Ordinary Time in the Liturgical Year

There are seasons in the Church’s calendar that shine brightly: Advent that waits, Christmas that sings, Lent that purifies, Easter that bursts with joy. But have you ever noticed that, all together, these great seasons don’t even add up to half the year? The rest — more than thirty weeks — is what the Church calls Ordinary Time, clothed in green. And perhaps it is precisely there, in the ordinary run of our days, that our faith has the most room to grow.

Ordinary Time — in Latin, Tempus per annum, “the time throughout the year” — is the stretch of the liturgical calendar that does not celebrate a specific mystery of Christ’s life, the way Christmas celebrates his birth or Easter his resurrection. It unfolds in two parts: the first runs from the end of the Christmas season, just after the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, to the eve of Ash Wednesday; the second begins after Pentecost and stretches all the way to the arrival of Advent. In all, it spans thirty-three or thirty-four weeks, depending on the year.

Its color is green — the same green as fields and forests, the color of everything that grows. And that is no accident. While the great feasts clothe the liturgy in white, red, or violet to announce an event, in Ordinary Time the green speaks of something else: of life going on, of sap rising slowly, of patient ripening. It is the color of hope that never gives up and of growth that no one sees happening — yet happens all the same.

Why does this matter? Because most of our own life is “ordinary time” too. We don’t live from feast to feast, from one emotional high to the next. We live the Monday workday, the traffic, the bills, the dishes, the daily routine with our family. The genius of the liturgical year is to declare that this everyday ground is not empty of God — it is the very soil where holiness takes root. Ordinary Time sanctifies the ordinary and reminds us that following Jesus is not a matter of living on strong emotions, but of steady faithfulness.

The Church explains that, on these Sundays and weekdays of the year, she does not recall a single isolated aspect of Christ’s mystery, but the mystery of Christ in its fullness. It is when, Sunday after Sunday, we walk alongside the Lord who teaches, heals, forgives, and calls — making our way through his Gospel little by little, like someone walking beside him along the roads of Galilee. The Second Vatican Council, in addressing the sacred liturgy, recalled that by unfolding the mystery of Christ across the year, the Church opens to the faithful the riches of her Lord’s virtues and merits, making them present in some way throughout all time.

In practice, Ordinary Time has a quiet but living rhythm. It is the season of the parables of the Kingdom, of the Beatitudes, of the miracles and teachings of Jesus, read unhurriedly over the weeks. It is also the season when solemnities such as the Most Holy Trinity, the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, and the Sacred Heart appear like clearings of light in the midst of the green. It is not, then, a “time of waiting” between important things: it is the very time for living, with depth, what we celebrate in the feasts.

Anyone who wishes to go deeper will find in The Liturgical Year, by Dom Prosper Guéranger, a classic guide that walks through each season of the liturgy with beauty and devotion, helping us pray the whole year together with the Church.

Today the liturgy is clothed in green. A few days ago we celebrated Pentecost, closing the Easter season, and now the Church leads us back into Ordinary Time — that long road that will carry us to the next Advent. It is a Saturday with no feast marked on the calendar, a simple feria, and perhaps for that very reason it is a good day to look with affection at the “ordinary” time of our own lives and ask: what does God want to make grow in me over these weeks?

What if we embraced the green of this season as a personal invitation? Maturing in faith rarely springs from one great moment; it comes from small, repeated acts of faithfulness — the morning prayer you never abandon, Sunday Mass, the confession you don’t put off, the little acts of charity toward the person who lives right beside you. Choose just one thing to cultivate over these weeks and be faithful to it, without rushing to see the fruit. Remember that the seed grows in the darkness of the soil before it ever appears in the light, and that God is at work in us even on the days when nothing seems to be happening. Ordinary Time is not wasted time: it is the time in which grace, silently, is making us into who we were called to be. May your heart, in this season, let itself be plowed, planted, and watered — and may you trust the One who tends the field.

And he shall be like a tree which is planted near the running waters, which shall bring forth its fruit, in due season. And his leaf shall not fall off: and all whatsoever he shall do shall prosper.

Sl 1:3 (Douay-Rheims)