guest post: ordinary time

My friends, welcome to the stage Jacquie Hauth.  Jacquie and I met when we started together at Vanderbilt Divinity School four years ago.  I have always been impressed with the precision and depth of her thought.  She also blogs over at Constant Conversion.  I asked if she would write a little bit for us on what "ordinary time" means for her.  For those who are not living and breathing the church calendar, ordinary time represents two LONG stretches from Pentecost until Advent, and then from Epiphany until Lent.  It eats up well over half of the year, as you can see:

Church leaders sometime struggle with what to do in ordinary time.  Do you stretch out Pentecost and Epiphany and act like they are seasons, rather than just days?  What do you emphasize?  In what direction do you drive the life of the church, or your own personal spiritual pursuit?  Here are Jacquie's reflections.

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Ordinary Time

Does the church year really mimic the academic year, or has my experience lead me to that conclusion?

For nineteen years of my life, I have had my seasons dictated by the school calendar.  It is hard to suddenly think of the 
year beginning in November instead of late August (or for that matter, January).  But this isn't meant to be a reflection on 
the start of the year, but the middle.  Or rather, the first long stretch.

The Christian year begins with Advent, and then comes Christmas and Epiphany.  Soon after, Lent arrives to mark the road 
to Easter.  Easter comes and goes, then begins the even longer season of Ordinary Time.  Unlike Lent, Ordinary Time is 
not marked by a sense of anticipation or special longing.  It is the first long stretch of time in the church year when there is 
nothing hovering just along the horizon.

In my academic career, Ordinary Time has always coincided with summer--vacations and blissful forgetting of all the lessons 
learned the previous year.  When I was growing up, this was a season of low attendance at my church.  No one said it aloud, 
but I got the impression that it was acceptable to miss some church in the summertime because nothing really "important" 
was happening.  Jesus wasn't being born, baptized or executed, nor was he rising.  Mary wasn't waiting patiently, and we 
weren't fasting or feasting.  Instead, it was a time for parables and summer reading lists.  Not terribly exciting.

But now that I have been outside of the academic pattern for over a year--and I haven't had the ending and beginning of a 
school year to approximate Ordinary Time--it's starting to sink in just how odd this understanding of this season really is.  
Ordinary Time is by no means unexciting (as a time devoid of other more thrilling things) but this popular perception fails to 
recognize just how exceptionally ordinary the rest of the year is, too.  This is the first season of Ordinary Time in which I'm 
not gearing up for some new beginning: I've just been chugging along in my life at the intersection of love, worry, work, and 
food.

How much of my life really is wrapped up in those four things: love, worry, work, and food--even and especially in those 
other more exciting seasons of the church (even in those other more exciting semesters of schooling).  And now that I don't 
have a new semester or a new thrill to look forward to, I'm beginning to fully realize it.

So perhaps this is more a reflection on how much my life's seasons have been dictated by the school year rather than the 
church year.  Or perhaps this was a chance to muse over how much I love Ordinary Time's insistence that the everyday 
matters just as much as the exceptional (otherwise, why devote a whole season to it)?  I rejoice in the ebb and flow of daily 
life... in the knowledge that this first long stretch of the church year is in many ways more like our everyday lives than the 
other seasons: the long quiet stretches when we get to practice life without glamour or pretense or any other "event" to 
make life meaningful.  It just is.  And that's the wonder of it.

In a way, this is a season for me to regret all the past seasons of Ordinary Time that were nothing more than filler between 
things that I thought were more exciting.  It is a time to give thanks that--despite all the imbued glamour we give to other 
seasons of the church--life itself is fantastically (miraculously) ordinary.