Ordinary Time

So I'm still getting used to this whole being Anglican thing--I think it's starting to grow on me. Anglicanism, for those of you who aren't familiar with the 2.5 billion branches of Protestantism, is a fairly high-church, more liturgical church tradition.

One of the key components of the church life in this setting is the church calendar. Rather than just the normal stuff like Christmas and Easter, the whole year is marked: Advent, for example, is the weeks leading up to Christmas and then Christmas itself is twelve days (hence the 12 Days of Christmas song).

There's a long stretch in the church calendar during the fall called "Ordinary Time." So called, I suppose, because it's rather, well...ordinary.

A couple of weeks ago I was meeting with a student who asked me a simple question: "What's up with you?" I realized that I didn't really have much to report. I sort of floundered through a couple of perfunctory comments about the kids and my overall sense of the ministry on campus.

But as I was doing so, I realized that this might be a good thing to talk about. I stopped myself from running my yapper pointlessly and started to think out loud.

In a culture that is obsessed with adrenaline, how do we process life when there's no headline news? What about "ordinary time?" Is it enough, as the Scriptures invite, simply to "do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?"

This seems to me to be a pretty critical skill to develop. Most of our life is spent in ordinary time. Figuring out how to savor the times between the high's and the low's seems to be fairly critical if the life of faith is to actually have much bearing on the life of real people.