Down Here In The Ordinariness Of Life

I stepped outside late yesterday afternoon to pick the clothes that were hanging on the line.

It had been a beautiful day. 

The high temperature for the day was in the upper fifties. A generous breeze was blowing. There was plenty of sunshine with an occasional passing cloud. It was a perfect day for drying clothes.

We do not own a clothes dryer. 

I know that sounds odd in a world where practically every home has a laundry room or laundry closet complete with a washer and dryer. There is no space in our little cabin for either of these appliances. Our washing machine is in our small shed that sits close to the cabin.

It is quiet here at the end of the narrow one-lane road that leads to this little knob of a clearing in the woods where we live. Perhaps I should say it is “generally” quiet. At times we can hear the children playing outdoors at the school several hundred yards away. Trains regularly make their way up or down the tracks that are a quarter of a mile from us. The near distant sounds made by children playing and iron wheels rolling are pleasant sounds.

The sounds coming from some neighbors broke the quietness while I was picking the clothes that had spent the day flapping in the breeze. They were hard sounds – harsh sounds – the sounds made by intense argument punctuated with vehement cursing. It was hard on the heart to listen.

Our Gospel today[1] recounts an episode where people flocked to Jesus realizing that he alone could provide them with remedy for the maladies and issues in their lives. “Great crowds came to him, having with them the lame, the blind, the deformed, the mute, and many others. They placed them at his feet, and he cured them.”

Jesus gave them hope in a world that offered no hope.

It is easy for me to close my eyes, plug my ears, and harden my heart toward the cries of humanity. The cries are disturbing. The cries are desperate. The cries are sometimes despicable. The cries invade the solitude and peace of the sanctuary of my own sacred space. I want to ignore them. I cannot, however, ignore them and go about my life as though the cries did not exist.

There is no possible way that this one human can physically intervene in all the human crisis affairs that surrounds him. I can, however, listen to the cries and allow them to move my heart compassionately toward the criers.

I can pray for the criers.

O my Jesus,

Forgive us our sins,

Save us from the fires of hell,

And lead all souls to heaven,

Especially those in most need of thy mercy.

I remind myself that it is down here, down here in the ordinariness of life outside the cloister, where Oblates are called to live out the Gospel ideals and principles so clearly clarified in Saint Benedict’s “little school”.

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[1] Mark 15:29-37