From the Archives: "Rediscovering the Rhythms of the Year"

Each month, our blog features articles from the archives of Liturgy. Our goal is to share the wisdom from decades past so that we might celebrate the work and insights of these excellent ministers and scholars.

With the goal of encouraging attention to the church calendar (the liturgical year), this article on “Rediscovering the Rhythms of the Year” is a meditation on the impossibility of locating time, knowing time, and pinning time down, and therefore the need for inserting into regular Sunday worship the means for acknowledging the changing seasons of nature. While Mackintosh explores the great gift of the liturgical year because it helps us know where we are in time, he also looks at the character of each of nature’s seasons and shapes a way to allow the natural world into the story of the liturgical year. His suggestions merge the natural seasons with the meaning of the church seasons, and he recommends not only marking the natural world’s changes in the church decorations but also at home, and particularly at the family dining table. –– Melinda Quivik

Selected Quotes from

“Rediscovering the
Rhythms of the Year”

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Oh, what a catastrophe… when [humans cut themselves] off from the rhythms of the year, from … union with the sun and the earth and the stars. This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars.

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Time is the ultimate mystery. It has been said in psychological terms that past and future are merely ego, and only the present is self. Thus, for Christians, there is little to do but practice the presence of God in the now, in the present moment. From another point of view, however, there is no present moment, there is no now. Augustine reminds us that even as we say the word, “now” the ”n” is already in the past and the ‘ow“ is yet to come. We can always slice time into thinner and thinner bits. No matter how small the time we seek to get hold of, however, it is always past or still to be. It is nowhere for us except in memory, perhaps, or anticipation. The present may be all we have, but we have it not at all.

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In the East, Christians call Pentecost “green Sunday”and continuing a custom from the days of the synagogue, fill the church on that day with green leaves, branches and the flowers of early summer. Green is more than a sign of hope; it is the color of life itself and of the Holy Spirit, the “giver of life.” In the Egyptian Pyramid Text, the life-giving god Kheprer is greeted in prayer with ”Hail, thou Green One!” The Western rite continues to use green vestments in the time after Pentecost, although the weeks of the year are no longer numbered with reference to the Fifty Days.

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We can create a seasonal environment. Not only the shrine, but many areas of the home and church can be decorated, especially those areas where people often sit. Let the environment truly reflect the season.

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Sam Mackintosh, at the time of this writing in 1980, was a liturgist at Sacred Heart Parish in Camden, New Jersey, and the editor of “The Greenblade” monthly newsletter about family religious customs.

Mackintosh, S. “Rediscovering the Rhythms of the Year.” Liturgy 1, no. 2 (1980): 71–75.

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