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| Ordinary days |
In the vocabulary of our day, so much emphasis is placed on “community,” we could easily be distracted from the deeper, richer reality of “communion.” That would be for us who enjoy communion both a loss and a disservice.
In these days of summer when our workaday tasks are relieved by school break and the call of vacation, so has our worship schedule been lightened by the completion of the Easter cycle, whose program of movable feasts ended with the cordial duet of Sacred Heart of Jesus and Immaculate Heart of Mary on the late dates of 27-28 June this year. July seems to be almost a ‘walk in the park’ with its groves of saints’ days spotting the green lawn of ordinary days in Ordinary Time. In these lives heavy with fruit and flower, we find the companionship and consolation of our communion.
The landmark apostles of Thomas and James (3 & 25 July, respectively) stand out in their celebrity, but that should not lead us to overlook Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions (9 July), more than two hundred souls who about the time of the foundation of our nation gave their lives in witness to the truth of the Good News in China. Two hundred fifty years later, we mark the semiquincentennium of our freedom, while they mark a quarter-millennium of martyrdom that continues this day as the rest of the Church looks away.
Sharbel Mahkluf (24 July) was a beacon of monastic sanctity in Lebanon at the time of our Civil War; now he stands witness for us to the millennial Maronite tradition of Christian life that is in danger of expulsion and possibly extinction in that nation war-torn and terrorized by sects who hate the faith.
A classic example of what we expect a saint to be, Bonaventure (15 July), was a thirteenth-century Italian follower of Saint Francis who wore a brown habit and wrote in Latin. More intimately, we recognize him as the patron of our neighbors in their friary at the corner of Colesville and Lorain, who frequently join us for Mass or simply pad about our streets in their grey habits.
Not so long ago nor far away, Kateri Tekakwitha (14 July) was known as the Lily of the Mohawks, redolent with the fragrance of sanctity in her time and for ours a reminder that the faith found fertile ground among the denizens of this land when first the Gospel reached these shores. Her charity for the very ones who mistreated her both confused and attracted the souls who did not yet know Christ.
These saints who might seem foreign or worse yet, unknown to us, reveal in their light-filled lives not only their own radiant identities achieved in Christ, but also who our brothers and sisters are across the expanses of the age and the globe we inhabit. We easily see the differences that distinguish them from us, but it would be a mistake to stop there and fail to seek and recognize what we share in the grace and the cross that is union with our Savior.
Unlike the virtual connections so much celebrated in our time, our authentic communities of common cause, common interest, and common home are essential to our lives and are worthy of our care and attention. But much more worthy and much more life-giving is what we share with these people we should work to know better, emulate more zealously, and ask for help more earnestly, that is: communion.
Monsignor Smith
