Ordinary Time

Pentecost has come and gone. This Sunday (June 15) is Trinity Sunday, one of our 7 principal feasts. Trinity Sunday always feels (to me) like the last echo of what began in Lent, a final feast to shut the door on Easter Season as we turn the corner into the Season after Pentecost. Technically, we are already in the Season after Pentecost, but before the colors turn green every Sunday, we get one final feast day.
 
The Season after Pentecost is one of two periods of Ordinary Time (the other is the period after the Epiphany). Most of the Church year is made up of these two green seasons, the two “ordinary” times. Advent and Christmas and Lent and Easter (the times of fasting and feasting) grab more attention, but most of life is neither fasting nor feasting—it is “ordinary.”
 
This makes sense. After all, most of life can’t be fasting (although a few ascetics try) or feasting (although a few hedonists try). Either one would wear our bodies out, eventually. We need normal life! But the lesson is deeper than biology; it isn’t just that we can’t sustain continual fasting and feasting in our bodies—we need Ordinary Time spiritually.
 
Penitence (the spiritual discipline that accompanies fasting) and celebration (the spiritual discipline that accompanies feasting) are profoundly important parts of discipleship, but most of the spiritual life is made up of the “ordinary.” Simple obedience, daily prayer, seeking to grow steadily in love and faith—this is the normal stuff of the spiritual life. The longest seasons of the Church’s calendar are “ordinary,” because most of the spiritual life is “ordinary.” Most of it is neither on top of the Mount of Transfiguration nor in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Most of it is, well, “ordinary.”
 
There is a vital starting point, though: Ordinary Time always follows a feast day celebrating God’s work in our lives. In other words, this period of “ordinary” growth in Christlikeness doesn’t happen on our own, by our own strength. The long, steady progression of “ordinary” discipline is in response to God and because of God. The first season of Ordinary Time follows the Epiphany, when God revealed himself to the nations in Jesus Christ. The second season of Ordinary Time (the one we are now in) follows Pentecost, when the Spirit was given.
 
We are embarking on the long season of “ordinary” Christian life. Daily habits of faith, simple disciplines and obedience, perseverance in love, prayer, and evangelism—these are the spiritual movements of this season. But all of it follows Pentecost; all of it is only possible because of the gift of the Spirit.
 
As this season winds on, and you feel your disciplines flagging or even failing, cry out to the Father for a renewed gift of the Spirit! This is Ordinary Time, but perhaps more importantly, it is the Season after Pentecost, the time when we learn to live in the strength of the Spirit.
 
In Christ,
Steven+