The Green and Risky Season

I know we haven't even hit Trinity Sunday yet, but my thoughts this morning turned to Pentecost.

I had some extra time at lunch and ran over to Cold Comfort Cottage to check on my newly planted onions and potatoes. The onions were half-dead-looking sets when I planted them, but have since perked up and maybe even grown a millimeter or two. The potatoes aren't doing anything right now.

Backyard gardeners and farmers alike know that planting is a risky business. A cold snap may freeze tender plants. A wet spell may rot seed potatoes. Too much hot and dry weather and seedlings may die a-borning. When I visited a local greenhouse this weekend to pick up some herb plants, the grower showed me how a very localized, unexpected hard frost had burned the top tier of leaves on most of his young tomato plants, right there in the greenhouse.

We church folk are wont to call Ordinary Time the "green and growing season" of the Church year -- that long, ritually uneventful stretch in the Church calendar when our attention turns to our living our faith into the everyday -- but it's also a risky season. Because we're called to live Christ in the world without knowing the result; without assurance of "success"; sometimes at great cost to us.

It's not easy being green.