The Season of Ordinary Time

The longest season of the Church’s liturgical year is Ordinary Time.

Calling the period of the church year outside the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter “Ordinary Time” is rather unfortunate. The word “ordinary” in common usage means every-day, unexceptional, and uninteresting. In that sense, there is no such thing as “ordinary time” in Christian worship.

When the liturgical calendar was reformed after the second Vatican Council, what had previously been called Sundays and weeks “after Epiphany” or “after Pentecost” were instead designated as Sundays and weeks “in Ordinary Time” and numbered from one to thirty-three or thirty-four. The word “ordinary” as used here relates to the word “ordinal”, as the Sundays and weeks are numbered in order.

There are two parts to Ordinary Time. The first falls between the end of the Christmas season and the start of Lent, and the second between the Monday after Pentecost and the Saturday before the first Sunday of Advent.

As Christians, Sunday is our original feast day – the day to celebrate Christ’s resurrection and our participation in the paschal mystery.  Over the centuries, however, appreciation of the importance of Sunday weakened and the practice of replacing Sundays with feasts of local saints and other celebrations began to take over. By the early 1900s the Sunday Mass texts were rarely used. The liturgical reforms of the second Vatican Council restored Sunday to its central place in the celebration of each week and the primacy of Ordinary Time as a whole. Ordinary Time is the way the Church - gathered to celebrate the good news of Christ’s death and resurrection - marks time, Sunday after Sunday.

Ordinary time is the foundation on which the major fasting and feasting seasons of the liturgical year are build. The liturgical colour of Ordinary Time – green – points to our Christian hope and life, entering into the mystery of Christ in all its fullness.

Parish liturgy groups are sometimes tempted to allow the Sundays of Ordinary Time to slip through the cracks.  There is a tendency to spend much time and energy on preparing for the key liturgical seasons and then to take a rest from planning during Ordinary Time.  However, there is no such thing as “ordinary time” in Christian worship.  While music and decorations used during the high season of the Church year will be scaled down, the basic principles of good liturgy remain – scripture readings that are well prepared and proclaimed, large liturgical symbols that speak clearly of the meaning they carry, music that supports the rites, etc.

It would be a pity, for example, if a parish which has been singing the psalm during Lent and Easter were to revert to saying the psalm again.  Just as the Lectionary gives the option of common psalms for Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter, there are possibilities for common sung psalms to be used during Ordinary Time so that the music leaders and the people don’t have to tackle a new setting every week.

This quieter time of the year gives the liturgy committee an opportunity to evaluate the parish’s normal patterns of Sunday worship and to find ways of enhancing the Sunday celebrations.  A committee might review, for example, the parish music repertoire, or liturgical space, or the recruitment and training of liturgical ministers.

Ordinary Time enables us to witness to the presence of the risen Jesus in the community of faith, to devote ourselves to entering into the fullness of the mystery of Christ by exploring all its aspects, and to celebrate the presence of God in the ordinary patterns of human life.