No doubt about it: the daily, the normal, the regular, the common is what gives clarity to the essence of the real self.

So important is this notion of shaping the interior life, of interiorizing what we commonly, even casually, declare publicly that we believe, that two periods of the liturgical year are made up of no great earthshaking mysteries of the faith at all. These periods call for no rigorous fasts. They develop around no overwhelmingly impressive feasts. It is simply the continuous, faithful, weekly attention to what it means to live out daily what we say we believe when we’re at those mountaintop moments of the spiritual life.

Almost two-thirds of every year is spent simply learning the fine art of living the Christian life. The liturgical year, we know, simply calls it, “Ordinary Time.”

But the truth is that there is nothing ordinary—if by ordinary we mean inferior or less important—about a period such as this at all. This, on the other hand, is the extraordinary period of coming to see the world through the eyes of Jesus. It is the period of catechesis in the faith, of immersion in the Scriptures. It is the time when the implications of Easter and Christmas become most clear to us all. It is decision time: will we take Easter and Christmas seriously or not?

It is the time between times, yes, but it is much more than that. It is the period after each of the major seasons and cycles that immerses us in the implications of what it means to wait for the coming of the Christ into our own lives, to wait for the fullness of time in the next. But Ordinary Time has an even more impacting effect than that. Like an echo off a mountain that ripples and repeats itself down the valleys of life, the Sundays of Ordinary Time stand as stark and repeating reminders of the center of the faith. Each Sunday, remember, is a feast, a little Easter, in its own right. Unencumbered by the overlay of any other feast, they carry within themselves, stark and unadorned, the essence of the Sabbath Day. Each of them is Easter, a return to the core of the faith, the call of the Christian community that “Jesus is risen.” Week after week we go back to the center of the system, not because there is some unusual kind of event going on but precisely because this is normal to the faith.

Ordinary Time is a time for making the faith the force of daily life. This is the time that makes dailiness, stability, fidelity, and constancy the marks of what it takes for Christians to be Christian the rest of the year.

—from The Liturgical Year (Thomas Nelson), by Joan Chittister