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Ordinary Time

"Ordinary Time" always seems to me a bit of a misnomer for the liturgical period we are now engaged upon. What can possibly be ordinary about salvation? We cannot always live on the peaks. The drama of Christmas came to a beautiful end at Candlemas and now we are back in our routine. Personally, I find Ordinary Time a kind of extended Holy Saturday. Nothing very much seems to be happening. We go on with the ordinary round, pondering the less magnificent passages of scripture, singing the less magnificent chants, doing the ordinary tasks of life. And all the while, just below the surface, so to say, something extraordinary is going on. Our salvation is being worked out "in fear and trembling", in ways we can only dimly discern. Ordinary time is just a heartbeat away from eternity.