Month: January 2021

I need admit that I do not usually pay a lot of attention to the Psalm which is offered as part of our Liturgy of the Word each Sunday; however, a line from this Sunday’s Psalm (Ps 95) caught my attention.

The line reads, “harden not your hearts as at Meribah, as on that day at Massah, in the desert.”

From the recesses of my memory bank there awakened a saying attributed to St. Irenaeus.

Irenaeus was born during the first half of the 2nd century, somewhere between the years 120 and 140.

The prayer reads as follows:

It is not you that shapes God; it is God that shapes you.

If then you are the work of God await the hand of the artist who does all things in due season.

Offer him your heart, soft and tractable, and keep the form in which the artist has fashioned you.

Let your clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of his fingers.

The Liturgical Calendar, gives complete details of the celebration of the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours, beginning with the first Sunday of Advent.

It tells us that we are now in what is known as Ordinary Time.

When one looks up the definition of the word ‘ordinary’ in the Oxford Dictionary we find stated “not interesting or exceptional; what is commonplace or standard.”

Nothing really to write home about.

The liturgical colour chosen for this “ordinary time” is green and maybe here the ‘ordinary’ becomes ‘extraordinary’; what is standard becomes special.

The 12thC Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen wrote, “There is a power that has been since all eternity, and that force and potentiality is green!”

Hildegard names this greening force viriditas, the Latin for her original “das Grün,” the greening.

With viriditas Hildegard captures the greening power, the living light, that breathes in all beings, flows through all that is alive: “Be it greenness or seed, blossom or beauty – it could not be creation without it.”

Hildegard spoke often of viriditas, the greening of things from within, analogous to what we now call photosynthesis.

There is a readiness in plants to receive the sun and to transform its light and warmth into energy and life.

Maybe that is what this “Ordinary Time” is truly about, a readiness to receive the sun/Son and to be transformed into energy and life.

Maybe, we dare rename our Ordinary Time as Greening Time.