Out of Ordinary Time

The first thing ...to say about ordinary time is, this week it runs out. Unlike those special Sundays that fall around Christmas and Easter, the 24 Sundays after Pentecost are designated only by ordinal numbers 1st through 24th, marked in green on the Liturgical calendar.

[Photo: A clock face representation of the liturgical calendar, hanging on the wall in the children's chapel, prepared by Nancy Eubanks, director of Children's Education at St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, GA. There's another sliver of green ordinary time between Epiphany and Lent.]

Second I'd intended to blog about Marie Howe's collection of poems The Kingdom of Ordinary Time for 24 weeks, but other projects came first, and time slipped away. This was the second summer in a row that's happened. Somehow that seems to be an essential lesson for ordinary time, how easily we let it slip past without doing what we'd intended.


Third Howe frequently draws on her Catholic upbringing with love, insight, and humor, as in the Prologue to Ordinary Time:

The rules, once again, applied
One loaf = one loaf. One fish = one fish...
And the woman who had been healed grew tired of telling her story,
and sometimes asked her daughter to tell it.

Howe imagines Gospel events with startling specificity. At Resurrection, Jesus feels "surprise and hurt" when "pouring back into" the hand with broken fingers, the body too small like "the sky trying to fit into a tunnel"; he awakes "in the dark alone." In "Sometimes the Moon Sat in the Well at Night," first of five "Poems from the Life of Mary," the poet's Mary tells first how she would stir water in the well with a stick "as if water were light, and the stick / a wand that made the light follow," then how "water broke" over rocks in rivers and moonlight shone in water pooled in a woman's skirt -- delicate images for the unimaginable lines from Scripture, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you." Another poem, "You Think This Happened Only Once and Long Ago" gives us lovely images of hearing water drop from the oars as a loved one rows across a lake at evening; how that lake is "sky that fell as rain," and "the wind is sky moving." Howe could be speaking of the lives of Jesus and Mary, so far away from us, and yet near to us at the same time.


Fourth Readings assigned for these 24 weeks by the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer answer the question, "What are we supposed to do now that Jesus has ascended and the Holy Spirit has descended?" We read about setting up government, failures of kings, obedience to the law, and justice for the vulnerable; healing and prayer; waiting patiently and faithfully. Near the end of ordinary time, we're reminded of all the saints, and all the forgotten souls. Last, we celebrate Christ the King, his authority over all powers on earth -- his being "Author" of all.


Fifth Howe makes much of the ordinary, reminding us that between-time, which is most of life, is all we really have -- so, what we really must appreciate. ("You must remember this" was my earlier blogpost about Howe, 07/2017.) The first poem after the prologue, "The World," lists commonplace things that I don't often care enough to notice. In "Prayer,"she confesses, "My days and nights pour through me like complaints / and become a story I forgot to tell."


Last Starting with the first Sunday of Advent this week, we get back into readings and songs about the birth and life and resurrection of Jesus, all beautiful and dramatic. Those holy days are the high-stake tent poles of the year, leaving me to think of ordinary time as a long, flat, tedious stretch. But, between Howe and the habit of reading all those scripture passages, I'm fired up about paying attention to God and the world around me, learning to treasure ordinary time.