This Sunday marks the beginning of what we sometimes call the “program year”: that part of the church year, more or less overlapping with the school year, when our community’s life is in full swing. The choir returns, Sunday School is in session, Harvest Fair planning has begun, everyone’s enjoying the cookout, and the pews are bursting with excited crowds. (Right?)

In one sense, the social life of the church community is only ever the second-most-important thing. Our focus, naturally, is on the spiritual life and worship of the church, on hearing the Word of God proclaimed and receiving the Body and Blood of Christ that transport us into a realm of heavenly worship. We can do these things in all the splendor of a giant cathedral congregation, or we can do them in secret as a surreptitious pair somewhere in a Soviet gulag; we can do them with a full roster of acolytes and musicians, or we can limp along with what we have. If we walked into Mass and back out without ever speaking with one another, if the music were lackluster and the fellowship nonexistent, in any case, God would be worshiped.

But in another sense, this “program life” of the parish is really a training ground for the whole Christian spiritual life. The Church has sometimes been called “the school of love,” the place in which we learn what love really is and we practice what love does. The Church is, more than anything else, the community in which we learn to love God and one another as best we can, despite all our imperfections.

So as we return to the busy schedule of church life, to weekly choir practices and sumptuous coffee hours, to Sunday School and committee meetings and all the machinery that makes us go, may we be reassured by the notion that whatever we do when we worship God is good enough for God, and may we delight in the opportunity to grow in patience, wisdom, and love.

Especially when we just can’t wait for that Zoom meeting to end.