Walking the Seasons: How the Church Year Guides Monastic Prayer
At Mother of the Redeemer Monastery, an Olivetan Benedictine house set among the moss-draped oaks of Plaisance in the Diocese of Lafayette, the monks greet the morning by chanting the psalms that the Church has sung for fifteen centuries. The season of the liturgical year decides which psalms, which antiphons, which readings are pulled from the heavy breviary on each monk's wooden prie-dieu. A reader wishing to glimpse the faces behind those voices can find brief portraits on the page that introduces meeting our community profiles of the monks. The page opens to the brothers who live out the vow of conversatio morum, the daily conversion of life, in a rhythm knitted to the calendar.
Across the hemispheres, Catholics in Brisbane, Melbourne, or Hobart walk the same yearly path, only inverted in season. While their American brethren pull on warm cassocks for an Australian summer Christmas, every parish and priory still turns with the same wheel of preparation, birth, passion, resurrection, and growth. A pilgrim stepping off a train at Central Station in Sydney with a retreat booking will find the chapel already dressed in the colour of the day, the readings chosen, and the silence tuned to whatever mystery the Church is contemplating that week.
The architecture of the liturgical calendar
The Church year is divided into six major seasons: Advent, Christmas, Lent, the Sacred Triduum (woven into Lent and Easter), Eastertide, and Ordinary Time. Each season stretches over weeks of preparation and celebration, with feast days and memorials of saints punctuating the rhythm like bell towers rising above a village skyline. The architects of this calendar did not design a museum tour of past events but a living cycle that draws believers into the saving mysteries of Christ as though they were happening now.
For the monks, the calendar functions as a daily rule of prayer. The Liturgy of the Hours shifts its antiphons with the season, the Eucharistic readings follow a multi-year cycle, and the brothers kneel for intercessions shaped by the tone of the moment — pleading in Advent, rejoicing at Christmas, lamenting in Lent. Outside the chapel, their manual labour in the garden, the kitchen, and the bindery follows the same pulse. Advent brings workshops for the poor, Lent brings simpler meals, and Ordinary Time brings the long steady work of building and study.
Australia's oldest Benedictine community, the abbey of New Norcia in Western Australia, observes the same architectural pattern in the wheatbelt north of Perth. Visitors there often remark that the calendar's order, when followed patiently, trains the soul much as a steady training regime trains an athlete for the Melbourne Cup later in the spring.
Advent: a season of holy waiting
Advent opens the year with four weeks of restraint. The Gloria is hushed, the organ softens, and the monks add extra silent hours of lectio to their day. They read the prophets — Isaiah, Micah, Zephaniah — and sing the great O Antiphons in the closing days of December, addressing Christ by His ancient titles: Wisdom, Key of David, Rising Sun, Emmanuel.
In the warm Advent evenings of southern Queensland, where parishes hold outdoor carol nights under jacaranda trees, the same restraint applies. The readings at Sunday Mass turn toward John the Baptist's cry in the wilderness, and the faithful are asked to ready a path in their hearts. A retreatant who joins the monks for an Advent weekend finds the breviary heavier than usual, the silence deeper, and the evening prayer extended by a meditative vigil before the Blessed Sacrament.
Christmas through Epiphany: word made flesh
When the vigil of the Nativity arrives, every stone of the chapel holds its breath. At the singing of the Gloria, the organ returns, bells ring, and the monks process with candles through the cloister. The Christmas octave stretches across eight days, each one unfolding another facet of the Incarnation, and the community reads prophecy after prophecy about the Child born in Bethlehem. Epiphany, falling on the Sunday after the octave's close in some Australian dioceses, sends the monks to the chapel of the Magi to honour the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
| Season | Length | Central Mystery | Monastic Emphasis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advent | 4 weeks | Christ's first coming and final return | Silence, lectio, prophetic readings |
| Christmas | 2 weeks plus octave | Birth of the Word made flesh | Prolonged praise, joyful chant |
| Lent | 40 days | Christ's journey to the Cross | Fasting, almsgiving, extended vigil |
| Eastertide | 50 days | Resurrection and Ascension | Festal psalms, baptismal renewal |
| Ordinary Time | ~33 weeks | Discipleship and growth | Steady work, study, hospitality |
Cross-tradition reflections enrich this picture. A glimpse of how Eastern monks live the same feasts can be found through the Ukrainian monastic tradition, a witness to the way the calendar is observed in another rite. The harmonies differ, but the heartbeat is identical.
Lent: the desert walk
The season that follows in the Christian imagination does not tolerate complacency. Forty days stretch from Ash Wednesday to the evening of Holy Thursday, and the monks strip away comfort one layer at a time. Earlier rising, less conversation, a stricter fast, longer matins, and a daily chapter of the Desert Fathers read aloud at meals. The brothers learn again, year after year, that prayer in the wilderness is rarely sweet.
Such desert theology is not the heritage of cloistered monks alone. Ministers and laypeople alike often rediscover its wisdom through reflection on Sabbath discipline, and the work of thoughtful colleagues such as those sharing their experience of Sabbath rest for pastors confirms that the desert teaches the same lesson to anyone carrying pastoral weight. Even in the bustling parishes of Adelaide or Parramatta, the Lenten fast offers a pause to recover the breath of the Holy Spirit beneath the rush of secular life.
Eastertide and Pentecost: resurrection joy
When the women reach the tomb and find it empty, the calendar explodes with light. Fifty days of Easter stand as the longest festal stretch, each day stamped with the alleluias the brothers had silenced during Lent. The Easter Vigil at the abbey runs from twilight to dawn, with baptisms, confirmations, and the renewal of monastic vows woven into the night.
Pentecost closes the Easter season with the breath of the Spirit over the disciples, and the monks join the universal Church in wearing red and singing Veni Creator. After Pentecost, the year opens into its longest stretch, the green fields of Ordinary Time, where the Sacraments of initiation have been celebrated and the long work of living begins.
Ordinary Time and the steady monastic rhythm
Ordinary Time is the quiet pasture of the calendar, but it is anything but empty. The monks return to a steady schedule of prayer and work, with Sundays keeping the Resurrection as a weekly touchstone. Within this rhythm, leisure has its place too — a quiet game of chess after Compline, a letter home, or, in rare moments of downtime, exploring pastimes such as the leisurely play suggested in a guide on video keno how many numbers to pick. The same spirit of discernment carried into chapel governs every other corner of life, including the modern question of how online leisure fits into a Christian day, even one touched by practical considerations like those gathered in a guide to e-wallet blackjack online.
Practical suggestions for walking the liturgical year at home
- Keep a small missal or liturgical calendar on the kitchen table so the colour of the season is visible in daily life.
- Read the Sunday Gospel each Monday with a slow lectio and let the questions surface over the week.
- Mark Ember Days and Rogation Days with a brief prayer before meals to widen the sense of the Church's rhythm.
- Choose a saint of the day for quiet intercession each morning, drawing on the Roman Martyrology.
- Plan a retreat during the quieter stretches of Ordinary Time, when the chapel and the soul are less crowded.
The seasons of the Church year remain a gift to anyone willing to slow down enough to receive them. If you feel the pull of this rhythm, consider making a retreat at Mother of the Redeemer Monastery, where the bells still mark the hours and the brothers welcome guests who come seeking silence. Begin by writing to the monastery through the contact page, mentioning your interest in joining the monks for the current liturgical season, or explore how you might support the planned chapel expansion that will give the community more room to welcome retreatants travelling from across the Tasman and the Pacific.