A New Day, acrylic on canvas; by Erice Liu

...And just like that, we’re back to Ordinary Time. It may feel like anything but ordinary as school comes to an end, summer begins, and long-planned vacations finally come to pass. And extraordinary time, as we might call the other seasons of the year, can sometimes feel just as ordinary as anything. This, friends, is part of the beauty of the church calendar.

I grew up in churches that didn’t observe the church year’s changing seasons, so unless it was Christmastime, there was no telling one weekend apart from another. And in many ways, that isn’t a bad thing--there’s a uniformity and sameness that can be a gift.

On the other hand, I have grown to love and appreciate the wisdom of the liturgical year, the wisdom that tells us to stay exactly where we are and not rush into the next thing on the calendar. We don’t celebrate Easter in November or Advent in June. Even the twelve days of Christmas come after December 25th. The church calendar requires a kind of patience and discipline that I don’t have to exercise much in my daily life, where I tend to pay attention to whatever I happen to be feeling or wanting or doing on a certain day.

With the church calendar, though, we are guided through the year based on the rhythms of the Scripture and the ecclesial community throughout time and space. And as we enter into Ordinary Time, we aren’t entering into a lull or a time far from God, like the earth turning away from the sun in its orbit. We aren’t nearer to God in the pomp and circumstance of Easter than we are in the chilly June mornings that feel like summer will never come. Ordinary Time, like the rests in between musical notes in the songs we sing together, is the time of pausing, listening, and understanding that the ordinary is never quite as mundane as it seems.