Ordinary Time

We are fast approaching the green season of Ordinary Time in the church year. The garden will grow, vegetables, flowers and weeds together. I will eventually get summer clothes out of bins and sweaters put away. We will slack off school for a couple of months. The boys will wear short sleeved shirts to church. A lot of Sundays it will seem sparse because it everyone is out of town. And our days will race by so quickly by the time September rolls around we will have whiplash. And then, just when we think the liturgical season should change because the school year has, we will go on being in Ordinary Time.

But from this vantage point, ordinary is so to be desired. The long exhausting season of feasting needs to folded up and put away or we will become like Aileen in Word Girl--monstrous, green, whining 'But everyday is my Biirrffffdaaaaayyyyy!'

I think a long Ordinary Time is a pleasant rebuke to our always-on-to-the-latest-thing-culture. I don't want anything new right now. I want some things to be useful until they become threadbare. I don't want to rush out and buy a new pair of shoes just because the shape of my heel is clearly last season's...well, I shouldn't lie, it is a lot more seasons before last season. From this angle nothing is to be gained by a new pair of shoes.

But I know that come September, the endless green of Ordinary Time will cause me to bite my lip and fret that we will never get on to the next new shiny thing. And that is when the rebuke will be for me and not for the general masses out there. Then, ordinary will feel insufficient. I will rearrange the furniture and be lured by school supply displays. Who knows what time it was when all the crowds left Jesus (well, obviously, someone probably knows but not me as I'm writing this) but I always figured it was sometime like September, or a change of season time. The crowds flitted away, thinking, 'whatever, if you won't give me bread I'm going back to see what's on sale in the market'.

And on that note, I am going to pick up this ordinary fat baby and hope that she doesn't move into any new stage for at least three days.