26th Sunday after Pentecost Thoughts About Our Liturgical Year

The Liturgical Year continues to wind down on this 26th Sunday after Pentecost. We've set our clocks back (in this part of the world). Thus the sun rises an hour earlier and sets an hour earlier. So the morning isn't as dark, but the evening has crept up upon us as it always does this time of year.

At this point, most of us are likely fully in "winter mode" as a result. Sure, "official" winter doesn't begin until shortly before Christmas. But this "official" stuff is a recent invention in the course of the centuries of Liturgical Years that preceded us. With some variation, our forefathers were more or less already in "winter mode" by now.

And so it is, really, for those of us who can hear the approaching footsteps of Advent and the beginning, yet again, of a new Liturgical. Year.

In our daily posts, we feature an annual series of suggestions for planning for next year. It's not that we're early here. We do thisfor two reasons:

First, planning is most effective done in advance. So the serious secular world endeavors to put its plans together before year-end - and well-before if these are to be distributed and taken seriously by those expected to follow the plan. Simple, right?

Experience tells us, though, that many of us worker bees - whether managers or actual grunts in the trenches - wait too long and the New Year arrives without some clear sense of where we want to direct our efforts for the coming 12 months.

And so the early start serves mammon - in a good way.

Second, our planning lands on our plates here because we want to align ourselves with our Liturgical Calendar. And this, of course, serves our spiritual lives.

Bringing the Liturgical Year into our daily orbit helps keep us grounded in the supernatural. We need no help with being immersed in the natural. But we must make an effort to be aware of the supernatural. 

But not just aware: We must live in the supernatural. Ultimately it is reality in its fullness. Being immersed in the supernatural means we're dealing with reality as God created it, not the "reality" that the world, the flesh, and the devil concoct for us.

With the waning of this Liturgical Year, we may want to assess how we've done with lifting our gaze from the natural to the supernatural. 

Whatever our current state, we can now determine to seek to live in the Light of the Supernatural, rather than to remain chained, weighed down, in the merely natural.

Not that the natural world is any way denigrated by our preference for the supernatural. It was created by God, and so it is good in itself. But it was created to assist us in getting to Heaven, not for us to remain "stuck" here. After all, as we know, our First Parents Original Sin caused the Gate of the Garden to be barred from our enjoyment in this world. 

Will this world somehow be transformed at the end of time back to a Garden of Paradise? Well, that's getting into esoteric areas reserved for theologians and mystics. For us regular, earthly creatures, it's enough to make a sincere intention to seek the Light of the Supernatural each day to guide us in our daily prayer and work (ora et labora).

And one way to support our intention, to help bring it to fruition, is to follow the Liturgical Year beginning with the 1st Sunday of Advent. 

It's thus time to prepare, to take all this seriously.

This 26th Sunday after Pentecost brings us the respite from our usual daily routines and thus the time to begin our preparation.

Happy Sunday!