Today we begin, once again, Ordinary Time. These are days that provide us the opportunity to live our spiritual life, our times of prayer, in a kind of quiet. These are days that are different from the special seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter. These days will carry us through some 34 weeks of a measured pace in our spiritual journey. Measured journey! Keep that in mind whenever you hear the phrase, Ordinary Time. It helps set the "atmosphere" of the season!The first reading puts before us a particular message for the journey. When we care to learn anything today, we either revert to "the old fashioned way ... we read about it" or we turn to the modern way and open us the Google treasury. On the spiritual journey, however, we need neither a library nor a computer -- although these can help at times. On our spiritual journey the finish line is bringing ourselves to recognize how God has spoken to us along the way. To hear God we do not necessarily have to read! Hopefully, through prayerful reflection, sparked by words from Sacred Scripture, we will come to realize that God has spoken to us through the life, death and resurrection of his Son. His life is what we need to not read the "old fashioned way" or even the modern way. Ordinary Time invites us simply to look at and hear how his life speaks to us in different circumstances and at different times of our lives (that is each day ... each day is different that the previous ones!!).
Perhaps it was Jesus' invitation to the Kingdom of God that brought two sets of brothers to follow him without hesitation -- the event we see in today's gospel. Ordinary Time provides us with the chance to see and experience in the life Jesus. He lived the compassion and care of a loving Father that books or computers cannot make as clear.
Let the celebration of the daily Eucharist that impacts our lives more through action than words alone be a walking stick that accompanies us on the Ordinary Time journey.
