After the Advent season leading to Christmas and the celebrations of the birth of Christ, I was very much ready for the “Ordinary Time” of the liturgical calendar of the church. As we gather with family, friends, and others brought into our lives, I always love the Christmas season with its preparations during Advent of honoring the first coming of Christ with the traditions we’ve experienced through the years. Putting up decorations and the Christmas tree, attending concerts, hearing Handel’s Messiah, being mindful of the themes of hope, faith, joy and peace as they are illuminated by different colored candles on the Advent wreath have become a special tradition through the years. The Christmas season is definitely one of our ordinary rhythms of life with all the celebrations, gift giving and activities.
Yet we all need the season of “Ordinary Time” that comes next on this historical calendar. Everything has to be placed back “in order” where we all live the majority of our lives for most of the year. It’s like taking a breath of fresh air while sitting in the stillness of just BEING WITH CHRIST as we step back into our common ordinary routines of life. We eat ordinary oatmeal for breakfast along with drinking an ordinary cup of coffee, or special latte which has now become ordinary because we drink it so much. That one makes me smile. We return to our ordinary schedules for work and school. In one sense, the Ordinary season which comes twice in the liturgical calendar of the year is a season of Sabbath to our souls. Our bodies, minds, and souls need a rest from all the wonderful Christmas and New Year celebrations.
So now that we are in the middle of Lent season to remember the time and events leading up to the death and crucifixion of Jesus, we are observing the ordinary rhythms within this special time of 40 days before Easter. Slowing ourselves down to times of reflection to be able to be aware of what the Holy Spirit is stirring in us to be transformed. The ordinary acts of “letting go”,
fasting (whether a particular food or action that we are doing without), prayer, forgiving others as we ask for forgiveness ourselves are all a part of Christian Spiritual Formation. Instead of being in a place of celebrating the coming Christ during Advent season, we are in a place of naming and grieving those things that are true losses.
We have to have these ordinary rhythms, routines, or experiences within these special seasons of our Christian lives, i.e. Christmas and Lent, because it reminds us to be centered with Christ in the “both/and” of celebration and grief. He doesn’t leave us when we’re looking at ourselves in very earthy ways as the Ashes on Ash Wednesday remind us. He doesn’t leave us as the Holy Spirt gently prods us to take a look at wounds that need healing, or sins that can come as a result of the wounds that need forgiveness. The grounding that the celebration and grief bring to us is once again that the presence of Christ through the Holy Spirit within us is with us constantly, ever present, to the whole person of you, to the whole person of me. To all of these ordinary rhythms within this special season of Lent, we thank you, Lord, that you love us insatiably and that you will never leave us.
Matthew 28:20: “And be sure of this, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” NLT.
