Feasts, Seasons, Sacraments

Flip your odometer

I was about 9 years old, riding in the backseat of a ’54 Ford. My parents, my older brother, and I were on the highway to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Though we were on a much-anticipated family vacation, the thrill of the open road had worn off way back near the Illinois/Indiana border.

But something caught our attention. Someone pointed out that the odometer was within a dozen miles of hitting 99,999.9 miles. So I leaned over the front seat to watch the car’s odometer grind its way toward that magic number 100,000. Though it would be just another ordinary spot on our long trip, this moment seemed special. Somehow it seemed to symbolize all the miles we’d driven prior to that moment, and pointed to the other miles we’d drive, together and separately, in years to come.

While we watched, we talked about the places we’d been in this car: Sunday trips to Cedar Lake, trips to Comiskey Park for White Sox games, over to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving, trips to cousins’ houses, to Sears for Christmas shopping, to accordion lessons (hey, it was the ’50s), to Dad’s office, to visit relatives in the hospital, and on and on. Even the memory of running mundane errands took on a special glow as the odometer neared this benchmark. God knows the odometer on that old beater of a car was most likely miscalibrated. So the "big flip" wouldn’t coincide with the actual 100,000th mile this car had traveled. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the gathering of memories, the reflection on our life together, the taking stock of the course we’d been on, and the hopes engendered for the journeys to come.

The same goes for the celebration of the millennium. From one point of view, the changing of the calendar from 1999 to 2000 is a nonevent, an arbitrary moment, a thin slice of time no different from the day before or the day after. What makes the millennium worth observing is the meaning we find in this moment and the opportunity it affords us: to discover God’s handiwork in our past, find a solid hope for the future, and see reasons to rejoice in the present.

As Catholics we’re a sacramental people. We believe that we meet God in natural things and events: a sunrise, a gesture of kindness, a shared meal. Yet we must pay attention to be aware of God’s presence all around us. And that’s why the Pope has called us to prepare now for the flipping of the calendar a couple years down the road. He’s not asking you to add more things to your "to do" list. In fact, it would be good if you could arrange to do less. What we are being called to do is to look at our own lives and recognize God’s presence yesterday, today, and for always. That seems worth celebrating.

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