Celebrating the Liturgical Season

Just like the yearly calendars that organize the rest of our lives, the church's calendar organizes our worship into seasons that provide us opportunities to observe, commemorate, and celebrate certain events or occasions each year. Each of these seasons comemorates the origins of important parts of our Faith, and you'll hear and see it in the Gospel readings, prayers, special church programs, and even in the colors of the priests' robes.

The powerful thing about the Christian church calendar and seasons, though, is the path they take us down each year. As one theologian puts it, "The sequence of festivals from Advent to Resurrection Sunday becomes an annual spiritual journey for worshippers as they kneel at the manger, listen on a hillside, walk the streets of Jerusalem, hear the roar of the mob, stand beneath the cross, and witness the resurrection."

Ordinary Time

Right now, we are celebrating Ordinary Time, the part of the church year that comes after Pentecost and before the whole cycle begins anew in Advent.

Rather than meaning plain or boring, the term ordinary in this sense comes from the word "ordinal," which simply means counted time. In Ordinary Time, we count out the remaining 33 or 34 weeks of the church year. We tend to important business, faith development, and the mission of our Church in the world until the First Sunday of Advent, when a new year begins with the prophecy that a Messiah shall be born as a child.

The traditional color associated with Ordinary Time is green, which is usually associated with new life and growth. Even in Hebrew in the Old Testament, the same word for the color “green” also means “young.” In Christian tradition, green came to symbolize the life of the church following Pentecost, as well as symbolizing the hope of new life in the resurrection.