The Weight of Ordinary Time
Why most of faith is lived without feast or vision
The liturgical calendar names most of the year Ordinary Time not because it is unimportant, but because it is unmarked. There is no approaching feast to organize the weeks, no penitential season giving shape to the days. It is simply time, one week following another, and it is here, far more than at Christmas or Easter, that most of a Christian life is actually lived.
It is also here that God's apparent silence is felt most acutely. Advent has its longing built in; Lent has its discipline. Ordinary Time offers no such scaffolding. Whatever silence a soul encounters, it encounters largely on its own, without a season to explain it.
Silence Misread as Absence
The quiet error that turns waiting into despair
We are quick to take an absence of answer for an absence of God quick to assume that if we cannot hear Him, He has stopped speaking, or worse, stopped attending. This is an understandable error, but Scripture will not let us make it so easily. Silence and absence are not the same thing, and the difference between them changes everything about how a soul is asked to wait.
The Witness of the Psalms
Lament as an act of trust, not despair
The psalms of lament cry out against a God who seems to have hidden His face "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" and yet they are prayed to that same God, not shouted into an empty sky. The very act of complaint presumes a listener. A soul that truly believed itself unheard would not bother to speak at all. The psalmist's anguish is, paradoxically, itself an act of faith.
The Cry from the Cross
Dereliction addressed, not abandoned
Even from the cross, the cry of dereliction "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is addressed, not abandoned into silence. It is directed at the Father, in the words of a psalm Christ would have known by heart, uniting His own experience of apparent abandonment to the long tradition of Israel's lament. If the Son himself could cry out in what felt like absence and still be heard, still be within the Father's will, then our own experience of divine silence need not mean what we fear it means.
The Mystics on Divine Hiddenness
What the dark night is not, and what it is
The mystics who wrote most searchingly about this the dark night, the cloud of unknowing did not conclude that God had left. They concluded that they had been brought somewhere further in, past the region where feeling and reassurance are given freely, into a place where trust has to do the work that feeling used to do. The dark night is not a sign of God's departure; it is, in their account, one of the more advanced stages of the journey toward Him.
Closing
None of this makes the waiting easier. It does not remove the ache of a prayer that seems to land nowhere. But it reframes the task. We are not called to manufacture a feeling of God's nearness, nor to treat its absence as evidence against Him. We are called to keep faith through Ordinary Time as through everything else showing up, asking honestly, and trusting that a Father who let His own Son cry out in apparent abandonment is not in the habit of actually abandoning anyone.