She was Ordinary ... and therefore not at all ordinary.

One very unexpected gift of this time has been to change the way I look at what might be called Ordinariness and Ordinary people.

Like Mom; like me.

I've been looking at old photo albums. This has been a great source of joy and sadness and, for me, a great source of humility among other things. Because when I look at my mother's life in so many ways she was very, very "ordinary."

Mom came from that World War II era generation when men and women did what they thought they should do: fought the War, came home, got jobs, got married, had kids, raised a family, went to church, paid a mortage, and so on. My father was in some ways very much "The Man in the Grey-Flannel Suit" of post-war movie fame.

Well, to my very deep regret, as a teen, I actually had the gall to despise my mother, and my father, for their Ordinariness. What can I say. But it's true.

Mom was in many ways a plain woman who tried to do plain things according to her plain lights. She and I always talked about plain things. She liked hot tea, and warm shawls, and butterflies, and rabbits. We talked often about seeing both of the latter out the back glass door, especially when she was mostly confined to looking out the back door.

And now ... I so miss talking with her so much about the ordinary bushes and the ordinary dog in our ordinary back yard.

The acuity of the pain shouts to me that there is truly nothing ordinary about the ordinary.

Nothing Ordinary is really ordinary at all.

Take an ordinary beam of wood and attach it at an ordinary angle to an another ordinary beam of wood and there's a Cross on which a God may be Crucified.

What an incrediblly extraordinary Gift therefore is the Ordinary.

Well I frankly have a very, very hard time seeing a path forward for me personally at this time. But then maybe my way forward is just to follow the Ordinary path shown me by my Ordinary mother, and by Christ, an Ordinary Man made Extraordinary by His Manhood being taken up into the matchless Godhead. Jesus Christ the God-Man ... Ordinary and Extraordinary at once ... Shows us the Way.

Really Bearing a Cross is very Ordinary in many ways, isn't it. Par for the course: the Call of God to all of us. No one is exempt from this Call.

God I miss this amazing, ordinary woman though. But this morning the time came for me to feed the ordinary dog, and go visit my mother's ordinary grave, and say an ordinary Office, and take my ordinary tears and my ordinary wrenched stomach to an ordinary Mass at which God re-presented the extraordinary Saving Events of Calvary.

And God Who Is Present Everywhere invests everything, everything with Meaning. Nothing is truly ordinary in God's universe. Not a sparrow falls from the sky without His knowledge. In every Ordinary drop of dew, in every Ordinary tear of sorrow, God is there. Transfiguring the Ordinary into the Divine ... every moment of every day in every way.

God bless all,

Charles Delacroix
The 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
Eve of the Feast of St Gregory