As the sacrament coordinator at Christ the King Parish in Regina, I have the great pleasure of welcoming dozens of new babies and children into the Church community through the sacrament of baptism every year and, along with that, meeting new parents, some of whom are making their way back to the Church after some time away. The faith journeys of these new parents are each unique – the detours they took along the way, the paths that brought them back – but there is a common theme that runs through not all, but most, of the stories they tell when I ask them why they have chosen to have their child baptized, often after spending years away from the sacraments themselves. Usually, it’s the faith habits of their childhood – and their own experience of receiving the sacraments and wanting the same for their children – that draws new parents back to the Church.
But when I invite new parents to share some of those memories of faith life in their childhood, oddly enough, the family traditions of Christmas and Easter seldom come up. People rarely mention Advent wreaths, Lenten fasts, Christmas Eve Mass, or Easter Vigil. Instead, it’s the regular, ordinary moments and traditions that these new parents tend to remember – weekly Mass as a family, grace around the supper table, Bible stories read at bedtime, the rhythm of the rosary prayed in the evening. It is these simple faith moments and habits that new parents long to recreate in their own families, and baptizing their child is often their first step on this reclaimed path back to living out the Catholic faith in their home. And there is no better time in the liturgical year to build the habit of a living faith than Ordinary Time.
Ordinary Time is time along the journey to put your head down and make up some ground. In the ordinariness of it all (no weeks-long seasons of preparation leading up to giant feast days), we get to build habits, doing over and over, for a season at a time, the same things until they become routine. And in the habitualness of it, we get to cover real territory in our spiritual journey, establishing a regular prayer life, building virtue, and developing a habit of hope that can support us through the valleys on our journey ahead.
Read the rest of the article, including three things we can do during Ordinary Time to build faith habits that can carry us through the inevitable highs and lows of the spiritual life here.
