SCRIPTURE/PRAYER

Liturgical Year

Ordinary Time: Summer into Fall

A Sense of the Season

What do the words Ordinary Time mean? The Ordinary in "Ordinary Time" refers to ordinal-counted-time, not to a lack of something to celebrate!

"Apart from those seasons having their own distinctive character: Advent, Christmastime, Lent, Triduum and Eastertime, 33 or 34 weeks remain in the yearly cycle that do not celebrate a specific aspect of the mystery of Christ. Rather, especially on the Sundays, they are devoted to the mystery of Christ in all its aspects." (General Norms for the Liturgical Year and Calendar, 43)

How do we celebrate "the mystery of Christ in all its aspects", the Paschal Mystery? We gather every Sunday, our original feast day. Christians have gathered every Sunday-the day of Christ's resurrection, the first day of the week-since the earliest days of the Church.

What is the heart of our Sunday celebration? We celebrate Eucharist. We hear the story of our salvation, told through the sacred scriptures and broken open in the homily. We praise and thank God for all creation. We pray for the whole world as well as our personal and local needs, as we remember Christ's life, death and resurrection. We share the bread and wine, the body and blood. We are sent forth to be the body and blood of Christ in our homes, our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our towns, our cities, our country, our world.

When we gather on Sundays in Ordinary Time, as always, we hear the scriptures proclaimed. The church reads nearly straight through the primary gospel of the year: this year, cycle B, we hear the Gospel of Mark, each week often picking up where we left off the previous week. (We read John every year during Easter, and on solemnities.) The first readings, from the first testament of the Bible, have been chosen for their relationship to the gospel passages. The second reading is drawn from the letters of the second testament of the Bible. We read these letters in a semi-continuous style: the second reading is independent thematically from the other passages proclaimed during the Liturgy of the Word. The mystery of Christ "in all its aspects" unfolds.

Although the church makes no official distinction between the days of Ordinary Time from Pentecost until Advent, in our lives we experience the subtle shift from the relaxed days of summer to the increasingly active days of autumn. For some of us, the shift comes with the end-of-summer holiday or the beginning of school. Others see work activities shift, from tending to harvesting, from stocking shelves to increasing sales, from cashing out an old fiscal year to digging into a new one.

The church's calendar contains some subtle shifts, too. From summer's scriptures that focus on the ministerial life of Jesus and the disciples, we begin to hear the scriptures that remind us of the second coming of Christ, the end-of-days. On September 14 we celebrate the Holy Cross, and the waning of the natural world around us points us to the mystery of suffering and redemption. At the end of September we invoke the holy archangels to guard us in the encroaching twilight. And if we listen closely to the scriptures in October, we begin to hear talk of the last days and the final things. These thoughts reach their culmination with the great festival of saints and souls, November 1 and 2. And we spend November remembering the dead, preparing for the end of days and celebrating Christ, the firstfruits harvested of the new creation, the firstborn from the dead.

  "What happens in our churches every Sunday is the fruit of our week. What happens as the fruit of the week past is the beginning of the week to come. Sunday is simultaneously a point of arrival and departure for Christians on their way to the fullness of the kingdom. This is not ordinary at all. This is the fabric of Christian living." (Saint Andrew Bible Missal [Brooklyn: William J. Hirten Co., 1982.])

This is the extraordinary opportunity that Ordinary Time opens up for us.