Years ago, there was an old “soap” on TV called The Days of Our Lives. I supposed that title was given to highlight how each day has its own special light and its own particular mood and how we are more attentive to the present moment when we recognize and honor the "special angels" lurking inside each hour. Every hour and day of the year have something special to give us, but often times we cannot make ourselves present to meet that gift.

We grasp this more easily for special seasons of the year. Even though we are sometimes unable to be very attentive to a season like Christmas or Easter because of various pressures and distractions, we know that these seasons are special and that there are "angels" inside them that are asking to be met. And this isn't just true for special seasons like Christmas and Easter. It's true too, perhaps especially true, for the season we call Ordinary Time – the season we are in right now!

Each year the church calendar sets aside more than thirty weeks for what it calls "Ordinary Time", a season within which we are supposed to meet the angels of routine, regularity, domesticity, predictability, and ordinariness. Like seasons of high feast, this season too is meant to bring a special richness into our lives. But it's easy to miss both that season and its intent. The term "Ordinary Time" sounds bland to us, even as we unconsciously long for precisely what it is meant to bring. We have precious little "ordinary time" in our lives for it draws forth a sigh along with the question: "What's that? When did I last have 'ordinary time' in my life?" For many of us "ordinary time" means mostly hurry and pressure, "the rat race", "the treadmill".

Many of us, I suspect, remember the opposite as being true for us when we were children. I remember as a child often being bored. I longed almost always for a distraction, for someone to visit our home, for special seasons to celebrate (birthdays, Christmas, New Year's, Easter), for most anything to shake up the normal routine. When you're seven years old, one year constitutes one-seventh of your life. That's a long time. Most children have enough of ordinary time.

However, as adults, for most of us don’t feel that way. The pressures, heartaches, illnesses, losses, demands, and seemly perpetual interruptions that beset our lives, though perhaps not normally recognized as "interesting times", are indeed the antithesis of routine, regularity, predictability, and ordinariness. And they deprive us of "ordinary time".

The church challenges us to be attentive to the various seasons of the year: Advent, Lent, Christmas, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. Today, I submit, it needs to challenge us particularly to be attentive to "ordinary time." Our failure to be attentive here is perhaps our greatest liturgical shortcoming.