The Season after Pentecost & the Daily Offices

Beloved in Christ,

The weather is changing, the sun is setting earlier, the air is getting cooler. Though the days are still warm, the nights have that quintessential and crisp autumnal bite to it - and I relish it so! Ads on TV are shifting towards the Christmas season, and the cool air seems to remind us that change is - quite literally - in the air.

But in our liturgical rounds, we continue to plod - for a few more weeks at least - through the Season after Pentecost, the weeks following the fateful event that we recounted seemingly forever ago (but technically, Pentecost was Sunday, June 8).

We call this time ordinary time - not because it is plain or common - but because it is ordinal. We count the weeks in an ordinal framework, “the first week after Pentecost,” “the second…” and so forth.

It is the longest season we have in the Church year!

And sometimes, it feels the most monotonous. 

There are no major religious holidays to break up the week-after-week goings-on in the Scriptures. We find ourselves - or at least, I can find myself at times - feeling that the lessons from Holy Scripture blur together into one long theme that I can’t quite make out.

And it is during this time that I am grateful for the Daily Office - the daily round of prayer offered to us in the Book of Common Prayer, unique to the Anglican tradition. It consists of Morning Prayer, Noonday Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Compline.

It is a means of spiritually anchoring ourselves in the midst of so much… plodding! It is prayed even when we don’t feel like praying, because it is meet and right to offer prayer to God. To read the Holy Scriptures daily. To intercede on behalf of one another and the world. To ask for forgiveness and to seek God’s grace every day - even multiple times a day!

It is a spiritual practice, a spiritual discipline, and one I find myself giving thanks for as I reflect over these many months in Pentecost, and as we enter a new season of cooler weather.

Advent, the start of the Christian new-year, is upon us in but a few weeks! I will try to savor the weeks we have left in Pentecost, and continue on the daily rounds of prayer in the meantime.

If you haven’t yet experienced the Daily Office, I encourage you to come to Morning Prayer at 7:00 am, offered at this church Monday - Thursday (M/W in person, T/Th on Zoom), or to Evening Prayer at 6:00 pm on Wednesdays (in person). It can be a wonderful way to encounter our loving God through the rhythms of the Anglican tradition.

And it is another wonderful way to engage in the ongoing prayer and mission of St. Andrew’s, to serve as a congregation that prayerfully acts in the name of our loving Lord, Jesus Christ, for one another, for Tucson, for our world.

Yours in Christ,

Alex+