Holidays come to an end too quickly, and all the more so if they haven't been long enough. And very quickly we settle for the ordinary. Even the Church this year has moved very quickly into Ordinary Time marked by the Baptism of the Lord in early January. If we are not careful, the ordinary can quickly become routine or mundane, or even passionless like a handshake that is a wet (and dead) fish!

Perhaps a way to avoid such lifelessness is to remember that Marist spirituality is a spirituality of the ordinary, but an ordinary that is charged with life, and is full of passion and imagination. One way to preserve that imagination and to keep it vital and sustainable so that the ordinary remains extraordinary is to recall the experience of Jesus when he saw the clouds part and heard the voice of his God: You are my Son, the Beloved, the One I have chosen (Mark 1:11, Christian Community Bible). If our call is to become Christ, might not those words be directed also to each of us?