What Is Ordinary Time? The Long Green Season Nobody Talks About

Most of the church year gets attention. Advent has candles. Lent has ashes. Easter has lilies and trumpets. And then there are these weeks — late July, no feast in sight, nothing to prepare for — that most calendars simply color green and leave alone. This is Ordinary Time, and it is by far the longest season of the church year.

"Ordinary" doesn't mean unremarkable

The name is a small translation accident. It comes not from ordinary in the sense of plain, but from ordinal — numbered. These are the counted weeks: the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Fourteenth, the Twenty-Third, on and on. The season is named after its arithmetic, not its mood. Which is a little funny, and also a little fitting, because counting is most of what it asks of you.

Two stretches, not one

Ordinary Time comes in two pieces. A short stretch runs from the end of the Christmas season until Lent begins — a few weeks in winter. The long stretch begins after Pentecost and runs all the way to the eve of Advent, roughly late spring through November. Between them they account for around thirty-three or thirty-four weeks. More than half the year is Ordinary Time. The seasons everyone can name are the exception; this is the rule.

Why green

Green is the color of the vestments, the altar cloths, the ribbon in the lectionary. The usual explanation is growth — the color of leaves and fields in their long middle, past the first shoots and well before harvest. Not the drama of purple penitence or the brightness of white feast days. Just the color things are while they're quietly getting on with growing.

What the readings do here

Outside Ordinary Time, the readings follow the events: birth, temptation, death, resurrection, the sending of the Spirit. Inside Ordinary Time, they mostly follow the teaching — the Gospels read more or less continuously, week over week, parable after parable. Nothing is being commemorated. Something is just being read, in order, patiently, the way you'd read anything long.

The season for the unremarkable stretch

There's a real gift buried in a calendar that names the unremarkable stretch and gives it a color anyway. Most of a life is not the feast day. Most of a life is a Tuesday in August. A calendar that only marked the peaks would quietly imply that the rest was filler — time to be endured until something happened. Ordinary Time refuses that. It says: these thirty-odd weeks, in which nothing in particular is being celebrated, are still counted. They are still part of the year. They still get a color.

A quiet note

You don't have to do anything with Ordinary Time. That's rather the point of it. There's no wreath to build, no fast to keep, no eggs to dye. If you notice it at all, you notice it the way you notice the trees are green in July — as a fact about where you are, not a task on a list. And then you get on with the afternoon.

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