Trinity Season Blues: In Defense of Going Through the Motions

The forty-day fast of Lent is more obviously demanding, but in my experience, the hardest part of the Christian year comes sometime around the middle of Trinity Season. By the time August and September roll around, Easter is months behind us and Christmas is months away, which means we are as far as can be from the great fasts and feasts of the church calendar. It is no coincidence that the lectionary readings for Morning Prayer in Trinity focus largely on the Israelites’ wilderness wanderings and the long arc of their chronic unfaithfulness across history. These twenty-something weeks of “Ordinary Time,” which comprise more of the Christian year than any other season, correspond to the centuries of waiting endured by the Hebrews between their exodus from Egypt –– a type of our deliverance from sin in Eastertide –– and the arrival of the Messiah on Christmas. This is the driest time of year, the time of year when life seems most thoroughly dominated by the merely secular, the time of year when compromise and laxity seem easiest to justify. Advent begins with the proclamation that it is “high time to awake out of sleep” (Romans 13:11), which presupposes that we have dozed off a little.

In Advent, we look forward to the joy of our Lord’s birth on Christmas; in Lent, we anticipate His glorious resurrection on Easter. The fast may be grueling, but we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the feast is right around the corner. It is all rather exciting. Trinity Season, on the other hand, is not exciting. In fact, Trinity Season can get rather dull, and the average Christian in 21st century America has little appetite for dullness. Our attention spans have atrophied from smart phones, social media, and 24-hour news. Is it any surprise that our Christianity too often boils down to a neverending search for spiritual experiences that will be sufficiently exciting to replenish our enthusiasm for the faith?

A Christianity that depends on perpetual excitement is a profoundly unstable thing, though. Given this state of affairs, we can hardly wonder at the vast numbers of young Christians who promptly quit the faith when they reach college, because while the world, the flesh, and the devil cannot offer true and lasting satisfaction, they can offer way more excitement than the church. When we conceive of our faith primarily in terms of feeling, and our feelings of spiritual enthusiasm begin to wane, we start to think something must be wrong with us. If this goes on long enough, we will probably start blaming the faith so we can stop blaming ourselves. This is an excellent formula for apostasy.

We often baptize our flightiness in religious matters by emphasizing “authenticity.” If we go to church just because we “should,” even when we don’t “feel like it,” we are probably being legalistic hypocrites, and everyone knows how harshly Jesus condemned the legalistic hypocrites of His day. Of course, we must take Scripture’s warnings against hypocrisy seriously. We must take care not to become like those described by Isaiah: “This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me” (Matthew 15:8). Nonetheless, allow me to suggest that there is a widespread problem with our barometer for “authenticity.” American Christians are so afraid of being Pharisees that they tend to distrust any kind of religious practice which does not spring from a place of spontaneous enthusiasm. In fact, many American Christians would be uncomfortable with the very phrase “religious practice,” which implies some amount of rigid structure and a certain indifference to how we happen to be feeling at the moment. “After all,” we say, “Christianity is not a religion; it is a relationship.” What we fail to account for is the fact that no relationship worth its salt is dependent on mere emotional whims. In fact, nothing good in life is. The Anglican writer Martin Thornton touches on this peculiar double standard in his book Christian Proficiency:

It is curious that the man who sticks to his job in illness, the sportsman who carries on in pain, the soldier who remains at his post in spite of wounds, are all subjects of admiration. None are doing brilliantly well but they are showing courage and stamina; we admire them in their hardship cheerfully borne, in their sinking of self-interest for the common good. Yet if we continue with prayer when it is dull and arid, we are ‘insincere.’ If we assist at worship when we are ill, tired, and distracted, we are ‘irreverent,’ and when a man under intense temptation struggles, falls, confesses; struggles, falls, confesses, over and over again without despair, then he is a ‘hypocrite.’

While we should not grow complacent or slack in our self-examination, sometimes the best thing to do is to simply get on with the work of prayer, worship, and virtue without worrying too much about whether or not we “mean it.” Self-examination is not a task we must complete on our own before we can fruitfully pray; rather, fruitful self-examination only happens in and through our prayer, as we continually bring ourselves before God and learn to see ourselves as He sees us. We all have more faulty motives than we realize, but let us not be so afraid of hypocrisy that we quit going to church. The church is the only place where hypocrisy can be healed.

More rigidly defined modes of worship, like those we practice at St. Matthew’s, are often criticized for being “unemotional” or “mechanical,” but a fixed, regular practice of prayer and worship should not be a tool with which to bury one’s pesky emotions. Instead, it ought to give us a stable framework in which to consistently deal with what we are really feeling. Without it, we are apt to fall into perpetual distraction on the one hand or endless wallowing on the other. When our feelings are tempestuous, a set rule of prayer is the ballast that keeps the ship upright. When we are in the doldrums and there is no wind in our sails, a set rule of prayer is the motor that keeps us moving forward. The beauty of liturgical worship is that it frees us from the need to artificially drum up any particular emotion; when we do not “feel like it,” liturgy helps carry us to the place where we do “feel like it.”

In the middle of Trinity Season, we may be discouraged by the feeling that we are “just going through the motions.” When our prayer feels driest, we may be tempted to abandon it for something that feels more exciting. However, as we patiently await the birth of the Christ child, Whose Advent seems so far away, it is a good time to keep on going through the motions. It is the time when we need the motions the most.