The unutterable preciousness of an ordinary day

A strangely named season of the Church calendar, Ordinary Time, is anything but that. Julie Canlis explores how it can point to wonder in the moments.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

A father sits on a bed and fixes the hair of his daughter standing in front of him

OPPO Find X5 Pro on Unsplash.

One of the strangest (and longest) seasons in the Church Calendar is called Ordinary Time. It feels caught like a fish out of water between the high pageantry of Easter and the thrill of Christmas. Ordinary Time – when school is out, and warm summer days are glorious – is there some mistake? Any kid with a high love of summer would know that the church had yet again missed the whole point.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Ordinary Time, despite its obvious insinuations for anglophones, means “boring” or even “not important.” It is not, after all, when the church gets a well-earned break from the supernatural, and things can be normal for a while. Nor is it when Jesus goes on vacation, alongside the rest of us. Despite the “terminological abomination” that is Ordinary Time (George Wiegel), Ordinary Time is when the church leans into the fact that all of life is sacred. All of life has meaning. Why? For Christians, it is because God decided to become human in every ordinary way, to bless and remind us that life is not so ordinary after all.

Because of this, no day can be a “time out” from the supernatural. Every day is now holy. And this is the riot of Ordinary Time.

The fact that God decided to walk our history in our shoes means that God’s life is available in all alleyways, everywhere, every minute. This means that every child whose knee has been scraped, and has been comforted, is in God’s territory. Every joy of friendship, and even rejection, has been experienced by the God-man. Every pubescent crush is understood. Every badly crafted project in our dad’s workshop or mom’s flour bin has also been in Mary’s kitchen or hanging on her wall. When Christians worship this God, they know that they worship someone who experienced everything that they are experiencing – every joy, every terror, and even the humdrum in between.

Because of this, no day can be a “time out” from the supernatural. Every day is now holy. And this is the riot of Ordinary Time, which has no holy-days but is itself one long holyday-holiday. And so, the church calendar is attempting to do precisely the opposite of carving up life into sacred and secular, a false division if there ever was one. The Church calendar integrates all things into the life of God who was also human, and so can testify to the goodness of jam and the horror of loneliness. This calendar, far from an attempt to lift people out of ordinary life, was an attempt to root them in the One who makes all things extraordinary. It’s no wonder that the chosen color for this season is green – that of new life, vibrant in its small seed-like ways, growing imperceptibly but persistently.

And this is why, when Christians have been vigilantes against things that prioritize the supernatural over the natural, the church has flourished for all classes. Even the good old stodgy Reformation forefathers (with their frilly collars) championed ordinary life as God’s sphere, against those who held it as lower on spiritual scale. Or again, there were Victorian priests like M. F. Sadler who intuited the dangers of church elitism and railed against “mischievous” theology cut-off from ordinary life. Or what of George MacDonald, Scottish pastor and fantasy writer, who says that Jesus’ miracles only seem like miracles because we take everyday life for granted. “How many more have the marvel of vision than those blind whom the Lord has healed.” He calls God the “divine alchemist,” turning every meal into a eucharist, not just the bread and wine on the high altar.

Today is the stillpoint from which all the days since our birth have been stretching forward. And today is the point from which all days rush toward our end

“Ordinary Time” in the Church Calendar is the season of the sacred ordinary. Or the ordinary extraordinary. Fifty days after Easter is “Whitsun” or Pentecost when, according to the history of the early church by Luke the doctor, the Holy Spirit came upon all people – young, old, men, women, Greek, African, slaves. The Spirit (and love) of Jesus was handed over to these ordinary people to continue what Jesus started. And that day the church was born. And here we are, 2,000 years later, as the same ordinary church, invited to hallow something as ordinary as time itself. How differently would we live, if we were able to recognize the unutterable preciousness of today? To be aware that we will never be given this particular day again? Today is the stillpoint from which all the days since our birth have been stretching forward. And today is the point from which all days rush toward our end. Without knowing this, and finding ways to honor it, can we be living at all? This is the invitation of Ordinary Time.

Snippet

Creed

Fun & play

Music

12 August 2025

2 min read

The nuns leaning into the serious business of fun

The beats breaking down barriers

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Sister Marizele and Sister Marisa.

Summer is for letting your hair down and water pistols. But in an age where we're super-soaked with content online, how did a couple of nuns in Brazil emerge through the saturation? As Sister Marizele sang and beatboxed, Sister Marisa danced on a Brazilian Catholic television show. They've now recorded their song, 'Vocation'.

Even though their online content was more about vocation than vacation, it's attracted huge numbers. “Why did something so simple and spontaneous take on such a huge scale?” asked Sister Marizele, “Because the Holy Spirit wants to touch people’s hearts.” “But besides the Holy Spirit,” she told the New York Times, “there’s also the algorithm.”

The algorithm's clearly helped. One of the nuns' colleagues came back from vacation to keep the content going online. Instead of only a handful of prospective nuns per year, they had over 50 women get in touch in a matter of days to ask about embarking on the life of a nun ahead. The nuns believe that God wants to draw young people to church in a country where church attendance has dropped off a cliff. Perhaps they should seek advice from Whoopi Goldberg, who has given them her blessing as a 'real-life ‘Sister Act’.

They aren't the only ones. Father David Michael is an American Catholic priest on Instagram (sometimes breakdancing) with 1.2 million followers who combines an uncompromising message with a sophisticated understanding of the need to hook people in the first three seconds of a video. This all doesn't paint the the staid picture of the church we expect. The iconoclastic act of beatboxing on TV isn't just breaking down beats, but the image of religion as being fun-averse.

Perhaps there's more to fun than meets the eye. We might misconceive fun as shallow, frivolous and lacking in depth. But you can be both a nun, and fun. Maybe it's not just a case of unexpected possibility, but actually intrinsic to those with vocations in faith.

Yesterday I returned from a crematorium in the front passenger seat of the empty hearse. The driver, along with hilarious stories of funerals gone wrong, also told me about losing his own child ten years ago. 'They say time's a great healer. But it isn't. You don't get over it. You learn to cope with not getting over it.' Those who have suffered and still carry unimaginable pain can know what it is to laugh.

It's a similar depth of fun from the nuns that can speak into pain. Far from a gimmick, their skills haven't just been breaking down beats, but barriers. According to Sister Marizele, they've been "an instrument to become closer and break down barriers" with young women at drug and alcohol rehabilitation centres, where they otherwise had little to connect over.

It might seem an odd segue, but it's striking that Jesus' first miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding party. The sheer abundance of the wine signifies the abundance of what's possible when nuns lean into fun: restoration and community for addicts, purpose for people considering their calling, and – simply – joy. Joy for countless millions around the world watching on. Joy, as CS Lewis said, is the serious business of heaven.