Ordinary Time on the church’s liturgical calendar is so named not because it has been demoted, but rather because it is ordinal or numbered. This includes the Sundays following Epiphany up to Lent, then the longer stretch from Pentecost to Advent. Taken together, it comprises 33 or 34 weeks, depending on the lunar dating each year of Easter.
Ken Sehested
Ordinary days are not mundane. But you could say they contain less drama than the festal seasons. That’s because the bulk of life, liturgical and otherwise, is less dramatic — but not less important. This season is ordinary in that it is outside the pinnacle moments of Jesus’ life.
This interval represents the dailiness of life lived between the peaks. It includes the grit and grind and humdrum of living, with party clothes in storage — the casual days when no trumpets are sounded, no ecstatic visions are had, where shoulders are put to stubborn wheels.
This is quotidian time, where the smallest details matter. To the easily distracted, Ordinary Time is tedious. The watchful, however, are granted confidence in incremental growth, although progress seems imperceptible. Germination is largely out of sight. As Luke 16:10 puts it, faithfulness in small things sets the stage for the great.
“This interval represents the dailiness of life lived between the peaks.”
I suspect Ordinary Time is what Jesus was referring to when, in his departing soliloquy in John 16:12-13, he told his disciples, “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” but that in the days to come the Spirit will provide further guidance. Wisdom accrues in Ordinary Time.
When people of faith speak of God, and how the love of God leads to the flourishing of souls and soil alike, such language appears on the surface as something being done to us, as from the outside.
Merely being acted upon — being objectified — hints at coercion, manipulation, feeble dependency and indignity. As if we are to be kept in chains and, moreover, taught to love those chains. Lovely as they may appear, but chains, nonetheless. As if we are merely utensils in a cosmic drama. As if we are chess pieces on a divine board game.
Such is not the case. Think of a time-lapse video of a flower blooming, first in one layer, then another, then another and yet another — as if from out of thin air. Prior to this there was merely a tiny bud. And before that, a roughly buried unseen seed. Pleasant enough, but without the slightest indication of what was to come. As if from nowhere, as if from outside and beyond and supernatural. As if being infused with what, originally, was not there.
Human life thrives only when surrounded by fertile humus, enriched soil generating life from decomposition. The fallen leaf does not regret its demise.
The Blessed One is not the author and enforcer of transcendent patterns of creaturely codependency. The Gracious Host is not a giant Self, demanding subservience from petitioners. The Merciful One is not obsessive and in need of constant homage and ovation as a guarantee of kindly attention.
“The Blessed One is not the author and enforcer of transcendent patterns of creaturely codependency.”
Rather, as mystics write, creaturely blooming is a growing into God and God into all.
Apotheosis — a growing into God — is the word used in Eastern Christian traditions. Frequently in Paul’s writing, the apostle speaks of growing into Christ and being. In Ephesians 3:19 he writes of being “filled with all the fulness of God.” Or as 2 Peter 1:4 insists, we are called to “become participants of the divine nature.”
Such language is fragile and risky and easily manipulated, because it hints that creatures may thereby strap on the glory of the Creator and be freed to wield power to reorder the world in self-aggrandizing ways.
Does a self or soul even survive the Spirit’s transforming fire? Yes, and no.
Yes, understood developmentally, in history’s time and space, the self that is in Christ expands, step by gradual step, to include ever-larger circles of communion with others — even, potentially, with enemies. It’s not so much a matter of denying the self but a relaxing and uncoiling of the self.
The self-forgetfulness that grows is not a self-debasement. Rather, it is like the bud’s tilt toward the sun’s radiance; like the arousal of the loved to the Lover.
Not, however, if the self means the continued existence of a sniveling, whining ego needing constant assurance and reinforcement of its own value and performance. Such a self demands that if I’m special, you must be less so.
Being self-possessed is, by definition, being separated from the Love that binds each to all without definition, degree, merit or measure.
Because we humans, at least occasionally, require reassurance, comfort and encouragement, we assume the same for the Beloved, creation’s author. And thus our worship becomes a form of commerce, offering praise in exchange for blessing, compliments in return for security safeguards. And when God’s honor is challenged, we — as divine lackeys — assume retribution, including bloodletting, is a sacred duty.
The annulment of such duty was accomplished in the Cross, confirmed in the resurrection and kindled at Pentecost. For people of The Way, swords have become plowshares in preparation for the bountiful harvest of peace, sown in justice and harvested in mercy.
“It is in these days after Pentecost, Ordinary Time in the church’s calendar, that dreams are molded into deeds.”
It is in these days after Pentecost, Ordinary Time in the church’s calendar, that dreams are molded into deeds, that vision is mirrored in befriending habits, that yeast is unleashed, that struggle ensues and peace is waged.
The daily duties of covenant-keeping, the menial acts of fidelity, the chaste response to aggravating speech, the refusal of silence in the face of abuse and the encouraging word to the forlorn and offended — these are among the beads of your Ordinary rosary. Pray it even on faltering days and throughout restless nights.
Notice the unnoticed. Choose the less lovely for a dance partner. Keep your eyes shielded from shiny baubles, your ears from the marketers’ lure. Proclaim honor in the land of disrepute. Approach all your pedestrian duties in the knowledge that future blossoms begin as dirt-covered seedlings jostling amid the mire, powered by unseen force to break through compressed soil until welcomed by the sun’s fecund radiance.
Live the unvarnished life, susceptible neither to flattery nor mockery. Don’t begrudge being little. Be like the yeast in the dough, not the flour.
Remember: There is no secular space or time; only sacred or desecrated. Train your eyes to spot reverential clues among sullied clutter. Shield them from cultural glitter and gaudy glamor.
Practice the kind of silence that allows you to notice the cries from the rubble above the clamor of barkers. Locate yourself in a community of conviction that trains attention spans away from the glitterati and toward the disregarded.
Acclaim the unadorned season, with its back alleys and broken asphalt and places Google Maps doesn’t go. Give praise to Ordinary days, such that — when all is said and done — more is done than said. Then be freed: to live large, to laugh often and to love well.
Ken Sehested is the author and editor of prayerandpolitiks.org, an online journal at the intersection of spiritual formation and prophetic action.