There is a certain sameness to ordinary days, routine and habitual. And then there is Sunday, savored for the disruption of work and difference. As a Catholic, there is the Mass which can be an experience of sameness and at the same time, an invitation to change and difference. Last night, seated in upholstered pews, I heard the Liturgy of the Word: first the Scripture read by a man with a wonderfully fluid and rich voice and then the Gospel with the clearly Bostonian intonations, and then the homily. Maybe it was that I really tended, or that the church was not my home parish. Maybe it was simply an occasion of grace, but that Scripture spoke as if I had never once heard the story.
And then, in the closing of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the words about being transformed into what we have received….transformed into Eucharist. Startling and revelatory, clear and simple: hidden in that sameness, that regular pattern of Sunday’s, a moment of surprise, of hope and even promise and purpose, all the things sought in a world engulfed by controversy and conflict. Something, a thought, a feeling, that makes today different and had the potential to change tomorrow…..if I have the courage and perseverance to keep listening and growing, if I can believe in the difference that sameness offers, if I can so believe ……
At Home as a Catholic 