3rd Week of Lent 2020 - Monday - How Ordinary!

Naaman, the Syrian army commander, afflicted with leprosy, was appalled at the suggestion that to cure his leprosy, all he had to do was to bathe in the Jordan River.  That river?  It’s so ordinary!

Jesus, after forty days in the desert, comes back to his home town and is rejected by its citizens.  They knew him as a young boy.  Perhaps they had heard some story about him being lost in Jerusalem for three days while Mary and Joseph looked for him. Or saw him working with Joseph in his carpenter’s shop. How could He be a prophet? How could he be the messiah? How could God be at work in Him?

So too, our sacraments: water, bread, wine, oil, confessing past faults, a man and a woman making promises to each other—ordinary things. One of the great difficulties that the very earliest Christians had was convincing their neighbors, accustomed to great religious spectacles, that baptism—just being washed with water—really did bring with it the promise of living forever.  “Washing in water?  Just ordinary water?”  The power of the sacraments comes not from the water or oil, but from God. God is so powerful he can work through ordinary things.

Sometimes our faith seems so ordinary.  Prayer, fasting, almsgiving, following rules, being patient, forgiving, it all seems so ordinary.

Many fallen away Catholics claim they don’t go to Mass because it’s boring and ordinary.  They don’t read the bible because, well, that’s so simple.  I’ve also talked to Catholics whose family members have fallen away from the Church and have fallen into to some pretty deadly sins.  They looked at me with surprise and doubt when I suggested they pray a rosary for their children.  A rosary, how ordinary!

I’ve talked to self-proclaimed atheists who claimed that they’d believe in God if He appeared to them in some great supernatural vision.  But when I tell them, God has appeared in ordinary flesh and begun His Church, they laugh.

During this time of this viral global pandemic, what should we do? Carry on and be faithful to the Gospel. Go to confession if you need to. Read the bible, pray the rosary, spend time in quiet meditation on the word of God, study the faith and the example of what the saints have done in time of pestilence and plague. Clothe the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, visit the lonely, pray for the living and the dead.

And keep your Lenten commitments. At this point in Lent you may be starting to be disillusioned with your Lenten penances, they might seem so ordinary now.  But I urge you to persevere, God is working through them.  Through them, God will bring about great conversion including your own, if you let him.  For the glory of God and salvation of souls.

- - - - - - - -
 
That the season of Lent may bring the most hardened hearts to repentance and bring to all people purification of sin and selfishness.

For those preparing for baptism and the Easter sacraments, that they may continue to conform themselves to Christ through fervent prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

For the Holy Spirit to guide the appointment of our next Bishop—that he may be a man of true faith and courage.

That we may generously respond to all those in need: the sick, the suffering, the homeless, the imprisoned, and victims of violence. And for all victims of the coronavirus and their families.

For all who have died, and for all the poor souls in purgatory, and for X. for whom this Mass is offered.

Grant, we pray, O Lord, that your people may turn to you with all their heart, so that whatever they dare to ask in fitting prayer they may receive by your mercy. Through Christ our Lord.