Dear Parishioners and Friend

This week the Church calendar moves from the season of Christmas into the season the Church calls “Ordinary Time”.  Because the term “ordinary” in English generally means something that's not special or distinctive, many people think that Ordinary Time refers to parts of the calendar of the Catholic Church that are unimportant. Even though the season of Ordinary Time makes up most of the liturgical year in the Catholic Church, the fact that Ordinary Time refers to those periods that fall outside of the major liturgical seasons reinforces this impression. Yet Ordinary Time is far from unimportant or uninteresting. We have Liturgical seasons for a reason: Lent and Advent are times of preparation; Easter and Christmas are special celebrations, and Ordinary Time is ordinary. But it is in this “ordinary” time that God offers us a chance to see the extraordinary. It is a time for seeing God’s goodness and love in the small things that can help us grow in our faith. We see this in this Sunday’s Gospel, which is actually the first Sunday celebrated in Ordinary Time. John the Baptist is pointing to Jesus as the Lamb of God.  We are reminded that it is in Ordinary Time in which Christ, the Lamb of God, walks among us and transforms our lives. There's nothing "ordinary" about that. The normal liturgical color for Ordinary Time—for those days when there is no special feast—is green vestments. This first period of Ordinary Time runs until Ash Wednesday when the liturgical season of Lent begins. Both Lent and the Easter season fall outside of Ordinary Time, which resumes again on the Monday after Pentecost Sunday, the end of the Easter season. This second period of Ordinary Time runs until the First Sunday of Advent when the liturgical year begins again.  The great saint of the “ordinary’ is St. Therese. Her "little way" teaches us to do the ordinary things of life with extraordinary love: a smile, a note of encouragement, a phone call, suffering in silence, always having a positive word, a simple unnoticed task to brighten the life of another, and so many other simple deeds, done with love – loving God in the ordinary. Let us pray that this may be our desire for this “Ordinary” season: we may love God in our extraordinary acts of kindness, forgiveness and love.
 

Father David Nolan