The Christmas Season is over – Starting tomorrow we are seeking God in our usual ordinary walk of life

The Christmas Season is over. The Church gives us a necessary period of rest with no feasts before we enter the next cycle of preparation and feasts. Our life returns to its usual daily order. As Joseph Pieper explains, we cannot have festivity without have our usual “ordinary” life:

…[W]ork is an everyday occurrence, while a feast is something special, unusual, an interruption in the ordinary passage of time. “A holiday every day”—even every other day—is an idea that cannot be realized in practice; even though it may not necessarily run counter to the concept of festivity in itself, it is hardly feasible in the lives of men existing here and now. The festive quality of a holiday depends on its being exceptional. A festival can arise only out of the foundation of a life whose ordinary shape is given by the working day. (In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity, 1963, pp. 4-5)

Drawing on the root word of ordinary, this is a time when we are ordering our life towards God. We are putting order into our days. I was thinking about how Catechesis of the Good Shepherd refers to this as the “growing time”. Green vestments are worn during this liturgical season with the color green being the symbol of hope and victory, but also new life and growth. We are growing in our relationship with God.

And so the Church provides for us this time of growth. We have been given special gifts during the Advent and Christmas seasons, and now it is a time to put these gifts. This is a time for us to live as Christians, guarding and strengthening the life received at Baptism. We deepen our relationship as children of God, and fulfill our purpose as alter Christus (another Christ) and look forward to His Final Coming. We are contemplating, entering deeper into the mystery of Christ as revealed through this unchanging, customary and ordered Ordinary liturgical Time of the Year.

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