Green, Ordinary Time

Advent done, Christmas time done. Lent and Easter and Pentecost, too. From those momentous events we come into a long period of Ordinary Time. The color is green. No more long-lived white, nor fretful purple, just green. It is Ordinary Time. But what a wonderful color is green, of many shades, as the song goes, but always green. It is the color so longed for when we look to muddy yards and fields, to dead dirt. Once it is here, once things turn to green, the heart, perhaps unmoved as the dead dirt, comes alive, one’s life begins to blossom, and all the good things of green come to serve us once again. In a way, it is a season for which all the more noteable seasons have prepared us. Waiting and longing, miraculous birth, the pain of sin and another waiting and longing, this time with wailing and sorrow, a death in place of my death, a life given so that I may live, the Spirit enlivening a dullish heart - does not all of this seem pointed, in the end, to our flourishing, our youthful growths, our beauty, the beginning of our eternal life? It is the green time, called Ordinary Time, but, from a certain perspective, a most wonderful time, both for its new breath and its hopeful future - a time for green. Ordinary Time? In a way, of course, but also a wonderful time. Its spring! John Kilgallen, SJ