Ordinary Time: Pausing in Pandemic

As a Catholic child, I was super into ritual, pomp, and props. I loved the incense, I loved the stoles, I loved the giant crosses carried atop long poles. And I loved the ritual of changing the colors of all the formal vestments for the clergy and for the altar according to the calendar: Purple for Advent, Red for Christmas, you get the picture.

Green was for Ordinary Time.

But I never understood what Ordinary Time meant until I became Jewish.

Every single week, Jews around the world mark the transition between the special, holy, set-apart time of Shabbat and the rest of the week. Rather than an entire season called “Ordinary Time,” we have holidays set aside as distinct, Queen among them, Shabbat, a holiday that happens every seventh day. And so every single week, we bless the very fact of distinction, separation, and difference, in a ritual called havdalah.

Lighting a multi-wicked, braided candle that represents all the effort and work and creative energy of the six days of the week, we say blessings for light, and for wine, and for the spices whose scent helps ease the transition from the rest and communal joy of Shabbat to the productivity of another work-week.

When I was a Catholic kid, I thought Ordinary Time was boring, paling in comparison to the high liturgical drama of…