Ordinary Time: the long green season

Read this at the start of ordinary time, if your household keeps the year. It belongs to the Year view only.

After the drama of the year's first half, the waiting, the birth, the road to the cross, the empty tomb, the church settles into a long stretch of ordinary weeks: half the year and more. The old calendars color this season green, the color of growing things, because that is what it is for.

Do not let the name fool you into boredom. This is the season of ordinary days, the sink and the shift and the school run, and ordinary days are where most of a life actually happens. So they are where most of the following of Jesus happens too. The readings of these weeks are his parables, his meals, his healings: the kingdom taught in seed and soil, one person helped at a time.

A few simple things a household might keep in mind for the long middle:

Keep the rhythm and do not dramatize it. The meal, the reading, the bread and the cup, week after week. Growth in this season is slow and mostly invisible, like everything green.

Let the practice get sturdy enough to survive dullness, because it will meet some. Missing a week is nothing; start again the next. The only real danger is quitting because it stopped feeling special. It was never supposed to feel special. It was supposed to become yours.

And notice, somewhere in the long middle, the season's quiet gift: without your marking the day it happened, the table stops being something you keep and becomes somewhere you live.

When the days shorten, the year bends back toward Advent and begins again. That is the whole design: not a straight line but a circle, walked slowly, growing as it goes.