As Western culture becomes more isolated from the influence of God’s personal love and its members settle into an opaque world where the supernatural is obscured, they begin to live as fleshly (sarx), and so denigrate the real, the body (soma), where they risk being ingrates to the wonder of the ordinary. Those who still live in the soma receive meaning from within their communion with Christ, sharing in His body the Church and receiving it as gift (“This is my body, which will be given for you” [Lk 22:19]). The body is more than the pain of boredom bearing an invitation to seek entertainment. Succumbing to such is the very core of sloth. Neither time nor ordinary living is to be jettisoned in favor of fantasy. The body in time is one’s life; immersion in Eucharistic culture means one’s life is meant to be “given.” The body in time is meant to be received as a gift and then given to God and others in return as “liturgy.” This reciprocal gifting of bodies (ours and Christ’s) is the action celebrated liturgically in “Ordinary Time.”
-Dcn James Keating, “Boredom, Ordinary Time, and God’s Gift of Himself”
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