June Saints and Seasons article

 Saints & Seasons 

            So much of our lives are ... ordinary. Cooking and cleaning, mowing the lawn and going to work, taking the kids to piano lessons and ball games and parties, changing the bed; in short,  juggling the hundred things that need to be done. Just ordinary. And here we are entering into what is sometimes called “ordinary time.” The longest season of the church year, it continues until late November, when the year culminates in Christ the King and falls quietly back into I Advent and we begin again. The color of the season is green, the color of growth. One year, ages ago, in the old church, Fr Lief brought a little eugenia tree into church and let it grow all throughout the season just as a reminder.  It’s name was Eugenia. 

Until the 1979 Prayer Book (which some of us still call the New Prayer Book!) the season was called Trinity or Trinity-tide. It was changed for ecumenical reasons to The Season of Pentecost so now all of our readings at the Sunday Eucharists are the same in the Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopal churches.  But the season of Pentecost begins with Trinity Sunday, one of my favorite days. It reminds me that even the Holy One is a community of love flowing form the one to the other. It is matrix in which we live and move and have our being. We are created by God the Father, redeemed by the Son and sanctified, indwelt, inspired by the Holy Spirit, not once but over and over again over our long lives. Or over a short one. 

If we could but remember this, that we live and breathe within the Holy Trinity, that we not only have access to this Love, but that we actually participate in this Life, no task would be small, no day would be ordinary, for 

The word is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness like an ooze of oil 

Crushed. And why do men now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is smeared with trade; bleared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares

man’s smell: the soil  Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. 

And for all this, nature is never spent; 

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, spring -

Because Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins

  19th c. English priest and poet

                                           Louise Buck 

                                                                                                      June 2013