(Extra) Ordinary Time

         

Have you had a peak experience recently? A real mountaintop? Or just feeling on top of the world? Don’t let go of it. Remember it!

            Recently we celebrated the feast of the Transfiguration; for us at this monastery it was at the end of our community retreat – a peak experience for me as summer nears its end. “Lord, it is good for us to be here!”  Peter exclaimed in the Gospel for the day. And the next day, like the three privileged apostles after their vision, it’s back to reality – ordinary places, ordinary people, ordinary time!

            I was reminded of a similar experience I had one summer participating in an NEH Seminar on Early Christian Monasticism. The final week was a full immersion in a Trappist monastery with the final day ending on – you guessed it – August 6, the Transfiguration. It was so good for us to be there. But then, we had to say Good-bye to the sixteen other persons from all over the country whom we’ll never see again on this earth, and we remarked that we had been to the mountaintop.  Now we go back home, remembering, and living what’s been learned.

            So here we are, August 2018, once again another year that goes back to “normal, back to “ordinary time.” For a new school term has begun, and that means for us teachers, life seems to be normal, ordinary, after a summer break, after Transfiguration. Have we been changed by it? Sure, there will be new students along with the old, maybe new subjects, new ways of approaching the old familiar ones. Or is it now just the “day-to-day,” the “same old same old” ordinary time?

            Can we enrich it with the good news we experienced in the Transfiguration moments? Christ gives us a glimpse of His glorious, Godly self, and promises the new life after our resurrection from the dead. Surely this memory can permeate our everyday actions with the joy that is to come. Not just for ourselves, but pass it on to those we meet in our everyday life. It could be an “extra” ordinary time! Lord it is good for us to be here, too! Joy! Joy! Joy!

Sr. Mary Carol Hellmann, OSB