Each year as summer rolls around, we enter a new season in the life of the Church as well. The great Feasts of Easter, Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday have passed, and we enter into what may seem like a more routine period of the Christian calendar. This time “after Pentecost” stretches across summer and into autumn and is sometimes referred to as the long green season due to the green vestments that are worn. It is also sometimes known as Ordinary Time, but this name is deceiving. Ordinary here refers to these Sundays being numbered (the Third Sunday after Pentecost, the Twelfth, the Twenty-Second) not to this season being particularly mundane.
This season offers us an invitation: if there is nothing particularly ordinary about the Christian life, then perhaps this long green season is precisely the time for us to return to the foundations of prayer and discover again that to live as God’s people is anything but routine.
Summer can disrupt our spiritual patterns. There are the wonderful interruptions of vacations and travel along with an increased level of yard work and other activities. Maybe we were faithful in praying the Daily Office during Lent and Easter only to find the practice quietly lapsing by the middle of June. Perhaps Sunday attendance becomes more occasional rather than habitual.
Summer is certainly a season of openness and ease, but that openness can scatter us just as readily as it refreshes us. During this season, we should consider just what kind of rest we are really seeking. Rather than drifting from prayer, might we use this time to instead deepen our life with God?
This is not a call to some sort of summertime spiritual heroics but is rather a call to return to our foundations, to what the Church has long taught about how prayer is sustained across a lifetime.
The twentieth-century English priest and writer Martin Thornton has been a useful guide in my own spiritual life. His book Christian Proficiency highlights an ancient approach to the life of prayer, rooted like all of Anglicanism in Benedictine spirituality. Father Thornton draws attention to a threefold rule of prayer that is at the very heart of Anglicanism: the Holy Eucharist, the Daily Office, and personal devotion. He is clear that these are not three options from which a Christian might choose according to their own taste. Instead, they form a trinitarian whole, a structure in which each element supports and requires the others.
At the center is of course the Holy Eucharist, the source and summit of the Christian life. Gathering at the Lord’s Table shapes everything else we do as Christians. The Daily Office—Morning and Evening Prayer—extends that life of worship into the rhythm of each day, grounding us in Scripture, the Psalter, and regular prayer. Alongside these common prayers stands our own personal devotion: the individual practices of prayer, meditation, reflection, and intercession that allow faith to take root in the particular circumstances of our lives. Thornton said, “The Eucharist is the living heart of the Body of Christ… the Daily Office is its continual beat or pulse… and personal devotions are the circulation of the blood which gives life and strength to all its members.”
Ordinary Time is not so much an interruption of the Christian life but its normal habitat. None of this stands in opposition to summer rest and relaxation. The God who rested on the seventh day and who calls the weary to come and find rest meets us in this “ordinary” season too. To renew this rule of prayer in the summer does not mean burdening our rest but actually deepening it so that we discover that resting in God’s love and praying in God’s presence are really the same thing.
As we enter this long green season, may we receive it as a gift: a time to gather at the Table, to pray faithfully, and to nurture our life with God. There is nothing ordinary about being loved by God, and there is nothing ordinary about learning to receive that love more deeply.
The Rev. Canon Charles A. (Chas) Marks serves as the Canon for Common Mission of The Diocese of West Missouri. This position involves working directly with the Bishop to serve our ministries and leaders. His primary focus includes congregational development and vitality, leadership transitions, and oversight of Diocesan Convention.
The Rev. Canon Chas Marks
