interested in upholding the interests of women’s health, then you don’t have to even mention the dirty word or, God forbid, even the word fetus and much less ‘baby’ and it would seem you’re a pretty good person and seeking the best for women’s health. Yet her words, like so many who are proponents for abortion, spoke not of death, murder, the taking of an innocent human life or anything like that, but of rights, choice, health, etc. It is a deliberate public cleansing of a dirty word that ought to remain dirty because it just is dirty and wrong and sinful and selfish and the taking of a human life – a human baby.
Just this week in the news there was the reported protests outside of the OSPCA Newmarket shelter because the shelter deemed it wise to euthanize hundreds of its animals due to a severe ringworm outbreak reportedly caused in part by the OSPCA’s failure to properly isolate animals who showed signs of the virus a few weeks ago. The protest was aimed at stopping the killing of the animals and turned ugly when death threats were being made toward some of the employees of the facility. Most people, including me, would have little stomach for the senseless killing or abuse of animals and even the idea of euthanizing hundreds of animals for a supposed necessary reason still leaves me cold. My point here is that there seems to be a growing sense in the public for the defense of an animals right to life than for a human life. And why wouldn’t there be? The OSPCA is a building which houses so many stray, unwanted, abandoned and often sick animals and it seeks to humanely treat these animals and find them good homes and adoptive families who will give them a new lease on life. The building is visible, stands clearly and visibly in the public eye and we know what goes on there.
With the killing of human beings through abortion we do things differently. Outside of abortuaries and hospitals, where the taking of life and the killing takes place, appear the words “Health, Clinic or Hospital”; it’s sanitized. In hospitals there are birthing units where women give birth to their children while in other areas of the same hospital women are giving up their children at the hands of those who are supposed to do all they can, according to the oath they took when they first became doctors, to save life. But even the Hippocratic Oath taken in modern times has been altered.
There are apparently three different versions of the Hippocratic Oath; the Original, the Classic and the Modern version. In paragraph 4 of the Oath it addresses specifically the term “abortion”, but notice how the modern version veers off course from the Original and the Classic and makes it abundantly clear that taking a life is permissible for the doctor provided that he/she is aware that he/she must be humble in his/her approach to death. Even the final line of paragraph 4 makes it clear that one charged with the responsibility of the care and life of a patient must not “play at God”, but what else is a doctor doing when he/she provides abortions or recommends them?
ORIGINAL: “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.”
CLASSIC: “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly, I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy.”
MODERN: “Most especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.”
I know of a couple whose doctor recommended that since their unborn child appeared to have a heart defect, she should abort her child. They came to me asking my advice and I told them that, while doctors may be gifted, intelligent and wise, they are not God and only God knows what is best. She ignored the doctors advise and said she was going to give birth to her child. She did, and this little boy they named Owen was born. As he seemed to be doing better than they had anticipated surgery was postponed for a few months. Owen later had surgery and while there were some tense moments with his health he has pulled through and has done remarkably well. To look on that child and think that he might not have been here at all due to the advice of a doctor is unimaginable for me. That little guy was well named, Owen, for we are owin’ God big time for that precious life.
A doctor’s power to take a life forfeits that doctors credibility for it goes against life itself to take it. If a doctors work is not about life and health and the value of one single human person, then how could a doctor be trusted with yours or mine or anyone’s life?
The issue of abortion is heating up once again in Canada and it is incumbent upon not only all Catholics and followers of Jesus Christ, but all people, to know the facts, to take a stand and to be a voice of truth in the midst of hype, rhetoric and much talk which seeks to veil and camouflage the ugly business of murder as a right. (Fr. Charles)