“There Ain’t No Big Bang”



Desert Cross by Rob Marczynski

This postcard may be a little long and preachy, but after 12 years working at a parish what can you expect, and after all, Lent starts this week. 

My son Charlie thinks it is funny that you can tell Lent is coming because McDonalds starts to feature their fish fillet sandwiches.  Lent is one of those "special" seasons when we become resolved to shake up our ordinary lives.  We eat fish sandwiches, we sacrifice, we pray, we give to the poor, we go to church; but I wonder if by doing all this extra stuff (albeit good stuff which we should probably be doing all the time) we are missing something - "We fail to see the tree in our own backyard because we're too busy looking for the forest."  Maybe Lent should be more about making the ordinary, extraordinary.

I love to go to baseball games.  That first glimpse of the brilliant green grass contrasted against the dark brown and red of the infield punctuated by the white bases literally takes my breath away. I stop in the tunnel for a moment just to take it in. Throw in an ice-cold beer and a hot dog and life doesn’t get much better. It is a moment when all is right with the world and God is in His heaven.  For me, moments like that are the times “God pulls back the curtain,” like in the Wizard of Oz, and finally everything becomes clear. In My Monastery Is A Minivan, Denise Roy describes these moments as:

[Times] when life shines a spotlight down upon you, illuminating that moment as a holy moment. . . .  A moment when you live half in and half out of time, when you know utterly and completely that this is a wonderful moment.  A moment when the music is so magnificent that you heart fills to the point of breaking open, when a note hangs in the air and all eternity is, just for that moment, made manifest . . . A moment that is so achingly beautiful your heart pleads for a time-out so that you can hold on to this moment and place and sense absolute wholeness.

We crave these moments to lift us up out of the ordinary and the mundane.  Remember Peter in the Gospels; he goes up the mountain where he sees Jesus gloriously transfigured chatting with Elijah and Moses.  A priest one time referred to this as Peter’s mountain top experience, and like any of us, didn’t want that moment to end.  In fact, he wants to set up tents and settle in.  He gets to see behind the curtain.  Yet, at the very instant Peter tries to capture this Kodak moment (remember Kodak moments?) he finds himself back in the “real” world at the bottom of the hill.  Another moment like this is the story of Martha and Mary. In Having A Mary Heart In A Martha World, Joanna Weaver points out that having Jesus in her home is something so out of the ordinary, Mary forgets all about helping out Martha.  She shuts out everything else, and for that rare moment Jesus is transfigured for her. 

Weaver, also share the story of Brother Lawrence, a member of a 17^th century French Carmelite community.  He spent his days cooking and cleaning in the monastery kitchen and in his book of reflections he writes that his kitchen work was a time of prayer, no different than the time he spent in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.  “What a goal,” concludes Weaver, “To be so in tune with the presence of God that washing dishes becomes an act of worship.  That the moments of our lives, no matter how mundane, become aflame with the divine.” (Weaver, p.86) She goes so far to suggest that if we do not experience God in these ordinary times of our lives or if we use these times as excuses for not having time for God, we are guilty of sin because we allow ourselves to be separated from God, “the very definition of sin. . . .(Weaver, p. 105)   

A friend from college would often remind me, “It’s not who you are present with, but who you are present to.”  Her reminder mirrors the words of Father Ronald Rohlheiser in his book of Lenten reflections entitled DayBreaks – Daily Reflections for Lent and Easter Week.  Father Rohlheiser writes, “We don’t pray to make God present to us.  God is always present everywhere.  We pray to make ourselves present to God.” (Rohlheiser, p. 29)  So, if God is everywhere, we don’t really need to go very far or do very much to find Him.  Kathy Cofey, in her book entitled Experiencing God With Your Children, writes:

             “In the routine we take for granted simmers a holiness that knocks our

              socks off. . . . .  We who are busily craning our necks into tabernacles

              and tomes may well miss the dazzling brilliance of the ordinary.  If we

              aren’t alert to the fact that God visits us at home, then we are likely to

              be unwelcoming hosts and hostesses, gawking elsewhere.”  

As my mom would say, when we couldn’t find something, “It’s right in front of you.  If it were a snake it would bite you.”

Like Peter and Mary, we all want and look for, or wait for, the “big bang” - that miraculous, transforming, extraordinary moment when God fully reveals himself to us. However, as a friend once said, when it comes experiencing God in our lives, “there ain’t no big bang!” We realize that even if we have one of these “take your breath away moments,” we ultimately have to return to our ordinary lives - Peter’s got fish to catch and Mary has to help with dinner. My glimmering baseball field becomes scarred and the game will end with the last out in the bottom of the 9^th. Even that quintessential moment of our salvation, the crucifixion and death of Jesus, which we cling to each Lenten season, has to end with His body being lowered from the cross and placed in an ordinary tomb before there can be any resurrection.

So, maybe this Lent  I’ll  try to make it a little more ordinary. I’ll spend more time looking at that tree in our backyard, marveling that the crocuses have come up even though its only 28 degrees, acknowledging that leftovers are pretty good compared to not having any food, being thankful that Beth brings me coffee and irons my shirt in the morning, relishing the accomplishments of my three great kids, and simply enjoying McDonald's fish fillet sandwiches, which somehow taste better during Lent.

Gotta go, I got a fish fillet with my name on it.