Sufferings And Glory
As you can see, we’re back in green vestments again after all the color changes of Lent, Easter and Pentecost. You might be wondering what this new season is called. It’s the longest season of the year, stretching from Trinity Sunday all the way to Advent. But does it have a name? Some bright spark in the Conciliar Church gave it a great deal of thought and came up with a name for this time of year. They now call it “Ordinary Time,” as if to prove once and for all their utter lack of imagination and total contempt for anything approaching liturgical or even literary beauty. In their impoverished and linguistically challenged minds, they seek out a smug classification to call this half of the year. They couldn’t come up with anything outstanding or extraordinary that happens with regard to our Redemption—no Christmas to fill us with joy, Lent to make us repent, Passiontide to excite our compassion, there’s no Easter and Ascension to remind us of our ultimate glory. So what’s left? If there’s nothing extraordinary going on, then…. I know, let’s just call it “ordinary time”! Truly a low point in the already dumbed down liturgical language of the Novus Ordo.
In point of fact, the Church already had a name for these months that the woke folks now refer to as Ordinary Time. The real name for this season is Trinitytide. That might surprise many of us who are accustomed to hearing these green-vestment Sundays referred to as Sundays after Pentecost. Why don’t we just call it Pentecost Tide, or more properly Whitsuntide? There is a Whitsuntide of course, but it is limited to the Octave of Pentecost, when our focus is on the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost. But the length of time between now and Advent is too long to limit our thoughts to only one of the Three Persons of the Trinity. We concentrate instead on the Unity of the Trinity, the divine Being himself, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. It might be a good idea to revert to the ancient naming of our Sundays to Sundays after Trinity, not Pentecost. Before the Reformation, this was the name given to them in English-speaking countries, and it is still in use today in the Church of England. Some Catholic religious orders also continue this practice—the Dominicans for instance call today the Third Sunday after Trinity rather than the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost.
But enough talk about the name. What is Trinitytide all about? It begins, obviously with the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, and ends appropriately with our own four ends—death, judgment, heaven and hell. The first two of these four ends are our portal to one of the others, either heaven or hell. Our absolute final end will be either eternal union with that Most Holy Trinity in heaven, as we have been discussing during the Corpus Christi and Sacred Heart octaves, or our eternal separation from that Most Holy Trinity, something that would cause us never-ending suffering beyond imagination. So as we make our life choices, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Fortunately, we have the Sundays after Pentecost, Trinitytide, to help us make those choices the right ones.
The Sundays of Trinitytide, you see, describe, week after week, what happened during our Lord’s public life. Here then are the actions and teachings of our blessed Lord that we are asked to emulate and absorb into our own life. For example, this first green-vestment Sunday recounts how Simon Peter, James and John forsake their fishermen’s nets and follow Christ as his first disciples, fully resolved to follow what he teaches. It’s a timely reminder as we enter into this longest of the Church’s seasons what should preoccupy us in our own life more than anything else. No matter what our occupation or vocation in this life, it should be set aside, that is, deprioritized, no longer regarded as the chief focus of our life. Through our Lord’s invitation and the example of the apostles, we are called today to set aside our nets, nets that trap us in a daily routine of seeking prosperity and material gain, instead, seeing our Lord Jesus Christ as the end of all our endeavors. We are reminded today to follow Christ, that is, to be Christians, to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves, to be fishers of men. Once we make this fundamental choice in our life, once we have committed to this essential requirement, the rest will follow on almost automatically. We will listen week after week to our Lord’s teachings, his parables, his miracles of healing and other revelations of his own divinity. We will listen to his words, absorbing all the examples of Christ’s behavior and actions, learning along the way the kind of person we are asked to follow, the kind of person we try to become. If we use this time well, we’ll be ready to look death squarely in the face when November comes around. We’ll be emotionally prepared for the effects of our advancing age with its pains and illnesses, our bereavements, our anxieties over the toxic moral, social and political atmosphere that now pollutes our world. All these things will reach their climax at the Gospel of the Last Sunday after Pentecost with our Lord’s prophecies of the End Times. But if we make the effort to devote ourselves to understanding Trinitytide, Sunday by Sunday, we’ll be ready!
If we’re looking for a quick little sentence to remind us of our priorities during Trinitytide, we need go no further than the first sentence of today’s Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans. In just a few words, he reminds us that the sufferings of this life should be nothing to us when we compare them to the glory of the life to come. “I reckon,” he says, “that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” Instill these words in your head. Use the lessons we learn on each of these Sundays in Trinitytide to keep them in your head. God first, all else shall follow! And when we can’t help but “groaning within ourselves” at the things going on around and within us, dig deep into your head and pull out the gems of wisdom, the pearls of charity and healing, that come from our Lord’s words and actions described during Trinitytide, “waiting”, as St. Paul concludes, “for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.”