Ordinary Time

Ordinary Time is the newest name in the Christian calendar for its oldest condition: the weeks in which nothing in particular is being prepared for or celebrated, and the church simply keeps time. The Latin name given in the 1969 reform is tempus per annum, the time through the year, and the English rendering invites a misreading the liturgists have spent decades correcting: ordinary here is the ordinary of ordinal numbers, the counted and ordered weeks, not a claim that the season is unremarkable.

There are thirty three or thirty four such weeks in a year, kept in two unequal stretches. The first begins after the feast of the Baptism of the Lord and runs until Lent opens on Ash Wednesday; because Easter moves, this stretch varies most in length. The second and much longer stretch begins after Pentecost and runs to the eve of Advent, carrying the church through summer and autumn. The counting is continuous across the interruption, the numbered weeks resuming after Pentecost where the pre Lenten count left off, so the two stretches are one season wearing a gap. Before the reform the same weeks were counted as Sundays after Epiphany and Sundays after Pentecost; the 1969 calendar gathered them under a single name and gave the year's longest season, for the first time, an identity of its own.

The liturgical colour of Ordinary Time is green, and the choice carries the season's meaning: not the violet of preparation or the white of festival, but the colour of growth, for the weeks in which the church grows by simply living. What fills the green Sundays is, above all, reading. The reformed lectionary assigns Ordinary Time a course of continuous reading, working through the gospels in sequence rather than jumping between festal highlights: Matthew, Mark and Luke each anchor one year of the three year Sunday cycle, and the weekday cycle reads still more widely. The effect is that the long green season is when a congregation actually hears the body of the gospels, the parables, the healings, the teaching, most of which belongs to no feast.

The season is not featureless. Saints' days stud it throughout, and its final weeks turn deliberately toward the end of things, the readings darkening toward judgement until the last Sunday, kept since the twentieth century as the feast of Christ the King, closes the year the way a keystone closes an arch; Advent begins the whole cycle again a week later. Ordinary Time is thus the season that carries the calendar's actual weight. The feasts give the year its shape, but the green Sundays give it its length, and most of a lifetime's churchgoing happens inside them.