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Fallow time, fruitful seasons: the Parish in Summer

Summer is a fallow time in the parish. The choir leave for July and August. Parish activities wind down. Clergy duties ease. Sunday congregations grow smaller, parishioners enjoying holidays.

It is a time to be cherished. A sabbath in the parish year. A time when the busy routines of parish life pause, and the gift of rest and recreation brings refreshment to body, mind, and spirit.

The mind that comes to rest is tended

In ways that it cannot intend:

Is borne, preserved, and comprehended

By what it cannot comprehend. - Wendell Berry, Sabbaths, 1979 II.

Sunday services can take on a different character during Summer. Hymns but no choral music. Gloria, Gospel responses, and Sanctus said, not sung. 

I rejoice in the gift of the Anglican choral tradition, particularly Choral Evensong. Sundays in Summer, however, can bring a different gift, something of the quietness of Early Communion. Said Evening Prayer on Sunday evenings in Summer has, for me, a particular delight. It is a time when an older Anglican practice may reassert itself, of services read in the parish church.  In Summer we can recover why the Prayer Book rubric says "said or sung", experiencing the quiet grace and simplicity of the said service.

The Countrey Parson, when he is to read divine services ... - George Herbert, The Priest in the Temple (1652); 

I preached and read Prayers there in the morning ... and read Prayers there in the afternoon - Parson Woodforde's diary, 3rd July 1763;

Let me then once more press upon the younger clergy, the advantage, indeed the necessity, of reading the service of the Church with the greatest attention and devotion - Henry Handley Norris, A Manual for the Parish Priest (1815).

Summer is a time when coasts and forests, lakes and parks can fill the long days, when family and friendships can be renewed, when weightier tomes can - for the moment - be set aside and some lighter reading enjoyed. 

A time when we can be brought to a deeper thanksgiving for "our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life".

Send us health and peace, justice and truth, good laws and good government; an excellent religion, undivided, undisturbed; temperate air, seasonable showers, wholesom dews, fruitful seasons: crown the year with goodness, and let the clouds drop fatness, that we may glorify thy name, and confess thy goodness, while thou bearest witness to us from heaven, filling our hearts with food and gladness - from the Prayer for the Catholick Church in Jeremy Taylor's Communion Office.

Summer can be for the parish a sabbath in which our delight in the goodness of the created order is refreshed. A quieter time when the rhythms of said services can nourish the soil of the heart. A fallow time that we may know fruitful seasons. May this Summer be such a time for us all.

After a break for the Summer, laudable Practice will return on 31st July.

(The photograph is of a Summer's Day at The Middle Church, in the heart of Jeremy Taylor country.)


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