In a minute, a baby can laugh for the first time. A couple can gather their courage and say " I love you." A grand-parent can tell a story from his life. A tiny, warm puppy can decide to snuggle up on your lap. You can find that perfect apple, of the final variety you've been searching for, to make that perfect sweet-and-tart apple pie for a holiday party. You and your friends can watch a lovely, rare blood moon light the late Summer night sky.
Sometimes I wonder if anyone besides poets or saints really comprehend the incredible miracle of each minute of our ordinary days and nights.
Perhaps the newly-dead, like Emily in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," who is given the opportunity to re-visit one ordinary day in her life in the small town of Grover's Corners before she goes on to Heaven. She is in awe of how much she missed when she originally lived that day:
"Goodbye. Goodbye, world. Goodbye, Grover's Corners...Mama and Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee and new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you."
I wonder about people today, noses buried in their latest electronic gadgets, as they walk through the woods. Do they hear the tapping of woodpeckers? Smell the pungency of wet ferns and earth? See sunlight slanting through branches? Do they stop, lift their noses up, and stretch out their hands with an apple to lure out the half-wild, half-tame deer hiding in the shadows?
Will our children who live their lives attached to computer games in the comfort of an inside world of perfect temperatures learn how to run outside, shivering, into a frozen landscape to build snowmen, go sledding, play hockey? Will they be attached enough to pets that they know how to cry when simple animals die, and dig with exertion their graves in their backyards?
In this age that worships the efficiency of Big Business, will their parents allow them to go to family wakes or keep them away from them because mourning is inefficient, uncomfortable, and inconvenient? When they grow up In an age of instant gratification from Internet porn, will they learn to treasure the touch of an ordinary spouse's human hand stroking their face in bed at night? Will they value the touch of a human hand ringing up their groceries, or instead opt for a robot scanning the prices?
I hope and pray that this generation and the next do not grow up so attached to the miracles of cold circuitry that the joyful miracles of interconnected, ordinary life elude them.
Hidden and cocooned in ordinary minutes lie extraordinary grace and meaning. Without the graced love and connectedness of millions of ordinary people in millions of ordinary minutes, humankind would have annihilated itself thousands of years ago. God lies both hidden and revealed in the ordinary minutes of our lives, even as God revealed Himself to His Son Jesus in the first thirty hidden years of His ordinary life - precious time that made Him the Man He became.
If we slowly become aware of God's Presence, of Eternity hinted at in the minutes of our Time here, we learn that nothing is ordinary, nothing is wasted by God. Every word can impact our lives and others' lives; every moment of joy can become an occasion of thanksgiving to God; every minute of suffering can become an opportunity to grow strong in God's grace.
In the Catholic Liturgical year, Ordinary Time is the days and weeks of simple plains that surround the mountains of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, and the valleys of Advent and Lent. But in our ordinary lives, as in the life of the Church year, it's daily love that gives us the ability to risk all in the peaks of marriage and parenthood. It's daily love that gives us the courage to endure the valleys of sickness and sacrificial fidelity and death. May you sense God's presence in every minute of your life: "may you find happiness in what the Lord has done. May you take joy in what His hands have made." (Psalm 92:4.)