language and liturgy

oh no. i can hear some of you groaning it; i know. but please, bear with me here. because it probably isn't what you're thinking, at least not quite.

before the huge change in the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church, the liturgical season had a lot of nuance, even more than now. don't get me wrong, the seasons of the Church still are beautiful and meaningful. during my stint with protenstantism, before i had any idea what the "Latin Mass" was, before i'd ever  heard of the "traditional" anything catholic (then, "traditional" was synonymous with "orthodox." one thing that continues to strike me as unquantifiably odd since then is how it is often the "orthodox" Catholics who are most contemptuous of Traditional Catholicism. ahem. rabbit tracks. apologies.) . . . before all that, one of the two things i missed most in the protestant church was the liturgical year, the continuous remembrance, along with the natural world, of our continuous death and rebirth, of the continuous seasons of flux we experience in the spiritual life. i know some protestant churches have a liturgical cycle, but the one i was in did not. and i felt its lack enormously. in fact, that whole church did; they just didn't know it. having a liturgical cycle: Advent - Christmas - Lent - Easter - Pentecost, gives an overarching structure to worship. it is a beautiful and, i think, essential part of worship.

hey, some of you might say, you forgot a season. the longest one, in fact. Ordinary Time.
Ordinary Time.
Ordinary.
the term is a novelty, from the Vatican II Latin term for "Ordered Time," as in, the sundays that are numbered simply to keep track of them. (literally, it is "Tempus per annum": time through the year.)
Ordinary.
in one way, i can see this as fitting, or i can make it fit, like cinderella's glass slipper on the step-sister's abnormally large foot. after all, language, in a way, is so fragile, and if stretched too far, loses its meaning altogether. ordinary? yes, we live our ordinary lives, punctuated by the occasional feast day (and even more occasional feast day actually observed); we go about our daily business, washing dishes and clothes, cleaning bathrooms and floors, shopping and partying and visiting and reading, striving to sanctify and be sanctified in and by our every day moments.
instead, i offer you this, for what it is worth:

before this revision, before we were given "ordinary time," the largest time of the Church year was spent in the Time after Pentecost. the Church counted each Sunday as it followed this great feast, the birth of the Church and of evangalization of the Gospel. and one of the things i miss most about the Traditional calender, now that we have fallen into the routine of attending the "normal" Mass, is this term, this season of following, of living under, Pentecost.

el greco

for me, this gives far more inspiration, is a far better reminder, of what it means to sanctify and be sanctified. yes, we live our daily lives, mundane moments, hard days, glorious days, sleepless and sleep-in days, our duties and plays and chores and joys . . . yes, these things are our daily lives. they can be ordinary . . . or they can be infused with the Holy Spirit, lived in and through and for the evangelization of the world by our lives, as transformed by prayer and the sacraments (the nine days of prayer preceding Pentecost; the sacrament of confirmation, when He descended upon Mary and the Apostles, the first priests*); our ordinary moments can be transformed into "Holy Spirit" moments. not that every moment is obviously miraculous . . . but that at every moment, we can choose a small miracle: to hold our tongues and our tempers; to temper justice with mercy; to think a little less of o urselves and a little more of others. they may be ordinary moments, but these are not ordinary feats. we accomplish them only through the power of the Holy Spirit working in us and through us.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of the faithful and  enkindle in them the fire of Thy love.
Send forth Thy Spirit, and they shall be created
and Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.


*incidentally, the Apostles were another problem that i encountered in protestantism. i remember, even as a small girl going to a nondenominational sunday school, the teacher's highly unsatisfactory answer to my question: who are they?  why are they "Apostles"? why are they different from disciples? why are the Apostles called to "make disciples of all?" as a Catholic, of course, the answer is obvious: the priesthood. as a adult, i find an oddly powerful sense of comfort in that.