Blessed Ordinary Time

Blessed Ordinary Time when everything in the Divine Office is simple and simply in one place! A time when we are relieved of that maddening fiddling and flipping back and forth which a confrere of mine calls ’an occasion of sin’. Blessed is this time when there are no liturgical extravaganzas to organise, no exultets to be practised, no dress-rehearsals to be endured. It is an uncomplicated time; it is elemental; it is ordinary. It is not, however, bland. As we leave Easter and move into the weekdays of Ordinary Time’s 8th week, we are straightaway confronted by the gospels of the challenge to the rich young man, the thrusting ambition of the sons of Zebedee, a fig tree cursed and withered and the temple being cleansed – strong and vivid stuff indeed. The first days of ordinary time are a reminder that this season is in fact an almost unbearably bright array, a ’dappled thing’ and full of things ’spare’ and surprising, lying in wait to astonish and stupefy Chris Chatteris, S.J.