Experiencing God in the Ordinary

by William A. Barry SJ

Overview

2021 Illumination Book Awards, Silver Medal: Theology

God’s presence is not “out there” but right here.
 
We tend to look for God in dramatic or miraculous moments, but such expectations can blind us to God’s ongoing presence. What if God is already with us, in the life we have this moment? When we experience ordinary but meaningful events, such as our first love or a favorite novel, we are in fact encountering God’s presence. As we learn to notice spiritual movement within and around us, we can recognize the many facets of God’s love that touch us daily.
 
“As a priest and spiritual director of many decades, my driving desire is for people to experience God’s limitless love for them and to recognize it when it emerges in what they consider just ordinary life happenings and conversations.”
—William A. Barry, SJ
 
Whether we are in pain or crisis, questioning if we are really worthy of God’s attention, or are simply wondering why God would be in the mundane details of our lives, Experiencing God in the Ordinary can nurture our hope—that God is always present and can be found in an ordinary day. Complete with personal stories and various suggestions for prayer and meditation, this book is perfect for devotional reading, retreat, or small-group discussion.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780829450347
Publisher:	Loyola Press
Publication date:	04/01/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	200
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

William A. Barry, SJ, is a veteran spiritual director who is currently serving as tertian director for the New England Province of the Society of Jesus. He is the author of several popular books about Ignatian spirituality, including A Friendship Like No Other, Praying the Truth, and Changed Heart, Changed World.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: How Ordinary Was Jesus?

During the past Easter season (2019), I was struck by how ordinary the various appearances of the risen Jesus actually were. There is nothing at all written about Jesus’ resurrection itself. We are told only about his empty tomb. When Jesus does appear, he is unrecognizable at first, even to his closest friends.

Moreover, the appearances are rather ordinary: he walks along with two disciples on the road to Emmaus; Mary Magdalene thinks he must be a gardener; he enters the upper room and asks for something to eat; he stands on the seashore and tells the disciples who have caught no fish to try the other side of the boat; on the shore he has some fish already cooked and tells Peter to get some more from that catch. In most cases, his friends finally recognize him by some familiar word or gesture: he says Mary’s name; he breaks bread and hands it to the two disciples who met him on the road to Emmaus; he helps the disciples catch fish; he shows his friends the wounds in his hands and side.

Admittedly, it’s way out of the ordinary to meet, alive and well, someone you saw die in a horrible way. Still, in these accounts of the risen Jesus, there are no big displays of power or majesty or glory; there is nothing newsworthy, you might say, in these stories. A publicist would have nightmares with the ordinariness of it all, wondering how he is to get the story across to the larger public.

Once I began thinking about the everyday-ness of the Resurrection stories, I realized that the whole of Jesus’ life is rather ordinary. God became a human being, and all we know of the first thirty or so years of his life is a few stories from his birth and another from the time he was about twelve. Even the three years of his public life are not especially spectacular. Israel was not the center of things in any sense most people of that day would accept. Like many other small and large countries, it was controlled by the Roman Empire. In this small and out-of-the-way land, Jesus gathered a few disciples around him and tried, without much success, to get them to understand who God is and what it meant for Jesus himself to be the promised Messiah. He cured a number of people—which, in that time and place, was not out of the ordinary for a “holy person.” Like many a prophet and preacher before and since, he announced the imminent coming of the kingdom of God and got into trouble with the leaders of his own religion. After three or fewer years of public life, Jesus of Nazareth was handed over by those leaders to the Roman governor to be crucified as a common criminal. To most observers of the time, Jesus was simply another failed, would-be leader. A publicist would have little reason to make Jesus’ story known. Even after the Resurrection, Jesus appeared only to his followers—he made no dramatic or miraculous appearances that might wow and convert people in the general public.

I believe that the ordinariness of Jesus’ life, death, and post-resurrection appearances tells us something profound about God. God does not need to be flashy to prove anything to us. Nor does Jesus, God’s Son. God just is and acts, and he leaves it to us to recognize who he is and what he has done. God is not in competition with us or with any other part of creation. God loves the world as it is, in all its ordinariness. Perhaps this love of the ordinary explains God’s predilection in the Old Testament for the weak and lost, the widow, the orphan, and the poor. Moreover, it is enough for God to become a human being in Jesus of Nazareth to  transform the world, without having to make a big splash. God is God, and that’s enough.

What this means, however, is that everything changes for us who live in this world where God is present now as one of us. The whole universe is different because now God is in some mysterious but very real way part of the universe itself, with a body that is related to everything else in the universe. This means that everything is touched by God’s bodily presence in the universe. So, when the poet and farmer Wendell Berry imagines going out to his barn and there encountering the holy family, he is speaking a truth. And when the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” he, too, is making a truth claim about the real world we all inhabit. The ordinary things of this world are transformed by Jesus’ presence in it.

I press this point because I want to help readers notice the surprising ways in which we encounter this mysterious presence of God. I am convinced that all of us meet God regularly and in quite ordinary ways. The question is, do we notice this when it happens?

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 How Ordinary Was Jesus? 1

2 Mustard Seeds, Yeast, and Other Tiny Things 13

3 God Meets Us in Human Love 25

4 Compassion-God's Love in Action 45

5 Daily Occurrences of "God with Us" 59

6 Kindness and Mercy: Sure Signs of God 81

7 Joy and Loveliness: God's Trademarks 97

8 Lavish Generosity: Our "Wow" Experiences 113

9 Gods Pleasure in Us 125

10 God Comforts the Afflicted 139

11 God Afflicts the Comfortable 155

12 God and Anger 173

13 God and Humor 189

14 How Do We Know We Are Experiencing God? 201

Acknowledgments 213

Endnotes 217

About the Author 219

What People are Saying About This

James Martin

A superb book, one of Father Barry's very best, in which he brings together a wealth of stories and experiences from his own life to show us how God makes his presence known in the everyday "stuff" of our lives.  These stories, by turns moving, surprising, humorous, challenging, and always inspiring, will help you to identify places in your own life where God is at work. I can't recommend this beautiful new book highly enough.

Editorial Reviews

Thoughtful, insightful, inspiring, Experiencing God in the Ordinary is an extraordinary and unreservedly recommended addition to church and seminary Contemporary Catholicism collections.

Midwest Book Review