Now take this

and sacramentalize it by reflecting on the incarnation, on the life of Jesus, on the Gospel.

What good can come out of Nazareth? If you are asleep to the ordinary, and not entering into it, in the sense of pouring yourself into it and equally receiving it and dwelling in it, you are not living the sacramental life. The sacramental life does not end in the sacraments. Indeed, the sacraments themselves have their form in ordinary matter. If you partake of the sacraments, then the sacramental life begins with the sacraments. And many, many people who do not partake of the sacraments are immersed in the sacramental life, and have much to teach Catholics. God is not bound by the sacraments. Indeed, if you partake of the sacraments, you should be all the more perceptive and sensitive to how other people are living a sacramental life who do not partake of the sacraments. Our awe of them should be like a mirror showing them the goodness, beauty, and truth in them that they might not see. Like Pope Francis said, receiving the sacraments is not like getting some kind of merit badge; it's not a reward for the perfect. Your repentance does not earn you them.

If you don't have the desire to do (which implies also enjoying) ordinary things extraordinarily well, as St. John Bosco would have it, (accepting that you will often fail, leading you to embrace more and more humbly the ordinary to the point of regarding with true awe all that is good in other cultures) then you are just not very Catholic, you are just not very universal. You are a specialist in the worst sense. Maybe you're looking to conquer the Catholic Family Thing like it was a merit badge. That's not doing it extraordinarily well. Because you're placing yourself outside of it. Or maybe you get cut off the vine through "apocalyptic fantasies"?

Maybe some of the above is how the nuclear family came about. Just think - the term extended family only came about with the term nuclear family. Extended family is not abnormal; the nuclear family is abnormal - that is, not the norm - irregular. I don't know much about history, but didn't the nuclear family come out of the second world war? I think that's where the legalization of abortion came from. It came from the forties and the fifties? The rupture between generations. The larger protective embrace of extended family was fractured and it caused a sick isolation resulting in the nuclear family, and this allowed abortion to become much more permissive; it made abortion that much more thinkable. Just remember, if abortion leads to war, then all the same, war leads to abortion.

Just think - Mary and Joseph migrating as refugees to all these places knowing their son (who they had no misconception of how special he was) was being hunted. Of all families they would be justified in being the nuclear family and totally stand offish. But they weren't. They thought Jesus was in the caravans behind when they were coming back from the Passover festival. Thousands of people. They just assumed he was with family. There was no nuclear family.

Anyways, I don't know how many times I've been to Mass in the Extraordinary Form when at some point I said to myself, "Man, this is just like the Ordinary Form!" The sense of joy that has given me is wonderful, deep, and enriching, just as Pope Emeritus Benedict would have it, not terminating in the form of the Mass, but in entering the prayer of the Church. It's totally in line with Church teaching: they are one and the same Mass.

Even in regards to talking about the liturgical forms alone, they are more alike than unlike. They are radically more alike than radically unlike, or even somewhat unlike. There is actually only likeness and complementarity to speak about them, and not difference. One comes out of the other, and that other came out of another. It's all in the safe embrace of the Church. The form of the Roman liturgy comes out of the engineering traction of ancient Rome. It's always been on the austere side, and it got caught up somewhat at a certain point with secular court theatrics, which was fine for what it was. The Ordinary Form is like a magnification. Attending the Extraordinary Form, I've been made to see the Ordinary Form within it, and to realize the movement of the Mass itself in a renewed way. So much so in fact that I'm satisfied and happy going exclusively to the Ordinary Form of the Mass. Not that I had any problems with it, which I didn't. The liturgy of the Word, and the liturgy of the Eucharist. One leads to the other, and both become more and more appreciated, loved.

The Ordinary Form is right there in the Extraordinary Form, you see it in the midst of the EF's sort of stick-on parts, the borrowings of the secular court stuff (if one wants to use the same anti-Catholic critical regard for that form as some people have for the Ordinary Form, to say stuff about the EF like "stick-on parts" etc. it can really work both ways) - not extraordinary in the sense that we typically use the word, but more like extracurricular. Enriched in our common communal prayer and worship, with the Ordinary Form being the norm, that is ordained.