This week it has been very difficult for me to decide the topic to write about and, even though it may seem like a contradiction, being in time – called ordinary – if you open your eyes wide, extraordinary things keep happening around you.
And that is what has happened to me. Immersed in the return to the blessed routine, I have had many impacts that have entered the depths of me.
Reflecting on this, I have decided to write about one of them, reserving the opportunity to write soon about someone else.
It was the meeting with a philosopher from the last century called Manuel García Morente. He is amazing how a person who is no longer alive can, through others, and his writings, make an impact within you. That’s what happened to me this week.
A person told me about him and his writing-letter, “The Extraordinary Fact.” I have learned that when something happens to me that is not very appropriate, that is not expected, or is out of the ordinary, it can be something specific for me. That is to say, that the Lord wants it for something or something.
Being told about this philosopher and his letter was not what was expected during a work day. But they did it, and as they told me about him and his “extraordinary fact” I knew I had to read it to him. He had questioned me.
I did it like that. I read it in one sitting and was able, thanks to reading it, to remember and reflect on my extraordinary event, that personal and unique encounter with God.
A meeting that changed everything without changing anything. An encounter that radically changed my way of looking and being in the world. An encounter that, like this professor of philosophy and ethics from the years of the civil war, turned my life around, giving me back that freedom that I myself with my disordered attachments and affections, my human respects and my so-called “goodness” had given me in charge of burying.
In his writing, he tells his spiritual director about his conversion. A conversion that had been brewing for a long time and that culminates on an April night (I won’t tell you more in case you want to read it) and that is that God speaks to us through our life and the events of it. The thing is that we are usually blind and deaf.
Professor García Morente, who was an atheist because he was a philosopher, ended up being ordained a priest two years before he died. An extraordinary story discovered in the ordinary course of a work day.
And life, as beings of encounter that we are, is full of encounters (and disagreements) that shape and mold us, building the person we are called to be. From my own experience, a good reading can also produce within you the effects of an encounter if it is capable of opening your heart and understanding to transcendence.
The extraordinary event had the effect on me of being able to feel the immensity of God and the deep gratitude for being able to know that I was his beloved daughter.
The immensity, I think it is not necessary to explain it and, furthermore, it would be very short, but seeing how in the ordinary things of life, in the small things it becomes present and calls us, seems very incomprehensible to me and, the gratitude for having opened my eyes and ears. For giving me my stretcher so I could walk. To me, without deserving it.
Ordinary time or the ordinary of life can have the risk of getting used to things and stopping giving them importance. It can cause us to put our day on automatic mode and stop looking up at the sky.
Therefore, if this is your case, as it was mine in this first week after Christmas, stop to look and not just see the beauty of that routine that is given to you every day. Because if you look and put yourself in manual mode, you can discover the immense power of a smile.
I needed to return to the origin and Mr. Manuel García Morente made it possible for me to remember and pass through my heart again, that MEETING that gave meaning to my life.
Who knows for what… well, better said, with the confidence that He knows what for.
