Blessed Ordinary Time when everything in the Divine Office is simple and simply in one place! A time when we are relieved of that maddening fiddling and flipping back and forth which a confrere of mine calls ’an occasion of sin’. Blessed is this time when there are no liturgical extravaganzas to organise, no exultets to be practised, no dress-rehearsals to be endured. It is an uncomplicated time; it is elemental; it is ordinary. It is not, however, bland. As we leave Easter and move into the weekdays of Ordinary Time’s 8th week, we are straightaway confronted by the gospels of the challenge to the rich young man, the thrusting ambition of the sons of Zebedee, a fig tree cursed and withered and the temple being cleansed – strong and vivid stuff indeed. The first days of ordinary time are a reminder that this season is in fact an almost unbearably bright array, a ’dappled thing’ and full of things ’spare’ and surprising, lying in wait to astonish and stupefy Chris Chatteris, S.J.
Blessed Ordinary Time
Show Comments ()
2
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
17 years 5 months ago
As much as I enjoy the pagentry of Easter, although I've never 'articulated' it until I read this, I do find 'ordinary' time peaceful, and less distracting. Simple. Blessed indeed.
17 years 5 months ago
I've always found it helpful to remember that the word "ordinary" in this context connotes less "commonplace" or "conventional" and more "following in a numerical sequence." It's a sense (pardon the pun) that is not ordinary (i.e. usual); it survives in some technical language (as in the "ordinary numbers" 1, 2, 3, 4, ...). FWIW. Paul Nienaber SJ
The latest from america
Brian Strassburger, S.J., a Jesuit priest serving migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, joins “Jesuitical” this week to talk about what the election of Donald J. Trump might mean for his ministry.
“Laudato Si’” and its implementation seem to have stalled in the church. We need to revivify our efforts—and to recognize the Christological perspectives of our care for creation and our common home.
Around the affluent world, new hostility, resentment and anxiety has been directed at immigrant populations that are emerging as preferred scapegoats for all manner of political and socio-economic shortcomings.
“Each day is becoming more difficult, but we do not surrender,” Father Igor Boyko, 48, the rector of the Greek Catholic seminary in Lviv, told Gerard O’Connell. “To surrender means we are finished.”