In some churches, “ordinary time” is treated as “boring time.” Because mainline churches have historically organized their program schedules around the public school calendar, many churches also treat it as “off time,” like the offseason in basketball. Coffee hour is cancelled, the choir is dismissed, and there are very few classes or community events held until mid-September. Many churches combine their worship times into a single service during the summer months, and some (particularly in the northeast) even cancel Sunday services altogether.
The impulse is understandable. Many people go on vacation during the summer months, so a lower turnout amongst regular churchgoers is always expected. Also, a lot of extra work and preparation go into the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. By Pentecost, most clergy, church musicians, staff, and volunteers are exhausted and in need of a break. Taking time off for rest, reflection, and discernment is vital in any organization, but it is an absolute necessity in the life of the church.
That said, thinking of ordinary time as “off-time” tends to reduce the experience of Christian faith down to something like a spectator sport. Church becomes little more than a series of theatrical productions retelling the story of Jesus before packing it up for the season. This misses something vital about the internal logos or logic of the liturgical year, which is meant to be a full annual cycle in which the “ordinary” half of the year mirrors the “extraordinary” half.
In fact, ordinary time is the season in which we are most meant to focus on the life of the Church, in both its individual and collective expressions, though this doesn’t mean offering high-level liturgical productions each week. Rather, it is a time of year when ordinary people are called to “put on the mind of Christ,” in order to be the hands and feet of Jesus in the ordinary world. In other words, ordinary time is a season for praxis — a time for practicing what it means to walk in the way of Jesus that we just spent half the year trying to understand.
In order to fully appreciate these themes within ordinary time, it’s helpful to take a step back first and look at the entire liturgical cycle, to see how it works as a comprehensive whole.
The Liturgical Year: An Overview
Each year, the annual liturgical cycle walks us through the entire life cycle of Christ. This includes:
ADVENT: The darkness of the womb and the promise of Christ’s coming into the world. (4 weeks)
CHRISTMAS: The birth of Jesus as the light of Christ coming into the world, including his infancy and childhood. (12 days)
EPIPHANY: The recognition of Christ’s presence in the world both within and beyond the Jewish religion, symbolized by the visitation of the Magi and Jesus’s baptism by John. (4-9 weeks)
LENT: The temptation to sin that Jesus overcomes in the wilderness, and his subsequent three years of public ministry. (6 weeks)
HOLY WEEK: The betrayal, arrest, crucifixion, and death of Jesus, and his descent into hell. (1 week)
EASTER: The resurrected Jesus appears to the disciples in the flesh, proclaiming God’s triumph over death. (7 weeks)
ASCENSION: The resurrected body of Jesus departs from earth, leaving behind the promise of the Holy Spirit. (1 week)
PENTECOST: The Holy Spirit shows up and moves and through the disciples, driving them out from their hiding places and into the world to embody Christ and preach the Gospel.
If we think of the liturgical cycle as little more than a memorial re-telling of the historical Jesus event, then it would seem as though our story ends here. But in the Christian theological tradition, the completion of Jesus’ earthly ministry is not the end of Christ’s story. The Church is understood to be the Body of Christ birthed from the broken and resurrected body of Jesus through the activity of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
That is why the side wound of Jesus was frequently depicted in medieval imagery as a vulva from which the Church was born. This is reflected in the vesica piscis shape of most church seals, which is derived from the geometric overlay of two circles and serves as a multivalent symbol that not only conveys the overlapping of heaven and earth, but is related to mathetmatical principles like the golden ratio that can be found throughout Christian art and architecture.
The vocation of the Church as the Body of Christ is to keep us all connected to the work of the Holy Spirit in concrete and tangible ways — through our participation in the sacraments, through spiritual practices and teachings that deepen our self-understanding, and through modeling and facilitating prayerful action in the world.
When treated as an entire year, it becomes easier to see that the full life cycle of Christ includes both the earthly life of Jesus and the Church as the living embodiment of Christ in the world:
Proportionally, the respective lengths of these two “halves” of the year varies depending on the date of Easter, which falls within a 35-day window (March 22nd to April 25th) on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. The date of Easter then determines both the date of Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent (46 days prior to Easter), and the date of Pentecost, which is always 50 days after Easter (hence the “pente-” prefix). The length of Advent, which starts four Sundays prior to December 25th, can also vary by up to a week, impacts the length of the season after Pentecost as well.
Notice also that the season after Epiphany and the season after Pentecost are both green seasons of “ordinary time.” These two seasons actually mirror and reflect one another, because they both emphasize the presence of Christ in the material world (hence the green). The season after Epiphany focuses on the recognition of Christ’s presence in the world through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and the season after Pentecost emphasizes Christ’s presence in the world through the Church as the Body of Christ.
These two seasons also mirror one another in the liturgical calendar: when the season after Epiphany is shorter (due to an earlier Easter), the season after Pentecost will be longer, and vice versa. Years with a later Easter result in a more evenly split year with a shorter season after Pentecost (28 weeks vs 24 weeks), while an earlier Easter makes for a much wider difference and a longer season after Pentecost (19 weeks vs 33 weeks).
But both seasons of “ordinary time” highlight the earthly nature of the Christian faith and the activity of God in material world, inviting us to consider how the liturgical year relates to the natural rhythms of agricultural life and the cycles of creation.
Liturgical & Agricultural Seasons
The liturgical year begins, as we all do, in the dark. Derived from the ancient Hebrew creation myth found in Genesis 1 — where all of creation begins in the dark waters of “the deep” — this pattern is reflected not only in our annual liturgical cycle, but in the Judeo-Christian understanding of daily time as well: new days are always understood to begin at sunset, rather than sunrise. This is why so many holy days in the Christian tradition are celebrated on the “eve” of the night before.
The deeper logos of this orientation to time and its relationship to the material world becomes clearer when we overlay the liturgical year onto a map of the solar year from the perspective of the northern hemisphere (the geographic context from which the Jewish and Christian traditions emerged).
Nowadays, most people only recognize the four primary seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall. But ancient people were far more attuned to subtle seasonal shifts in light, temperature, and precipitation, which impacted the harvest cycles that sustained human life. And so in addition to celebrating the solstices and equinoxes, most ancient people also recognized the four cross-quarter thresholds that mark the halfway points between solstices and equinoxes. Taken together, this creates an annual cycle of 8 seasonal divisions:
Grafted onto the liturgical year, it becomes easier to see how the church calendar is designed to walk us through this perennial life cycle with Christ as our guide for how to navigate this journey in ways that keep us in right relationship with the Creator and the rest of creation.
As in daily time, our journey begins at the “sunset” of the year, just as life around us is moving into hibernation and the light is being swallowed up by darkness. In the ancient world, this was a time when many northern European people were particularly prone to making sacrifices to the gods (including human sacrifice), in the hopes of securing prosperity for themselves in the coming year. Even many modern people who are completely estranged from the rhythms and anxieties of agriculture tend to become more insular this time of year. During the winter months we are naturally more aware of our vulnerabilities as a species, and our dependency on forces beyond our control.
The Babylonian Talmud (ca. 5th century CE) contains a wonderfully relatable story from the Rabbinic Jewish tradition about Adam’s first winter solstice, which captures the natural feelings of existential grief and anxiety that this time of year can elicit for many people:
“When Adam saw the day gradually diminishing, he said “Woe is me! Perhaps because I sinned, the world around me is growing darker and darker, and is about to return to chaos and confusion, and this is the death heaven has decreed for me!” He then sat eight days in fasting and prayer. But when the winter solstice arrived, and he saw the days getting gradually longer, he said, “Such is the way of the world!” And he proceeded to observe eight days of festivity.”
A similar rhythm of fasting in the days before the winter solstice, and feasting in the days after, is reflected in the Christian liturgical seasons of Advent and Christmas. These festivities help get us through this most difficult part of the year with a spirit of hope, expectation, joy, and the promise of the light’s return.
Christmas is then followed by a short season of “ordinary” time, which marks the start of the planting season, on a day traditionally known as “plough Monday.” This season calls our attention to the light slowly coming back into the world, but is interrupted by a 40-day “wilderness” period that confronts us with the limits of the human will and the inevitability of our impermanence. While the dates of Lent and Easter can vary by up to a month each year, their predictable overlay with the seasonal weather patterns of the northern hemisphere is so blatant that it can almost seem cliche: the stormy battle between darkness and light during the season of Lent (in February and March) always inevitably gives way to the abundance of resurrected life at Eastertide (during April and May).
These overlaps between the liturgical and meteorological seasons are no coincidence. The Hebrew tradition out of which Christianity emerged intentionally sought to align human activity with the Creator by studying and emulating the rhythms and “laws” of the natural world. Particularly during their 40 years living in the wilderness, the people of Israel discerned the heart of YHWH by paying close attention to the lessons of the desert, and calibrating their religious lifeways accordingly.
The events of Holy Week and Easter have their roots in the rich symbolism of Passover, which is itself rooted in ancient Hebrew agricultural practices that were discerned while living in the wilderness. The 7-week season of Easter overlaps with the ancient Jewish practice of “counting the Omer,” a time of waiting and trusting in God that occurs between the fresh harvest of barley and the first fruits of the new wheat crop. This 50-day period once culminated with a celebration at the Temple of first fruits of the spring wheat harvest, a holiday that came to serve as the symbolic context for the Day of Pentecost.
For further reflections on the thematic connections between the agricultural seasons and the liturgical year, check out my year-long “Annum” series of 8 seasonal playlists:
The Liturgical Year, Part 1: Apprenticing to Jesus Christ
(Advent to Pentecost)
Theologically, the first half of the liturgical year focuses on the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. It is significant that we do not begin with Christ’s birth, but with a 4-week gestation period that functions as a liminal threshold between the “ordinary” part of the year, and the extraordinary events we are about to witness.
During the season of Advent, we hear from Jewish predecessors of the faith — John the Baptist, Jesus’ mother Mary, and the prophet Isaiah — all of whom looked with hopeful expectation for a coming Messiah. We also hear apocalyptic visions from Jesus and Paul that point us beyond the present age to the fulfillment of all time, when all of creation will be reconciled to God.
In this sense, Advent holds together both beginning and end in an eternal time loop that technically “has no end.” It is our annual reminder that the Christian faith is not oriented according to modernity’s linear map of “progress,” which places the beginning and the end on opposite poles and then envisions humanity as advancing from one end to the other, primarily by its own devices. Rather, the Christian faith (at least as it is lived out within the liturgical tradition) is a slow, ever-deepening cyclical process by which we come to know and embrace God’s eternal love and unconditional mercy towards all of creation.
There is enormous grace in this cyclical orientation: it reminds us that we don’t have to have it all figured out all at once. Because our faith is being held in trust by an eternal Communion of Saints, we are free to engage genuinely in the humble process of learning — a process that involves curiosity, wonder, revision, stumbling, repentance, doubt, intentionality, failure, commitment, practice, and the humble awareness that we do not always have all the answers. This is the natural manner in which all human beings learn and grow: we forget, and then we remember. We make fail, but then we come to understand more deeply. We resist the truth that is right in front of us, but then in a flash of insight we suddenly have eyes to see.
A more accurate rendering of the Greek word translated as “disciple” in the New Testament (mathetes) is “apprentice.” An apprentice is not merely one who follows, but one who closely observes a wise master and seeks to emulate them in the hopes of becoming more like them. Imitative or “mimetic” learning is the most innate and embodied form of learning, and it was the model for how Jesus taught his disciples (apprentices) the Way of Love.
During this first half of the liturgical year, we are invited to apprentice our lives to Christ by walking with Jesus through his birth, life, death, and resurrection. Like the disciples, we find our story within this larger story through our own encounters with the miracle of God’s incarnation. This also allows us to discern new layers of meaning and wisdom in the Gospel each year, because while the story of Jesus may not change, ours certainly does! Maybe we have moved to a new town, lost a loved one, changed jobs, gotten sick, had kids, watched our kids move away, or witnessed a major political shift or cultural upheaval. Or maybe we’ve just gotten one year older. As our journey unfolds in real time, our context changes in ways that can dramatically shift what we are able to see and hear.
This cyclical approach to apprenticeship also makes plenty of room for confusion, doubt, and error. It expects that we will sometimes misunderstand, and even occasionally “miss the mark.” Certainly the disciples who apprenticed their lives to Jesus misunderstood his meaning all the time, and stumbled mightily in their efforts to emulate him. But no matter how many times we fall away from the path, the liturgical cycle catches us and offers us the grace to return. “You do not understand right now what I am doing,” Jesus tells Peter, “but later you will understand.” (John 13:7).
Whether we have lost the thread for a few weeks, a few months, or many years, the liturgical cycle allows us to jump back in at any point and continue on our journey apprenticing our lives to Christ from wherever we find ourselves now.
The Liturgical Year, Part 2: The Church as Christ’s Body
(Ordinary Time)
The second part of the church year can stretch anywhere from 24 to 33 weeks (6 to 8 months). It is usually the longer “half.” This is significant, because it is a time of year when we are meant to reflect on our active role in the Church as the body of Christ in the world. During this time of year, we are challenged to take what we have learned during our months apprenticing to Christ, and go out as witnesses to the Gospel in our ordinary, everyday lives.
In her book on liturgical time, Ashley Wallace writes:
“Ordinary time might not have the excitement of Advent calendars or Lenten disciplines, but in many ways it is the most essential part of the Christian year. This is the long green stretch of days where our faith takes root and begins to grow. Ordinary time invites us not into preparation, but into formation. It’s the season for building spiritual habits, and shaping the quiet, consistent ways [we] walk with the Lord.”
The word “ordinary” has taken on many layers of meaning over the centuries, particularly in the history of the church. “Ordinary” is still the proper title used for a bishop, pointing to their role in maintaining “order” in the churches under their jurisdiction, and their role in “ordaining” priests. The root word “order” is not only used in secular courts of law, but also for those living under special vows of religious obligation and discipline (“ordained” clergy, as well as those who have devoted their lives to monastic “orders” like the Benedictines or the Trappists).
But the Latin ordene, from the proto-Italic “ordn-,” means something a bit more quotidian. It is simply: “a row, line, series, pattern, arrangement, or routine.” The root word seems to come from the practice of weaving, with ordinem originally meaning “a row of threads on a loom” — similar to the Old English endebyrdnes, which expresses the idea of a methodical or harmonious pattern strewn together from a series of parts. This gets us closer to the significance of the “ordinary” in the liturgical sense: it is through simple, ordinary routines that we piece together a meaningful whole from our daily lives.
Lo Cotidiano: Finding the Sacred in the Mundane
Still, the term “ordinary” tends to have a negative connotation in our culture — one that conveys monotony and boredom. These negative associations are heavily influenced by the conditions of late capitalism, which tempt us with a constant stream of emotional overstimulation and hyperarousal. We are daily immersed in the near-constant pressure to maintain a heightened state of consumer pleasure, and to be agitated or even infuriated when we are unable to do so. Our culture’s broad fixation on positive “vibes” can become addictive and performative, amplifying our need for control and exacerbating our anxiety about what might happen if we actually allowed ourselves to just stop and rest.
From this vantage point, the simple dignity of labor is lost: a routined life is thought to be one without meaning or purpose. Trapped in the logic of perpetual self-improvement and the desire to be at the center of our own “hero’s journey,” we constantly internalize the message that we are not enough, the world is not enough, our efforts are not enough, and God is not enough. Many megachurches and mainline progressive churches even convey that the Gospel is not enough, by fixating on adiaphora like worship aesthetics, branding optics, virtue signaling, and heightened entertainment value, hoping to compete in a marketplace that has to destroy the self-esteem of everyday people in order to sell them the solution.
And yet, in his book Common Callings and Ordinary Virtues: Christian Ethics for Everyday Life, theologian and ethicist Brent Waters reminds us that we “attend to others primarily in and through the muddle of commonplaces relationships and activities.” It is in the relatively routine practices, chores, activities, and social interactions that meaning is actually woven, and we discover the true purpose of our lives. And it is here that we come to understand the true meaning of the Gospel.
One of the central concepts in mujerista theology is “lo cotidiano” or “the everyday.” For Latina theologians like Ada María Isasi-Díaz, the concrete and material experiences of everyday life (and the common relational sensibilities that arise from them) are the starting point for Christian theology and praxis. Black contemplative theologian Barbara Holmes echoes this same theme in her own writings about how the holy can show up in the midst of the everyday:
“When you least expect it, during the most mundane daily tasks, a shift of focus occurs. This shift bends toward the universe within — that cosmos of soul and spirit, bone and flesh, which constantly reaches toward divinity.”
If we never allow ourselves permission to “come down” from heightened states of emotional overstimulation and artificially manufactured joy, we will never have the opportunity to discover the richness that is already at the heart of creation and the simplicity of everyday life. As Claude Atcho writes,
“Ordinary time is the season in which all the cycles that have gone before combine to form our daily living. Think of ordinary time as a steady reverberation of extraordinary time, a sort of ripple effect of Jesus’s work in his people that stretches out to shape life in all its beauty and mundanity. We are now placed into a season in which the cumulative power of Christ through the church year flows forth in the nitty-gritty of our common daily life.
How does this happen? Partly through a different tempo and pace. In ordinary time, we slow down. We have space to consider, contemplate, and apply. In this season, we find where the life of Jesus intersects with the daily lives we inhabit. We seek and meet Jesus in the mundane and discover that this, too, is holy ground.”
Framing the Ordinary
Ordinary time is bookended by two special Sundays: Trinity Sunday and Christ the King Sunday. These two holy days frame this important liturgical season by situating us within a proper understanding of what Christians actually mean by “God,” and how our understanding of God relates to our lives in the world and to the earthly institutions and powers that influence them.
Trinity Sunday always falls on the Sunday after Pentecost, with the purpose of clarifying the Christian understanding of God’s nature in light of the incarnation of Jesus Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit. This feast day reminds us that the Christian God is not like the pagan gods of old, requiring sacrifices in order to be appeased.
Through broad-based councils of discernment, the Christian understanding of God came to be articulated as an active, creative, embodied, and relationally self-emptying love Who is always at work in the world, both within us and beyond us. Most preachers struggle to convey this message fully in their Trinity Sunday sermons, but the day offers us a capstone to our journey with Jesus that interrupts any lingering assumptions we might have about God as some sort of “sky daddy” or cosmic vending machine.
Many liturgical calendars dating back to the Middle Ages actually refer to the first half of ordinary time as Trinitatis, or “Trinitytide,” rather than the “season after Pentecost.” This is still what ordinary time is called in the Church of England, which is distinguished from the latter half of ordinary time, Michaelmas, starting in mid-September (sometimes signified by a very subtle shift to a darker green).
Christ the King Sunday closes out our season of ordinary time with a final reminder that Christ is “king” above all other kings. In other words, Christ’s eternal victory over death is not beholden to, dependent upon, or threatened by any earthly institution, political power, or ruler. This holy day is a relatively recent addition to the liturgical year, added to the church calendar in 1925 by Pope Pius XI in response to the growing nationalistic fervor that emerged in the wake of World War I.
Within the larger logos of liturgical time, this final Sunday confronts us with the paradox of “the Church” as it is lived out in the world. The Church (with a big “C”) is an eternal and mystical Communion, held in trust by Christ and the communion of saints, in which we participate through the sacraments. But churches as sociological and political entities are made up of human beings, who are prone to both individual and collective (systemic) sins and blind spots. Thus, the earthly institutions that make up “the church” with a small “c” must continue to apprentice themselves to Christ as well, in order to live more faithfully into their call to be the Church with a big “C.”
Christ the King Sunday, then, closes out our church year with a final reminder that no earthly “Caesar” will ever have the final judgment over humanity: including any individual priest, pastor, parish, deacon, theologian, bishop, pope, street preacher, or denomination. All earthly powers, institutions, and individuals — especially those seeking worldly power in the name of God — will be humbled by the leadership of Christ’s vulnerable, self-emptying love.
A “Fall Triduum”: All Saints Day & All Souls Day
November 1st is the cross-quarter threshold marking the halfway point between the fall equinox and the winter solstice. This octant of the solar year ushers in our final turn towards the enveloping darkness. Advent arrives about halfway through this season, with its aforementioned liminal transition into a new liturgical cycle.
But the November 1st threshold is also set apart as holy in its own right, with two sacred days focusing on the relationship between life and death: All Saints Day and All Souls Day. All Saints is also anticipated by “All Hallow’s Eve” on the evening before, a celebration commonly referred to as Halloween. This mini-season not only honors the reality of “sister bodily death” that is part of our experience in ordinary time, but lifts up the example of ordinary people like ourselves who have died in the faith, and found their eternal life in Christ.
These holy days are sometimes referred to as a “Fall Triduum” because of how they mirror the Paschal Triduum in the spring: both seasons mock the power that death holds over us while also integrating and accepting that suffering and death are an inevitable part of life. The playful mocking of death on All Hallows Eve gives way to the celebration of All Saints Day, which reminds us that Church is held in trust by a Communion of Saints who stand as witnesses to the faith even when we stumble. All Souls Day then provides us with a further opportunity to honor all of our ancestors who have shaped our own lives of faith personally.
Most Protestant churches nowadays combine All Saints and All Souls into one Sunday celebration that honors all of the faithful departed at the same time. But celebrating both days allows us to make room for the ordinary people of faith who have impacted us both collectively and individually. In the liturgical tradition, “saints” are not necessarily people who lived perfectly moral lives, but ordinary individuals whose lives turned towards Christ in such significant and demonstrable ways that their stories continue to materially impact the lives of countless Christians across time and space. This is distinct from All Souls Day, which provides us with a particular opportunity to focus specifically on the everyday saints in our own lives — ancestors who continue to pray for us and shape what faithfulness looks like in our lives, even beyond death.
The Emotional Logic of the Liturgical Seasons
One of the gifts of the liturgical year is that it interrupts the messaging of our consumer culture by reminding us that we don’t need to constantly manufacture an artificial sense of “joy” in order to be okay. In this way, the liturgical year is deeply affirming of the whole human experience: it blesses our humanity by making room for the entire life cycle and every human emotion.
This process helps us to develop resiliency through our experiences of grief and trauma over time, by teaching us to regulate our emotions in healthy ways while avoiding the human tendency to compartmentalize, repress, or split off from those emotions and experiences we define as “negative” or “bad.” This is significant, since these are the very patterns and mental habits that most often lead to projection, shame, gaslighting, denial, and scapegoating — patterns that perpetuate real harm, which the Christianity identifies as “sin.”
This pathway of emotional resilience is shaped for us aesthetically in the liturgy by the subtle changes that occur in collects, prefaces, chants, hymns, prayers, and dismissals. The themes of the liturgical year are also expressed in the logic of the lectionary, and in the shifts to decor, lighting, and color.
During Advent, a quieter, more contemplative and reflective atmosphere is nurtured to provide a womb of preparation, so that we can inwardly receive the miracle of Christ’s incarnation. The color during Advent is either purple or sarum blue.
This is contrasted with the festive celebrations of Christmas, which provides us with 12 days of innocent joy and wonder and gratitude. The color during Christmastide is white.
Epiphany returns us to a wintry season of apprenticing to Jesus as he shines his light to more and more people in the ordinary world. The color during this season of ordinary time is green.
During Lent, the Great Litany is recited, the kyrie (“Lord, have mercy”) is chanted, and the word “alleluia” is removed not only from the Eucharistic liturgy altogether, but from chants and hymns, as well as from the Daily Office. This significant shift in tone makes room for lament and grief, allowing us to engage in honest self-reflection as we humbly cultivate within ourselves a sense of our dependency on God in the wilderness moments of our lives. The color during Lent is purple.
This is again contrasted by the heightened experience of a more mature joy that comes with Eastertide, when the liturgy itself is framed at both the beginning and the end with a call and response refrain: “Alleluia! Alleluia!” The addition of the alleluias during Eastertide holds special significance in the liturgical tradition because of its relationship to the Temple hymns that were sung specifically during the Passover. This refrain during Eastertide speaks to Jesus’ triumph over hell and death. The color for all 50 days of Easter is white.
Pentecost marks the arrival of the Holy Spirit and the “birthday of the church” with a somewhat chaotic celebration of diversity, community connection, and joy. The color for the Day of Pentecost is red.
The return to Ordinary Time is marked by a return to simplicity, emphasizing the everyday nature of our faith and the shift to a season of praxis. Aside from the holy days of Trinity Sunday, All Saints Day, and Christ the King Sunday (which are white), the color for ordinary time is green.
Sometimes laypeople who are new to the liturgical tradition get confused during the shift back into Ordinary Time, thinking that the “alleluia” refrain is being “taken away” during this season (like in the season of Lent). But those who actually pray the Daily Office know that this is not the case at all. Rather, a more humble aesthetic of simplicity is encouraged during the Sunday Eucharist in ordinary time, in order to shift focus away from heightened liturgical performances, and to call us out into the world in appreciation of lo cotidiano (the everyday).
This slower pace is also deeply countercultural, drawing us out of our desperate capitalist mindset of never-enoughness. This green season of ordinary time invites us to “touch grass,” cultivating within ourselves habits of self-restraint that push against the anxiety and overconsumption of our age. In this way, we grow into an even deeper sense of spiritual maturity as we learn how to steady and sustain our faith through the common rhythms of daily prayer and embodied praxis.
The Grace in Liturgical Seasons
Some Christians (especially Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, and other evangelical and “non-denominational” churches) recoil at the very idea of liturgical seasons. Influenced by the teachings of John Calvin, these denominations tend to dislike the practice of anything being set apart as “sacred” — not just holidays or times of the year, but furniture, buildings, music, and even clergy. Their argument is usually something along the lines of: shouldn’t all of us be doing all of this all the time? Shouldn’t we keep the spirit of Christmas every day? Shouldn’t every day be Easter? Shouldn’t we be doing everything, everywhere, all at once?
One of the many issues I have with this rather puritanical way of thinking is that it lacks real emotional self-awareness. If we are being honest with ourselves, and humble about the realities of the human condition, we will appreciate the importance of taking time for steady and intentional practice, while also understanding that it usually doesn’t take us very long before we come up against the limits of our good intentions (both individually and communally).
After 6-8 months of trying our best to faithfully embody Christ’s hands and feet in lo cotidiano, many of us find that we are confused by our relationships, frustrated by seemingly intractable conflicts, and beginning to lose hope in our ability to make a meaningful difference in the world. It is then that we are most in need of a Savior — another cycle to apprentice our lives to Christ.
The expectation that we must maintain a perfectly “fixed” attitude of faith at all times tends to lead, more often than not, to spiritual stagnation and scripted performances of religiosity that lack depth. When we try to force ourselves to be in every season all at once (emotionally or religiously) our anxieties and our need for control tend to become heightened, and under these conditions our spiritual lives eventually become fallow. The liturgical seasons meet us as we are in space and time, as humble and imperfect creatures of God, and invite us to grow in faith from wherever we are through the natural rhythms of communal prayer, action, rest, reflection, integration, and restoration.
Blessed be God for this sacred gift.
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