Like Advent, the season of winter is a season full of darkness, cold, and waiting. Winter creates limits–the days are shorter, we’re stuck inside, and the sun itself (or at least its warmth) is elusive. Often we can even be closed off in our own minds, as the dark and cold work their way inward.

But the story doesn’t end there. The limits aren’t just a challenge–they are an opportunity.

The constriction–of time, space, and everything we do with both–gives us a chance to work within it. To create concentrated warmth and cheer. To make rich food and hot drinks. To tell stories. To linger. To see each other more fully, in long conversations by the fire.

This is a poignant picture of the life of the church. We see darkness and cold all around us. But with our redeemed imaginations, we can not only acknowledge these things; we can live in intentional defiance of them, for the life of the world.

Our winter content will focus on this theme–the reality of the darkness, but a calendar full of warmth, cheer, and hope that go out in defiance of it.

Spring is undoubtedly a season of rebirth. Just when we despair that we might never see green again, the earth gently rallies from the silence of winter. Leaves begin to unfurl, blooms appear, and the sun shines brighter. Life springs out of cold and darkness into warmth and light, and all around us, creation shouts the praise of the one who touches our hearts and turns them from dead stone to living flesh. In some ways, it is easy to find celebration and hope in this season. 

But in springtime, we also discover a tension between hope and the human tendency to despair. Before we arrive at the crashing joy of Easter, we must first pass through the Lenten season and a keen awareness of our mortality. Before Christ rose from the tomb, He had to be stricken, smitten, and afflicted. Before gardens rise from the dirt, seeds must first die in burial. As God makes all things new, we must still journey homeward, often through pain and suffering. This tension will teach and shape us if we let it.

Despair can hold many guises, and this season we will peel back the layers and note how it hides in our lives as Christians and in the world around us. We will also explore what it looks like to hold hope–the gritty, robust kind — amid our grief and the broken story that despair mutters. In this season, we will focus on what hope truly is (and what it isn’t) and lean into ways that we can “practice resurrection” as Wendell Berry put it.

Reflection Questions:

• What are some ways that we can lean into the coming of spring and gratefully reflect that in our life rhythms?

• What are some ways that nature and the outdoors reflect the duality of our theme, for instance Christ's death and resurrection?

• What are some ways that we can practice resurrection in our lives, especially when there's a disconnect between the season and what we're experiencing?

• What are some tiny practices that help with that?

In the church calendar, more than half of the year is given over to “Ordinary Time.” Coming from the word ordinal, which means “counted,” this time is far from a mere placeholder between holidays. We are urged to count each day, each hour, each minute like precious stones on an altar. Indeed, these "small bits" make up the "sites of our worship," as Tish Harrison Warren puts it.1] 

Yet, this simple call is not an easy one. It is often hard to recognize the moments of our days, filled with miscellaneous and routine tasks, as the holy ground where we encounter God. And while life is punctuated with extraordinary and defining moments, we live in the ordinary and average, day in and day out. Whether it is due to sheer boredom from the monotony or sheer exhaustion from our burdens, we forget to notice the everyday glories which are teeming over in praise to their creator. How do we begin to have the ears to hear, the vision to notice, and the courage to join their song? 

As Warren puts it, “some of most astonishing gifts are the most easily overlooked.”[2] This season, we will seek to cast our eyes, once again, to what’s in front of us — at the glories found in the ordinary, the plain stuff that fills our schedules, our closets, and our worries — and not stopping there, but seeing through them to what Grand Story they participate in. It may, possibly, be only then that we can genuinely have the capacity to revel in the lilies of the field while not diminishing the reality of our pains and struggles. For only in the narrative of Christ’s cosmic story do both aptly fit In this season, we will focus on what “ordinary” truly is (and what it isn’t) and lean into each site of worship, no matter how routine, humdrum, simple, awful, or awesome it is. 

For this is the day the Lord has made. 

Reflection Questions: Please think of all five of your senses as you answer these prompt questions!

• What are ways that we can lean into the coming of summer and gratefully reflect that in our life rhythms? Summer can seem like a vast stretch of time, so how can we combat that and give meaning?

• What helps you lean into counting your moments as sacred in the summertime? 

• When you think of summer and your everyday life, what extraordinary but overlooked treasures come to mind? Extraordinary or plain and ordinary ones?

_____ 

[1] Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (InterVarsity Press, 2016), 20.

[2] Ibid., 35.

“In celebrating this feast we declare that evil and death, suffering and loss, sorrow and tears, will not have the final word.” -Douglas McKelvey, “Liturgy for Feasting with Friends,” from Every Moment Holy, Vol. 1.

In the autumn, the trees turn golden in preparation for emptiness. The air gets crisp–ready to be cold. The light begins to fade into gray. Crops that have been growing all year are harvested before they die. And many of us already begin to feel wistfulness for the life that is disappearing before our eyes.

But of course, before the chill gray truly moves in, there are fall glories: apple picking, favorite films, harvest festivals and celebrations, annual culinary favorites, and yes, pumpkin spice lattes. A harvest feast takes things that are dying and, in a way, marks them for eternity–in the form of unforgettable flavors and memories. In fact, in the waning days of the long green season before Advent, the Church has long celebrated Allhallowtide, three days of feasting that connect our gratitude for the past with our hope for the future.

The world around us is quick to dismiss the past. And we Christians have sometimes been too quick to join our neighbors in writing things off that “don’t last.” But autumn is an opportunity to do something different: to recognize that our timeless God works in things that appear to be fleeting, and to consecrate the moment for eternity. We do this when we cook for a feast. When we sing and laugh in the face of darkness. When we give thanks for the saints of the past. When we find new ways to repurpose old things. And when we learn, bit by bit, to live each moment like it is part of a larger story.

In this season, we will focus on the idea of the harvest feast (drawing inspiration from Allhallowtide), and the creative and hopeful art of marking the dying for resurrection.