It’s Ordinary Time - So Now What?

(Originally published 5/25/2015)

I hope you’ve enjoyed these last fifty days as much as I have. I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly enjoy Lent. So suffice it to say the Easter season--those sweet, sweet seven weeks immediately following Easter Sunday--is a happy time in my life.  

But now that Pentecost has come and gone and the Easter season along with it, it’s time to settle into what the Church calls “Ordinary Time.” No, Ordinary Time is not Easter, but it’s also not simply a placeholder until Advent. And, of course, it’s definitely not Lent. So what is Ordinary Time? And what does it have to offer you and me? I’m glad you asked.

Time for Order

Don’t mistake its moniker as suggesting something lame or boring.  In fact, the word ordinary, at least historically speaking, has had more to do with order and being orderly than being uninteresting.  Although you can see how they would become interchangeable at times, especially today in our entertainment-obsessed culture.

Ordinary time, then, is what gives the Christian life a sense of order.  Ordinary time is itself ordered by the two main Christian feasts, as Christians themselves should be.  After all, we would not be Christians without the first Christmas; and, furthermore, our lives would be in vain without the Resurrection, at least if St. Paul has anything to say about it.

But the Church’s celebration of Advent and Christmas and Lent and Easter do represent more of the exception than the norm.  The Christian life is to be marked by times of fasting as well as by feasting, certainly, but we shouldn’t be feasting all the time just like we shouldn’t be fasting all the time.

Habit Forming

So what does that mean for Ordinary time?  Well, it means a little of both.  We are still to do penance on Fridays, whether that be giving up meat or something else, like snacking, or dessert, or alcohol, or (gasp) TV or something equivalent.  And we still are to feast and to rest from work on Sundays and other holy days which are interspersed throughout Ordinary Time.

But for the most part, Ordinary Time is to be spent somewhere in between.  Eating enough to satisfy our bodily needs, but not more.  Enjoying drinks on occasion, but not to excess.  Working hard - but only six days a week, not seven.  And while our Liturgies won’t be as extravagant as on Easter morning, we certainly won’t be sparing any Alleluias.

The balance that we find between our feasting and fasting, mourning our sins and rejoicing in Christ’s redemption, that’s the real stuff of the Christian life.  That balance is what you might call virtue, which can be more easily understood as a good habit.  And while there’s nothing saying you can’t form good habits in Lent, Advent, Easter, and Christmas, they might be best perfected during Ordinary Time, as virtues are put to the ultimate test: the test of time.

Room for Growth

That’s because anyone who’s ever developed a habit knows it didn’t happen overnight, and the biggest enemy to developing a habit is constant change.  Whether it’s learning an instrument, quitting an undesirable behavior, or simply trying to exercise more, the best environment is quite simply a lot of sameness.  Boring?  Maybe.  Effective?  Most definitely.

Americans are often tempted to loathe the day-to-day grind, mostly because we’ve become addicted to that which is out of the ordinary: new, weird, sexy, etc.  As a result, our lives definitely become newer, weirder, and sexier.  But do they get better?  Like a student looking for something to distract him from his studies, he’d be better off just studying, even if it’s the last thing he feels like doing.  The TV will still be there when he’s done, after all.

So for those of us who would like to grow in virtue, to spend more time in prayer, and to do a better job loving those we care about, Ordinary Time can be just what the doctor ordered.  For the next 26 weeks or so, the Church is going to give us a steady diet of order.  What will we do with it?
 

• Need a visual? Check out this inforgraphic.

Photo credit: St Paul's Cathedral Clock, London, Wikimedia Commons