Buying Back Ordinary Time

And so the liturgical stone keeps on rolling. We’ve had Christmas, Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday. The liturgical year that began on the first Sunday of Advent, way back in late November or early December, is now half-over. The blues, whites, purples and reds of those special feasts and seasons are done. Now it is “Ordinary Time,” the long green season that goes on, and on, and on. Think of this season as the teaching season. Instead of focusing on the extraordinary things that Jesus the Christ did; we now focus on what he said and taught. After all our special celebrations, we now get to hear Jesus answer that pressing question, “Now what?”

Of course, all that is relevant to those who are liturgical stones, rolling along every year in time with the Church’s year. But how relevant is that? If you have children, I suspect that the school year has more pull on the daily lives of families than the Church. And how relevant is a measure of time that thinks a year ahead? “Really? A year? I’m trying to find enough time to keep my to-do list to one page at the end of the day when I collapse.” Back in the 1990s, Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American, concluded that in 1990 Americans worked an average of nearly one month more per year than in 1970. According to the U.S. Labor Department, more than a third of American workers now work during the weekend.

Measuring time by a liturgical cycle made sense when work time was measured by the cycles of planting and harvesting. The Church’s time was easier to “sync” with the peoples’ time, and most people never travelled more than five miles from where they were born. Today, people travel further afield, work longer; and “church” threatens to become just one more outside demand of their scarce time.

And that’s why we need liturgical time more than ever. Day to day, we have no idea how scarce our time really is. “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all our years away; they fly, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.” From the moment we are born, we are dying. Day by day, we are rolling toward that moment when there is no more time; no past no future, just an eternal present. Or not.

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation. *

Our hope is that our past shall be redeemed, bought back, made worthwhile. What was lost shall be restored. That is what we’re rolling toward. Every year, we liturgical stones roll along, reflecting again on new births and beginnings, past disappointments and failures, redemption and resurrection. Year by year, we are more and more prepared for that eternal time when past and future become an undying and beautiful present.

But here we still are in this demanding time of past things falling through the cracks, excessive demands that cannot be squeezed into the present moment, leading to fear of what will fall through the cracks in the future. The Church must be with people in that time, and help them roll along in time. Part of that rolling is the Daily Office of psalms, scripture readings and prayers. Since she first published The Divine Hours in 1999, I have been nourished by Phyllis Tickle’s reworking of that ancient cycle in a more individual and portable format. Wherever you are rolling through the hours of this hectic and demanding time, you can roll along in divine time.

Welcome to Ordinary Time, in which our extraordinary God meets us where we are, and helps us reflect, learn and act in this limited time and people of eternity. Wherever you are, let’s keep rolling together.

*T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton from Four Quartets