Sanctification of the world is carried out in everyday life

By Archbishop Charles Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

January 30, 2002

Sooner or later, we all have the experience of wasting a day in fruitless worry, or doing tasks that accomplish nothing or the wrong thing. We also know the frustration of someone else wasting our time with a missed appointment or a broken promise. We get irritated. It's natural. But the reason we get irritated is worth exploring.

We spend much of our lives acquiring things — cars, clothes, a home, a job, and enough money to buy the distractions that give us a sense of security in the world. But we're never really secure because our time here is limited, and we know it. Even the expression, "spending our time," reminds us of our dilemma. Time is the only thing each of us, in a sense, owns. It's ours, and yet it always eventually runs out.

 

That's why our gift of time in the love we show to our family and friends, or the service we give to others, is so precious. It's literally a gift of the self. Once we invest our time, we never get it back. Mistakes can be redeemed, but they can never be called back. Therefore, a life well-lived is a life spent on the right things, the right choices, the right priorities.

The Church has always understood the sacredness of time. Her whole liturgical life is ordered toward celebrating and teaching God's purpose for creation. Time is the arena in which God creates, redeems and sanctifies the world, and where He calls us to cooperate with Him in that work. Just as the Liturgy of the Hours organizes the daily prayer of the Church and Sunday should anchor the weekly cycle of Christian life, so too the liturgical seasons like Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter give meaning to the annual passage of time — a meaning that points us toward our fulfillment in heaven.

Each liturgical season is a lesson. It tells us something vital for our salvation. Advent prepares us for the messiah and teaches us to trust in God's promises. Christmas teaches us who God is — "God with us," the Word made flesh. Lent invites us to understand our sinfulness and the need for salvation. Easter restores our hope and shows the power of God's love even over death.

But where does that leave us now, in the mid-winter days of late January and early February?

The Church sets aside the weeks between the Baptism of the Lord and the beginning of Lent, and again between Pentecost and the beginning of Advent, as "ordinary time." These weeks between fast and celebration speak directly to the way we live most of our lives, most of the time. They remind us that — for nearly all of us — we do God's work most fruitfully not in extraordinary acts of heroism or drama, but in the little things, the ordinary things, which we try to do extraordinarily well out of love.

As Augustine said, "to be faithful in little things is a big thing." The ordinary material of our lives is what God asks us to weave into something beautiful through our daily actions. "Ordinary" time is exactly where the sanctification of the world is carried out — and we "ordinary" Christians are God's agents in that extraordinary work.

This week as we begin to turn our hearts toward Lent, let's remember that all of our days and all of our choices matter. This hour will never come again. Use it well. God took our ordinary clay and glorified it — and us — in His Son. Surely we can take the ordinary moments of our lives and glorify them by trying to love as He did.