When the Homily is about Immunology

The Season of Bright Week

Generally all has been quiet on the northwestern front as of late. The hurried yet sacred pace of Holy Week leaves us now in Bright Week with a sense of What should we be doing? Well, one of the obvious answers is that we are doing alot of eating - in particular meat, but at the same time I personally find myself reflecting alot on Lent and of course the crescendo we call Pascha. More generally I am thinking about seasons.

"Nature" gives us seasons – a rhythm by which to play the music of life. Our modern society has to a large extent lost touch with this, but you can bet that it was a HUGE deal for agrarian cultures. Indeed, we humans have always lived amidst the seasons and we still to this day look upon them with a good deal of nostalgia. Despite our lessor dependence upon them, they still lurk and occassionally lord over us. So basic are the season to us, that they become for us very symbols of life, death, and rebirth.

The Church has also blessed us with different - yet related - seasons, which also are intended to be for us to be a rhythm of life. Fasting and Feasting, Repenting and Rejoicing, Prostrating and Dancing…on and on it goes. The whole of the Church is like a powerful slipstream which spans history, and as we enter into the rhythm of the ecclesial seasons – a sort of submitting to the wind – we begin to see just how these motions are joined to a whole and how they guide our lives. Not at all unlike how the solar seasons guide the life of a farmer.