This weekend we return to the Sundays of Ordinary Time.  With the exception of the Feast of the Transfiguration on Sunday August 6, we are stuck in Ordinary Time until the end of November. The very name “ordinary time” sounds dull, drab, and boring. Of course, experts on the liturgy will point out that “Ordinary Time” is misnamed. It should really be called “Ordinal Time” because it is based on ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc.).

Looking a little deeper, though, calling summer and fall “ordinary time” is not all that bad. Don’t we spend most of our lives in ordinary time? No matter how spontaneous we may think we are and how much we may enjoy variety, most of our time is spent following an ordinary routine. That is what gets us through the day. For example, many of us enjoy travel. Visiting friends and family can be refreshing; seeing new places can be enlivening; but hardly anyone wants to be travelling all the time. If we did, we would not have a chronic shortage of over the road truck drivers.

Another example is the family meal. Some families make a point of eating together regularly. Others do not.  In 1984 when I was newly ordained and serving in a parish in New Jersey, one of my responsibilities was the high school youth group. The leadership team had the idea that prior to Easter, we would give the group an experience of what a Jewish Seder meal was like. The teens seemed excited. We made the preparations, set up the room, and found a simple service that we could use. When we began, we ran into an unexpected problem. Several teens in the group had never been at a meal where everyone started eating at the same time. They had never been at a meal where prayer preceded eating. Since this was forty years ago, we cannot blame the internet and cell phones for that! The point is that households that make a greater effort to come together regularly for meals tend to be more closely bonded than those who do not. When we do something regularly, we get to know each other better, because we get to experience one another in all our many moods.

The color of Ordinary Time is green. It is also the color of nature this time of year. When the world is green, stuff is growing. If we had taken a photo of our garden two months ago and compared it to today, we would see a tremendous change. But day by day the changes are largely imperceptible. That is the spirit of Ordinary Time—slow but steady growth. There are no big holidays during Ordinary Time. There are no church seasons that ask us to alter our routine. Instead, we are invited to pursue those activities that bond us closer to God and to one another and make them part of our routine.

A good place to start is church. Do we come to this family meal regularly or just on special occasions. If we come regularly, we will not always be at our best. Some Sundays we will be distracted or worried or annoyed or bored. Still, we have made Mass a part of our routine. We have acknowledged that we owe God at least an hour a week and we will feel more connected to the community of faith. If we show up only a few times a year, we will always feel like an outsider. Ordinary Time is also a good time to get into the habit of reading Scripture or doing a daily devotional, or listening to a Catholic podcast. Devoting five minutes a day to the Word of God will begin to impact the way we live the rest of the day. Ordinary Time is also a good time to swing into action. There are many charities that could use our help, especially those working with refugees and asylum seekers. Many of them are being housed and cared for in ways that belie Chicago’s claim to be a city that welcomes immigrants. What so many people discover over time is that a lot of charity work ceases to be charity and becomes an opportunity to share time with people whose friendship they have come to value. Ordinary Time can also be a time to become more informed about some of the justice issues that the Catholic Church has been addressing for years. For example, our website contains a whole year’s worth of suggestions for how we can get involved in saving our planet. You might even take a deep dive into some of the major teachings of Pope Francis. His “encyclicals” are not long, boring, philosophical treatises, but real calls to action.

We live in a world that has come to expect instant results and instant answers to all our questions. As a result, we can lose patience with ourselves when we do not see change happening fast enough or we find ourselves slipping back into old habits and old sins. We can too easily define spiritual growth with the same metrics we use to talk about financial success. Mother Teresa liked to say, “God has not called me to success but to faithfulness.”  We simply create the conditions for God to work within us, and God’s timing is not always our timing. That is why we have this very long season we call “ordinary time.”

                                                                                      Fr. Joe