Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

The liturgical year gives us this long season after Pentecost and before Advent which, on the Roman Catholic and other calendars is called Ordinary Time. Ordinary refers to the numbers of the Sundays (ninth, tenth, etc) and not to regularity or normalcy.

In our calendar it is referred to simply as the season after Pentecost. You get this long stretch after the ecstatic experience of Pentecost when the Church sort of says, collectively, “And now what?

This year we have the boredom of a pandemic. We have the regular stuff of a political campaign. We have the addition of the unrest in our streets. In some ways this is the least ordinary time and yet, for all its strangeness, it sort of feels like a numbness has set in — such that all the craziness is kind of ordinary. It is as though a world gone mad is the most normal thing.

Whatever we’re moving toward in the secular or political or social realm — an election, legislation, or a vaccine — there will be something next. Some new outrage or threat or consuming passion. It has always been that way. The Church has served as a constant no matter what is happening in the world. It does not mean that we are apart from the world or that its concerns are not ours — quite the contrary.

In these times I am reminded of the Carthusian motto, “Stat crux dum volvitur orbis,” Latin for "The Cross is steady while the world is turning.

How does the Church remain steady no matter how ordinary or crazy our days may seem? This is one of the main vocations of the Church, to keep steady as the world spins faster and faster. By prayer, service, worship, and constant love we remind the world again and again what our deepest call is — to love God and to love our neighbor. Those twin commitments have called the world again and again back to a commitment to one another’s well-being and fundamental humanity.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote the following in an essay called Prayer in a World Gone Mad, “Father Hugh Bishop, who was at that time superior of the Community of the Resurrection, gave a devotional address which remained indelibly impressed on me. I was very impressionable then. But he was speaking about the Society of the Precious Blood, which as we know is a contemplative order in England but also they have a house in South Africa. And he said something very striking and odd, ‘You know, it is this order, and people such as the ones who are educated in and practice the life of prayer who in fact hold the universe together.’

He wrote, “Thanks again to those anonymous ones of faith, in a sense, those living this hidden life, of silence, of worship, of adoration, on behalf of others, who prevent the world from going completely mad.

As we come to this tenth Sunday after Pentecost let us stay constant in the work of silence, of worship, and of adoration in this ordinary time. As the world is turning madly may we, like the Cross, remain steady

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert