(Finding meaning and freshness in the liturgical ‘in-between’)
Somewhere around the second or third Sunday after Pentecost —just after the last “Alleluia” from Eastertide has faded and the clergy have dutifully packed away the white vestments — there comes a curious feeling among church folk. It’s the same feeling you get when you’ve put away the Christmas tree, vacuumed up the last of the tinsel, and looked around the living room wondering, “Now what?”
Welcome, friends, to Ordinary Time — the long, verdant stretch of the Church’s calendar sometimes affectionately (and accurately) known as The Long Green Season. From Pentecost all the way to Advent, it stretches before us like an unending prairie highway — green as far as the eye can see, with nary a liturgical hill or festival in sight.
This is the season that can make even the most faithful parishioner glance at the calendar and sigh, “Are we still in Ordinary Time?” Yes. Yes, we are. And we will be… for quite a while.
But don’t let that verdant sameness fool you. There’s more life in this season than meets the eye.
Ordinary Time, you see, is not a pause between the big stuff — it IS the big stuff. It’s the time when the fireworks of Easter settle into the steady flame of discipleship. The Holy Spirit, having made its grand entrance at Pentecost, now rolls up its sleeves and gets down to the quiet business of growing us into Christ’s likeness — inch by inch, Sunday by Sunday, like tomato plants in a patient gardener’s care.
That’s why the liturgical colour is green. It’s the colour of slow, steady growth — of chlorophyll, renewal, and photosynthesis. It’s the hue of the Spirit’s sanctifying persistence. God does some of the best work in the long middle — between the thunderclaps of Pentecost and the trumpet of Advent.
If we think of Christmas and Easter as the feasts, Ordinary Time is the family dinner table — the place where we learn how to live with each other, how to love one another, how to pass the peas without resentment.
It’s where faith stops being an event and starts being a habit.
In the Long Green Season, there are no angels singing in the fields, no stone rolled dramatically away. Just the steady rhythm of prayer, service, and community. It’s the time of the Church at work: choir rehearsals, coffee hours, parish council meetings (heaven help us), and the small, holy heroics of ordinary Christians showing up, week after week, with open hands and open hearts.
One might compare it to life between paydays — steady, uneventful, but utterly necessary. For it’s in these “ordinary” stretches that we discover whether faith has truly taken root, or whether it was merely an emotional high from the feast days.
So, if you find yourself growing weary of green, take heart. Ordinary Time is not spiritual filler — it’s formation. It’s the holy middle where the Gospel seeps deep into the soil of our lives and grows something lasting.
The saints, after all, were not forged on Christmas morning or Easter Day — they were formed on the long, green road between them.
So press on, my friends. Sing another hymn, brew another pot of after-church coffee, and let grace do its slow, faithful work. Ordinary Time may be long — but so, thank God, is the patience of the One who walks beside us through every shade of green. But also, take heart, friends, There are only 3 more Sundays until Advent… and one of them is white.
A Prayer for the Long Green Season
Gracious and ever-patient God,
you are Lord not only of our feast days,but of our Tuesdays, our errands, and our coffee hours too.
Teach us to love the long, green stretches of life — those steady, unremarkable days when faith must grow quietly or not at all. When we yearn for fireworks, give us roots. When we crave novelty, grant us depth. When we tire of “ordinary,” remind us that your grace is anything but.
Bless the slow work of your Spirit in us — the humble habits of prayer, the unseen kindnesses, the steadfast turning toward love.
Make us faithful in the small things, content in the in-between things, and joyful in all things, until we see your harvest come in full.
Through Jesus Christ, who walks with us through every season, and makes even the ordinary holy.
Amen.