I've always both hated and been stoked by 'the end' of the Christmas season. On the calendar next to me the box marked January 11th. says, The Baptism of the Lord. The adjoining box says, 1st. Week in Ordinary Time.
Only the Catholic Church would bother to call ordinary time Ordinary Time. (It's one of the many reasons why I love the Catholic Church.)
I'm not sure I've felt so full of faults and indifference to those faults as now, and a sometime feeling of being adrift; and yet I sense some sort of beacon beneath, like a singular blip, blip, blip, very faint, saying: Enter into the foray on the enemy's ground! Take peace with you and do battle! Reborn, initiated, consecrated and empowered, fare forward into Ordinary Time and bear witness to the Truth.
Jesus, in His three year ministry, apportioned His time into something...liturgical. I note it in the solemn doom that is portended when Jesus overthrows the tables of the money-changers, and which finally seems to crack the air when scripture says, "...and from that day on no one dared to ask him another question..."
Jesus proclaims the truth and He Himself is the truth.
And He Who is the Truth said:
"If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father's who sent Me." John 14:23-24
Doesn't that free you up? Your will decides what your love is; not because it is omniscient, but because it is yours alone. Not all the demons of hell can decide it for you. Not all the choirs of angels in Heaven. Not God.
Of course there is much to be said here how God and the choirs of angels and the saints operate to give your will sufficient grace and so forth; but the deciding factor is our willingness to keep God's words and, keeping them, act on them.
And your acts (and non-acts) testify to your will. So, what better time to get on with this stuff than Ordinary Time?
By the way, it's one of the reasons why I don't attend those reconciliation services during Advent and Lent, and instead just go during regular confession times during those seasons. I prefer the "ordinary" for such things; sort of "off-the-cuff", not entirely, but something like it. To put it in the worst sort of way, I "perform" badly when it's a "special service". Thank God for the ordinary.
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Oh yes, and my blog header needs something. After the holly that was thrown up there, the 'thorn crowns' feel so...
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