The Sacrament of Ordinary Time

“I am the vine, and you are the branches.”

—John 15:5

It is hot in Louisiana. H.O.T. There is no escaping the summer's insidious wet heat, this air that makes you want gills. The kind of air that can make you forget the coolness following a springtime rain, the light breeze that washes in from the Gulf of Mexico carrying the slight sting of salt, and sometimes bayou silt. July in this part of the USA is tropical. Only no mango trees bend with heavy fruit in these yards. Our neighbors grow kumquats. Another yard hosts a satsuma tree so pregnant with orange globes in December that almost every year we walk past a sign, hand-lettered, PLEASE take some. I would never have expected it. This has become home.

In this slow, laden heat it is easy to forget the grand celebrations of springtime's end. The international Fête de la Musique, the music festival. University graduations, high school proms, the last of the crawfish boils, the Feast of St John. May crowning, Ascension, Pentecost. Those days feel like part of a very distant past, when you step outside and it's 98 degrees and 85% humidity at 9 a.m. And yet, still … A few weeks ago was Pentecost Sunday. A definitive change, a shift in the order of the universe. More than spring to summer, or steamy to boiling. The Gospel reading (from John 20:19-23) introduces a new facet of what it means to follow the Lord. It’s not simply missionary, going through the lands teaching and leading people to Him. In this reading, Jesus delegates. He tells the disciples, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” He assigns them their own mission, and with it gives them a new responsibility: to go into the world and do for others what he has done for them. To give to the world what he has given to them. 

It may seem paradoxical that Pentecost closes the Easter season, that glorious period of rejoicing, and sends the Church straight back into Ordinary Time. Proclaiming the Gospel of the Lord is a glorious mission, after all, and don’t we all want to wear the brilliant albis of immeasurable mystery, the symbol of purity and redemption, the liturgical color of Sundays since the Resurrection? But instead, the brilliance subsides to green. The longest period in the liturgical year, Ordinary Time takes us from late May or early June all the way to Advent’s penitential violet, the vestments like a bruise we have inflicted and for which we need those four reflective weeks to heal.

But it is ordinary, this delegation: part of the order of things. That’s what it all means, what it’s all for. Jesus sends the disciples out to fulfill the “new normal,” which is precisely the act of telling people about the Lord and guiding them to relationship, or greater relationship, with Him, to greater grace. Still shocked with grief and fear from the loss of the old ordinary, the disciples have to trust what he told them after his Resurrection: “I am with you always, unto the end of time” (Matthew 28:20), he said, then left. And they were on their own, to be Jesus’ hands, feet, and mouth, and – much more difficult, I think – to bear witness to their own conversions, their own profound trust in him, to show the people they encounter that their faith is unshaken even in the (outward) absence of the person who taught them how to be who they are.

I write this as a convert myself. I grew up in a non-religious household, my father only wavering on whether he could label himself agnostic or atheist. And things were different then. Pope Francis had not offered condolences to a young boy about the possibility of his own atheist father’s salvation. Vatican II was a recent memory – the Council having set its fleet of changes onto a sea like a sudden summer squall. Plus, it was the 1970s. Between the sexual revolution and Soul Train, the world was a very odd place in which to proclaim Catholic doctrine. The 1980s represented the religion of “me-ism,” the 1990s were characterized by various popular-culture rewritings of Christianity (the Indigo Girls’ rendition of Jesus Christ Superstar; Alanis Morrissette as God in the movie Dogma), to say nothing of the “Darwin fish.” I had one of those decals on the bumper of my Jeep, an old wheezing hooptie my friends had named “Mrs. Jefferson,” held together mostly by stickers by the time she passed out of my life. In a time of intellectual growth and crisis, during graduate school, I recognized my call to the Church. I received the sacraments of baptism, first communion, and confirmation on one unseasonably warm April evening in 2001. Yay! Catholic!

It is tempting to call that the happy ending, the rest being, as they say, history. In fact, the time following baptism brought home the reality that the hard work had really only just begun. I had to go back to my old world and live in it, converted. I encountered a lot of questions. “Why did you choose Catholicism??” was probably the one I heard the most often, as if I had selected my faith from a buffet table and could just as easily have piled my plate with Buddhism or Tasawwuf. It took years for me to articulate the deep, indwelling truth that held me up, that I had not “chosen Catholicism,” but that God had chosen me and brought the Catholic Church into my life to bring me home. So to "why Catholicism," my usual response in those early days went something like – “I mean, …”

It will perhaps not come as a surprise that I was not a terrific apostle.

I was, in fact, quite a disastrous apostle. I struggled with depression and suicidal ideation and all the while despaired to read Gospel accounts about people to whom Jesus announced, with tremendous compassion, “your faith has saved you.” Fellow converts, like Scott and Kimberly Hahn, once drawn to the Church made it the center of their lives and lived it with every breath, every word. I didn’t do that. I was finishing my PhD in 19th-century French literature – arguably the least Catholic century of in the history of France, whose “first daughter of the Church” status became an embarrassing epithet rather than a prized moniker. And while diving into Church teachings and apologists and theologians (I remember staring at my bookshelf and sighing as I faced the decision between St Thomas Aquinas and Balzac – I didn’t realize then the things they shared, the ways in which Balzac was influenced by Aquinas’ methodological and teleological approaches), I also faced the necessity of completing a very secular narrative study so I could put this interminable degree to bed and get a job. I didn’t want to finish it. I didn’t want a job, for that matter. I wanted to live my conversion, like Julian of Norwich, digging a cell beneath the side chapel of my little church on the southern quai of the Saône and living there with only my laptop so I too could write of God’s radiant love. I wanted to Be Catholic.

Since I did not then have the ability, knowledge, or wisdom to live as one of the beautifully trusting from the Gospels, I did what people did in 2001: I started a blog. And I wrote about my daily life. Sometimes daily life contained lyrical insights into the beauty of small things, like a packet of Nescafé in the morning. Or the effect of walking along the quai of a river with a large gold statue of the Blessed Mother shining on a hillside up above, her arms outstretched in unwavering blessing, hovering also beneath the black surface of the water. Or again, the freeing realization of being OK, even when caught in a morning downpour while out for a run. This is rain, I typed. It taps against my skin like fingertips against a celestina keyboard, warm, sparkling. It will soak this t-shirt, these shorts, my socks and shoes – and that will be OK. It may sound silly, but the sudden belated understanding of living in a world that had been carefully and intentionally sculpted by a benevolent and loving Creator brought a peace I had never known. I keep finding this faith within myself, today, on those blurry confusing days. Faith through raindrops. 

It rains a lot during Ordinary Time, here in south Louisiana. Hurricane season runs 30 June to 30 November, and believe me, we feel it whether or not a storm swirls in the Gulf. I continue my dual life – Catholic and academic, focusing more on building bridges than on keeping the river banks distinct and distant. Already the culture we have both inherited and built holds deep divisions, chasms of opposition where we should have ensured safety nets. We do not have to be one OR the other. As Bishop Robert Barron likes to say, often we inhabit “the great Catholic both/and.” In my own case, I did not become an anchoress. I did, however, become a more profoundly believing Christian, and a more intentionally practicing Catholic – and these elements inflect the wholeness of my life, not just who I am inside a church. Because if we separate who we are inside a church from who we are in the world, then we are not doing the most ordinary thing, the thing that Jesus instructed his followers to do – to go out and live among others as he lived among us.

It's important for academics to see that we can both believe beyond explanation, and exercise critical thinking skills. That we can teach Balzac without throwing Aquinas into the dust heap. I don’t pray in my classrooms and don’t talk about my faith unsolicited; but I do talk about the Church, and liturgy, and iconography and apologetics and Medieval Latin and how the construction of the rose windows in Notre-Dame de Paris reflects a minutely organized system of then-contemporary beliefs about the soul – and how Victor Hugo’s descriptions of the same cathedral windows occupy a space that is simultaneously medieval, early-modern, and post-Revolutionary. I teach Charles de Foucauld and Thérèse de Lisieux. I don’t proselytize. I don’t assume all my students are Baptist or Catholic (the two heavy hitters in SoLA). But I also don’t conceal my miraculous medal in a pocket or rub the thumbprint of black ash off my head at the start of Lent. I’m Catholic, and a convert, and a professor. Every so often one of my students shows up in class with their own ash thumbprint. “I like your outfit,” one of them said to me, years ago, with a grin. (I have stolen that line more than once.)

This morning I sat for a while in a church that had just emptied after an early Mass celebration. The nave was filled with gentle brightness and the sounds of water – the baptismal font had a sort of aqueduct, a little channel whose rivulets flowed quietly down into a pool beneath. I sat toward the back in the not-quite-silence, studying the large crucifix behind the altar, and only realized after several minutes of intense looking that the glass behind the crucifix was etched with intricate, delicate floral patterns. Not flowers, I noticed the longer I looked, but leaves and vines. The wholeness of it came beautifully into focus for one moment, and I held my breath to contemplate what it told me. I am the vine, and you are the branches, Jesus told his disciples. But the branches cannot grow without the vine’s going deep into the earth and taking root.

I thought back to planting tomato seeds with my six-year-old. You have to bury the seed deep in the soil, I told him, watching his little fingers turn back and forth, pushing deeper into the potting mix. I shook some tiny beige grains into his hand and helped him drop them into the earth he had prepared, then smooth more soil over the hole to fill it in and pat it down. We won’t see the seed anymore, I told him then, and he started to reach for the place he had filled with soil. I held his hand and signed the process. Bury – cover – nourish – tend – grow. First this, then that. There is a specific sequence to follow, and then (the final sign) we eat. The divine economy, the whole of salvation history, contained in a ceramic pot from Walmart and the eager explorations of a child’s hands.

We are like that too. I imagine the grief of the disciples, having seen their beloved teacher, companion, and soul-friend suffer and breathe his last. Even seeing him resurrected …. I am more Thomas than John, and I just know it would not be the same. And, I discovered/am still always discovering, it shouldn’t be. Growth is greater, harder than burial or birth. It requires nourishment and care. To make something grow, we use materials that are discarded, embarrassing even, seen as dirty or base – cow-manure fertilizer, mulch from a compost heap. With this cast-out matter we feed what we want to treasure. The resulting fruits feed us in turn, and we share them with the people we love. What satisfaction, inviting a friend for lunch and making a tomato salad with tomatoes grown in our own garden. Tomatoes grow in Ordinary Time. The season naturally offers us the pleasure of giving what we have given to. 

The crucifix at the center of the leaf-embossed pattern in that sanctuary – Christ’s broken body hanging from the Cross – is the source from which grow the fruits of our belief, the tenets of our faith. We cannot have the fertile growth of leaves and branches without the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. From Eden to Gethsemane to my 6-year-old’s tomatoes, I traced a long, extraordinary, ordinary continuum of grace. We have to give something up if we want to gain something greater. Can’t have the fruit of faith in redemption without a seed planted in the confidence that it will take root. Sending roots down into the soil comes with pain, sometimes. With anxiety. We have to trust that air and light and water will do their jobs and coax our fledgling sprigs from the ground.

And so, on Pentecost Monday I gazed at a glass wall covered with gorgeous etchings: a stark contrast to the suffering flesh and bones nailed to a cross that rests against the same glass. The design of the luminous background against the brutal physicality of the bloody foreground. It’s not contrast, but fulfillment. And that is the season we enter into after Easter: Ordinary Time, a season of working in faith and trusting what remains hidden for now. The sacrament is held within the ordinary, and that is the mission. 

And it is good. 

– Baton Rouge, 19 June 2022