Ordinary Time

Sunday was Pentecost, the last day of the Easter Season. And so today, Monday, we find ourselves back in the workaday rhythm of “Ordinary Time."

Ordinary Time means it’s we’re not in the extraordinary times of feasting the Church celebrates: Christmas and Easter with their respective periods preparation of fasting—Advent and Lent. And so we will be in Ordinary Time until Advent begins on December 1 this year.

The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus understood why Ordinary Time is called “ordinary,” but he hated the term. Time, particularly time from a Christian point of view, he said, was never ordinary. Each day is an extraordinary gift. As Neuhaus’ friend George Weigel wrote:

For he insisted that there was nothing “ordinary” about the times of our lives, for those lives were all being lived in the time after the Resurrection. We were living, he insisted, in the time when the horizon of our hope has been made secure: for God made clear his answer to the worst that human beings could do by raising Christ from the dead and by Christ's exaltation at the right hand of the Father—and in all of that we learned our true destiny. This time, our time, is the time of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the time in which our energies are woven into the tapestry of Providence, in ways we never fully understand. And, for über-energetic Richard John Neuhaus, there was nothing in the least ordinary about it.

 And while I fully understand and agree with Fr. Neuhaus, this year, I find the switch back to Ordinary Time somehow comforting. It is, after all, in ordinary days and weeks that our lives unfold as something extraordinary. Ordinary time is getting up, making coffee, having breakfast, getting to work, caring for the people in our lives—spouses, family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors—reading, learning, praying, and, when day is done, putting our heads down to sleep in preparation for the next ordinary day.

It can all become drudgery if we let it or we can look for—and occasionally catch a glimpse of—something beyond the daily, something noble, something good, something fully and satisfyingly human.

So here’s to Ordinary Time. May we discover in the ordinary weeks of our lives the truly remarkable.