Extraordinary Time

At the beginning of this week, I went on the long trip to the water to make my offerings and usher in Extraordinary Time, the end of the Christian time and the beginning of the witch’s season. On the water I sat there and admitted that I was scared, that I was niggled by little worries and could not relax into the joy that the water brings. And the clear water and the sand and pebbles did bring joy. The water spoke of eternity. I traced the sigils on the sand of the Workings I had done, and watched the waves take them back. I ran along the water looking for the gift the waves had for me, and took up a double pronged wand that was as dark as the straight bleached one the water gave me the year before. I don’t know how to do this new magic, but I don’t have to know. Soon I will be taught, if I can shut the silly parts of myself up long enough to listen.

The old way and everything that occurred last year is a model, but only a model for what is about to come. Now we are doing a new thing. Part of me is the Fool Card. I strive to be the spiritual traveler who expects good things, but the other part of me is often dizzied by fears. I see monsters where they are not. Sometimes I see them where they were before. I haven’t quite come out of the war zone. There is still a little trauma. This time around I have a working camera that can take the image of the Red Ram and remind me Khnum is the master of formations, the Lord and Master of Arts. Before they called the goat Devil or Baphomet or Bucca even, he was Khnum and he still is.

Extraordinary Time. It was the word I coined because the liturgical year ends in churches and when they settle down to doing the same thing over and over it is called Ordinary Time. Recently I’ve learned that another word for the long form Latin Mass is Extraordinary Mass. That is to say, the regular mass I grew up with in English is ordinary, but the much longer, more ornate mass in Latin, which all Catholic churches used before 1963, the one where congregants are usually dressed, the women veiled, where the chanted service takes far longer than anything we know now, is called the Extraordinary form. The extraordinary form is the old form and the form taking its time, the form that is always in celebration, that rather than moving into the speed of modernity, goes deeper into what was lost. What is more, this is the form that more and more Catholics are reverting too. I will not. That is the way to characterize Extraordinary Time. It demands beauty. It demands depth of dedication and worship. It goes back and back and seeks to retrieve what was lost. It seeks to maintain beauty and wonder in devotion.

But then, at this very moment we are in truth, in an extraordinary time. Things are quite really nailbiting. We don’t know how to make sense of what’s going on and there is the feeling that this is because there is, in fact, no sense. The old Christian woman in her rocking chair knowingly saying “God has a plan,” seems to be about wishful thinking. But then that was always true.  As we proceed into Extraordinary Time, I do not understand the rhythm and don’t quite get the language. It reminds me, in fact, of the first time I went to an Extraordinary Mass (and didn’t stay). Where I thought I would get it, thought it would be just like regular church, but in another language, and did not know the entire form was different, that there were no opening hymns, that psalms were where opening prayers would be. I didn’t even know they were psalms because they were in Latin. There were only a few things I could catch onto, and in the end it was best to let those go too. I think this may be the first rule of Extraordinary Time as well.