How often do you receive a mass-email, whether it be a forward or a newsletter, and discover therein something stirring? Yeah, probably never. But today I was taken aback by a reflection on Ordinary Time by Dr. Karen Hamilton, General Secretary of the Canadian Council of Churches and, if you’ve met her you’ll know, a general delight:

That wondrous Christian writer, Dante, whom some of you know is a deep favourite of mine, writes about time and its sacredness as a creation of God. Dante, in The Inferno, speaks out very strongly against the practice of collecting interest on loaned money. He speaks out against it because, he says, interest is made on time and no one should be able to collect on or make money on time because time is a creation of God.

It’s not a statement on banking. Ordinary Time—not a 'break' between more 'demanding' seasons and ordinary only in the sense of numbered, not plain—offers no less opportunity for reform and reawakening. And as Dr. Hamilton reminds me this morning, time, that great equalizer of men, was never ours to begin with.