“They ate and were satisfied. They picked up the fragments left over—seven baskets. There were about four thousand people.”
I don’t like Ordinary Time. To put it more accurately, I don’t like that there’s a season called Ordinary Time. Time was when we called the Sundays after the Christmas season “Second/Third/etc. Sunday after Epiphany” until we got close enough to Lent to give them the mysterious Latin names of Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and so forth up to Lent; then between the Sunday after Trinity and the beginning of the next Advent we referred to the “Third/Fourth/etc. Sunday after Pentecost.” Many of our Protestant friends still do this with those post-Pentecost Sundays, except that they count them “after Trinity.” Either way, it’s a continual reminder of one of the central events or truths of the Christian faith.
The problem with “Ordinary Time” is that it tends to make God ordinary. It makes Jesus ordinary. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all in favor of seeing God in the ordinary circumstances of our lives and would never want to return to the days when God and religion occupied a separate compartment that impacted not at all on the other aspects of our lives—the complete dichotomy between sacred and secular. If I pursue my photography with a passion, it’s because it’s my way of reverencing God’s creation; it’s my way of praying. It’s not something that has nothing to do with my weekly attendance at Mass. Nor am I promoting that old mindset—a sort of misplaced or exaggerated high Christology, if you will—that regards Jesus as some sort of supernormal human being instead of as “a man like us in all things but sin.”
But there’s the point. Jesus was normal. He wasn’t ordinary. Could an ordinary person have fed four thousand people with seven loaves of bread and a few fish?
Seeing God in our ordinary everyday lives should not be confused with seeing God as ordinary. The “Ordinary Time” mindset drags him down to the ordinary, and the result is the invasion of today’s prevalent narcissism into our worship life so that First Eucharist services degenerate into school graduations that celebrate the kids, cantors are regarded as, and behave like, singing stars instead of servants of the Word, and—well, you can name your own examples, I’m sure. (I'd love it if you'd share some with me by posting a Comment.) How many parishes do you know whose motto should be “It’s all about us”?
What do you do to ensure that you regard God in awesome wonder instead of as ordinary?
I've heard "Ordinary Time" explained as the time for the "ordinary" work of the Church, meaning growth, which is why the vestments are green. This sounds totally false, like trying to justify something after it's happened. The name is a relatively recent change, recent counting by Church time. Before then, the Church year, like its people, lived in relationship to the feasts. But then time became O/ordinary. It would be interesting to know how the term "Ordinary Time" was decided on. Is it the equivalent term in all languages?
ReplyDeleteI propose that the calendar have only Luminous Time and Numinous Time. Anything less is too poor.