ON ORDINARY TIMES
By Lucia A. Silecchia

Recently, I enjoyed one of my favorite rites of autumn – the search for perfect pumpkins for home, office, and anywhere else that might be brightened with glorious gourds. In a long drive through quaint corners of the countryside, I relished the splendor that is autumn.

Yes, the pumpkins were the excuse for the journey. But the trip was made more beautiful by the showy splash of autumn surrounding the corn fields gone gray and the farmhouses hung with Halloween wreaths. There was enough of a crisp chill to announce that summer was gone. Yet, the bright sun that bounced off the red, orange and gold in the trees heralded a new season with a loveliness all its own. I rejoiced in the simple beauty of a world made new.

It will not be long until I marvel again when I awaken to the first snow that dusts my city streets. The silent brightness of that blanket, the sound of my neighbors’ shovels that beckons me out of bed, and the hot chocolate I promise myself when I am back inside are all part of a new type of wonder. (I would rather ignore the icy sidewalks and high heating bill that will follow!) In this, I will rejoice again in the simple beauty of a world made new.

Just when the snowy season starts to lose its charms, there will be shy crocuses rising tentatively from the earth, faint traces of green in lawns coming back to life and trees getting ready to burst forth in the lacy splendor of spring. As the days lengthen and the sun grows brighter, I will rejoice again in the simple beauty of a world made new.

While I might, in the fullness of May, doubt that I would ever want to bid farewell to spring, a day will come when the days last long into the night, tomatoes ripen on the vine, and the beach beckons. Summer will hold joys of its own, and yet again I will rejoice in the simple beauty of a world made new.

I am deeply grateful to live in a corner of the world where seasons change around me and every few months life feels different.

Yet, it is not just in the world around us when seasons change. Life, too, has its own seasons.
Some of the people I admire most are those who have the faith and hope that allows them to welcome each new season of life with the same joy I have when I welcome the new seasons of the world around me.

Some seasons of life are filled with excitement and eager anticipation as the start of the adventures of a new school, new job, new home, marriage and parenthood. Some of those that are most important are those we do not remember well, like the transition from infant to toddler. Some are filled with angst – the so-called terrible twos and the terrible teens – and others with peace. Some seasons change of our own volition when we choose a new path. Other seasons come unwelcomed and unbeckoned.

Some are seasons of dreams fulfilled, and others are seasons when a dream moves out of view. There are seasons of suffering and loss that come to each life, and seasons to surrender the things to which we cling. There are seasons that are filled with companionship and those when, for a time, we find ourselves walking alone.

In the depth of our hearts, there are those seasons when we walk closely with God, and other seasons with the taste of the “dark night of the soul.”

As years pass and I look back at the ways in which life’s seasons have changed, I can see that there is, indeed, something to be grateful for in each of them. At the time, some have seemed to me far more beautiful than others. Yet, in their own way, each season of life made my own heart new – whether I wanted it to or not.

I hope that as I watch autumn unfold and winter follows, it will be a reminder to cherish each season of life – to thank God for the blessings it brings, to ask Him for strength through what it may take away, and say a trusting “Amen” to every season of ordinary times.

(Lucia A. Silecchia is a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Faculty Research at the Catholic University of America. “On Ordinary Times” is a biweekly column reflecting on the ways to find the sacred in the simple. Email her at silecchia@cua.edu.)

GUEST COLUMN
By Sister Constance Veit, LSP

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by magnets. I loved to watch the little magnetic skaters glide across a mirror in our family’s Christmas village at the flip of a switch and I enjoyed doing science experiments with magnets and iron shavings in school.

I recall a comparison Pope St. John Paul II made between the Eucharist and the force of a magnet’s pole.
“The presence of Jesus in the tabernacle must be a kind of magnetic pole attracting an ever greater number of souls enamored of him, ready to wait patiently to hear his voice and, as it were, to sense the beating of his heart,” he wrote just six months before he died.

These words of John Paul II came to mind when I heard about the National Eucharistic Revival launched by the U.S. bishops earlier this year. It is a beautiful, powerful image – the idea of Jesus acting as a magnet drawing people to himself in the Blessed Sacrament.

I have begun to ask myself, do I allow myself to be drawn to Jesus in the tabernacle? Do I cling to him the way iron shavings cling to a strong magnet? Or do I allow myself to be pulled away too easily by distractions and my lack of love?

The Eucharistic Revival will help us to renew our appreciation for many aspects of Jesus’ ultimate gift to us, beginning with the centrality of the Mass as the representation of Jesus’ saving sacrifice on the Cross.

But it seems to me that when all is said and done, our devotion to the Eucharist will be proportionate to our faith in what we call “the real presence” – our unwavering conviction that Jesus is really and truly present on the altar during every eucharistic sacrifice and in every tabernacle around the world.
Our foundress, St. Jeanne Jugan, was not a highly educated woman but she was a person of profound faith and committed action.

She often told the young Sisters to remember the presence of Jesus in the tabernacle, in the poor and in their own souls. And she gave them this very practical advice:

“Jesus is waiting for you in the chapel. Go and find him when your strength and patience are giving out, when you feel lonely and helpless. Say to him: ‘You know well what is happening, my dear Jesus. I have only you. Come to my aid …’ And then go your way. And don’t worry about knowing how you are going to manage. It is enough to have told our good Lord. He has an excellent memory.”

Jeanne Jugan didn’t have an easy life.

As a young person and then the foundress of a religious congregation, she worked hard and shared everything she had with the poor.

Although she chosen to be superior by the young women who joined her and she even achieved a measure of public notoriety, she was treated unjustly by a priest who had been appointed to assist the nascent religious community and stripped of all authority in it, until, 27 years later, she died in total anonymity.

But Jeanne Jugan possessed something no one could take from her – a very real, strong and intimate relationship with Jesus, whom she knew was always waiting for her “in the chapel.” Jesus Christ was real to her – more real than anyone or anything else.

No doubt St. Jeanne Jugan often told Jesus everything that was happening in her life, in both good times and bad.

Pope Francis recently spoke to seniors about how they should pray. I think his words would resonate with our foundress.

The pope said, “If you have some wound in your heart, some pain, and you want to object, object even to God. God will listen to you. God is a Father. God is not afraid of our prayer of protest, no! God understands. … Prayer should be like this: spontaneous, like that of a child with his father, who says everything that comes out of his mouth because he knows his father understands him.”

I believe that St. Jeanne Jugan was like a child with her father. She shared with him from the depths of her heart because she knew that God heard and understood her.

May her example, and the words of Pope Francis, convince you that it’s okay to be honest with Jesus, truly present and waiting for us in every chapel or parish church!

(Sister Constance Veit is the communications director for the Little Sisters of the Poor in the United States and an occupational therapist.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI

If we only prayed when we felt like it, we wouldn’t pray a lot.

Enthusiasm, good feelings and fervor will not sustain anyone’s prayer life for long, goodwill and firm intention notwithstanding. Our hearts and minds are complex and promiscuous, wild horses frolicking to their own tunes, with prayer frequently not on their agenda. The renowned mystic, John of the Cross teaches that, after an initial period of fervor in prayer, we will spend the bulk of our years struggling to pray discursively, dealing with boredom and distraction. So, the question becomes, how do we pray at those times when we are tired, distracted, bored, disinterested, and nursing a thousand other things in our heads and in our hearts? How do we pray when little inside us wants to pray? Especially, how do we pray at those moments when we have a positive distaste for prayer?

Monks have secrets worth knowing. The first secret we need to learn from them is the central place of ritual is sustaining a prayer-life. Monks pray a lot and regularly, but they never try to sustain their prayer on the basis of feelings. They sustain it through ritual. Monks pray together seven or eight times a day ritually. They gather in chapel and pray the ritual offices of the church (Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, Vespers, Compline) or they celebrate the Eucharist together. They don’t always go there because they feel like it, they come because they are called to prayer, and then, with their hearts and minds perhaps less than enthusiastic about praying, they pray through the deepest part of themselves, their intention and their will.

In the rule that St. Benedict wrote for monastic life there’s an oft-quoted phrase. A monk’s life, he writes, is to be ruled by the monastic bell. When the monastic bell rings, the monk is immediately to drop whatever he is doing and go to whatever that summons is calling him to, not because he wants to, but because it is time, and time is not our time, it’s God’s time. That’s a valuable secret, particularly as it applies to prayer. We need to go pray regularly, not because we want to, but because it’s time, and when we can’t pray with our hearts and minds, we can still pray through our wills and through our bodies.

Yes, our bodies! We tend to forget that we are not disincarnate angels, pure heart and mind. We are also a body. Thus, when heart and mind struggle to engage in prayer, we can always still pray with our bodies. Classically, we have tried to do this through certain physical gestures and postures (making the sign of the cross, kneeling, raising our hands, joining hands, genuflection, prostration) and we should never underestimate or denigrate the importance of these bodily gestures. Simply put, when we can’t pray in any other way, we can still pray through our bodies. (And who is to say that a sincere bodily gesture is inferior as a prayer to a gesture of the heart or mind?) Personally, I much admire a particular bodily gesture, bowing down with one’s head to the floor which Muslims do in their prayer. To do that is to have your body say to God, “Irrespective of whatever’s on my mind and in my heart right now, I submit to your omnipotence, your holiness, your love.” Whenever I do meditative prayer alone, normally I end it with this gesture.

Sometimes spiritual writers, catechists, and liturgists have failed us by not making it clear that prayer has different stages – and that affectivity, enthusiasm, fervor are only one stage, and the neophyte stage at that. As the great doctors and mystics of spirituality have universally taught, prayer, like love, goes through three phases. First comes fervor and enthusiasm; next comes the waning of fervor along with dryness and boredom, and finally comes proficiency, an ease, a certain sense of being at home in prayer that does not depend on affectivity and fervor but on a commitment to be present, irrespective of affective feeling.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer used to say this to a couple when officiating at their marriage. Today you are very much in love and believe that your love will sustain your marriage. It won’t. Let your marriage [which is a ritual container] sustain your love. The same can be said about prayer. Fervor and enthusiasm will not sustain your prayer, but ritual can. When we struggle to pray with our minds and our hearts, we can still always pray through our wills and our bodies. Showing up can be prayer enough.

In a recent book, Dearest Sister Wendy, Robert Ellsberg quotes a comment by Michael Leach, who said this in relation to what he was experiencing in having to care long-term for his wife suffering from Alzheimer’s. Falling in love is the easy part; learning to love is the hard part; and living in love is the best part. True too for prayer.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com.)