Focus on the Word to drive out the darkness
Note: This is the fourth blog in a series of four written by Providence Associate Brad Crites.
I have memories from childhood of listening to the ticking of the clocks. At my grandma’s apartment, during a moment of silence in our little country church, or just about anywhere there might be an opportunity to sit patiently and wait.
Watching the second hand, the torsion spinner on my aunt’s anniversary clock, the pendulum swing … it was fascinating. I find a lot of beauty in quiet times, or as I learned from visiting the Trappists, the language of silence.
I also have memories of being in a dark, quiet space that are less than pleasant. Any unexpected noise, the feeling of being alone, the emptiness can bring about fear, worry and all manner of frightening things.
It’s no wonder silence can feel uncomfortable. There’s much to be grateful for in the noise that surrounds us most of the time.
As we wrap up June, we encounter three liturgical events: The Nativity of John the Baptist, the single-day Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, and the calendar’s transition into Ordinary Time.
John was the “voice crying out in the wilderness” – a voice born of silence that pierced through the clatter of his day and was ultimately silenced again.
Peter and Paul represent the spectrum of early Christianity’s leadership, a focus on action and a focus on word, a simultaneously contradictory and complimentary pairing.
If we consider how the calendar is designed to guide our prayer, that oft-overlooked ordinary time isn’t meant to be casual or just the space that fills in between the major events of celebration. It is meant to be the common life that gets us from fast to fast and feast to feast.
Not “common” as in lesser but “common” as in shared and foundational.
Advent prepares us for Christ’s arrival that we celebrate at Christmas; the somber time of Lent takes us from the Passion to the joy of Easter, a boisterous season that overflows for weeks until Pentecost and the following feasts, feasts we have recently viewed in light of how they empower and ground us for the swings of life’s pendulum.
Ordinary Time, then, is our call to reexamine the teachings of Jesus and live them. Let’s live them in the sustaining silence, and let’s live them in a way that makes enough noise to drive out the dark around us.
