HAVING recorded the World’s Greatest Killers on the digital box, placed the child’s latest Marla creation on a par with Michelangelo’s Pietà, heard about the biggest this, read about the mega that and watched a thousand other superlatives, tomorrow, the third Sunday in Ordinary Time, is a bit banal.
Ordinary is not a word we relish, is it? We exist in a culture that has little appreciation of the ordinary as it continually manufactures its conversations around big stories. Everything has to be big and impressive.
News of births, marriages and deaths are listed in the end columns of conversations as celebrity behaviour fills conversational headlines. In a world besotted with the extraordinary we have become quite disconnected from the ordinariness of real life.
For many of us the word ordinary is one we use when we cannot think of anything else to say about something. It is not a word that we use other than to dismiss something. In Ireland we have a tendency to refer to a man with a misshapen nose as “your man with the nose” but would never think of describing somebody as having “an ordinary nose”. However, the church chooses to use this word because most of our lives and achievements are ordinary and ordinary is a good word.
The tradition of our faith identified a need for humility in human life. It classed humility as a virtue. A virtue is any skill or disposition that helps a person lead a better life. But humility often became confused with self-deprecation and proved a useful tool for the cunning to oppress people. As a result of this capitulation to the strong and powerful we stay shy of commending the virtue of humility.
Humility, correctly understood in the tradition, is the acceptance that most good things happen at an ordinary level. A good family meal can be every bit as wonderful as a meal in a top restaurant. Your 14-year-old successfully purchasing train tickets in Spanish might be a nicer moment than getting a meaningless A1 grade. They might not be events that inspire the great oratory that has become synonymous with the daily gathering at the water-cooler, but they are far more honest and consequently far more valuable. They are more valuable because they are real.
Humility shines when you realise that the cubist representation of you by your child might never hang in the Prado, but you appreciate its genius nonetheless. Humility understands that colleagues are not friends. They are uninterested in the magic of your ordinary life and only wish to speak of distant celebrities and bright public figures. Extraordinary tales provide nice temporary links between people who have not chosen each other as company. Family and friends appreciate the cubist drawings and the ordinary stories about how you are doing.
Against a background of the tales of the Earth’s Greediest Suits and the World’s Deepest Pockets, most of us continue to live an ordinary life. We work, rest and argue. We eat, drink and joke. We cry, laugh and wonder – we are alive. We have debts and worries, problems and cares. We have fears and dislikes, addictions and betrayals – we are alive. We have successes and failures, escapes and flukes. We have confidences and secrets, stories and forgiveness – we are alive. And we are fully alive because we are surrounded by ordinary people and ordinary things that give a meaning to our struggles.
True humility is the understanding that it is the small ordinary things, and not the newsworthy exceptions, which makes our lives extraordinary. – FMacE