This article came to me over 10 years ago. I saved it at the time because its timing spoke to me….
From a publication called “Explorations”, Liturgical Ministry 2003
Living by Seasons
“I was enjoying an hour with a new friend last winter, watching flakes of snow flutter past the coffee shop window as he described the outline of his life: his career, his family, places he had lived. A native of Colorado, he had spent a number of years living in southern California but had returned to Denver a couple of years ago. I asked him why he had moved back – a work opportunity? He looked thoughtful, then replied, “Actually, I got tired of the weather.” “But isn’t the weather there pretty good?” I asked him. I’d only been living in the States for a couple of years, all that time in the shadow of the Rockies,but even I knew part of the draw of California was the bright sun-filled skies.
“It was always good weather,” he replied. “Always sunny, always hot. Every day was perfect. That was the problem. I realized I was really missing the cold mornings, the frosty air, the snow. I wanted to watch the Aspens change in the mountains. Something happens when you come out of a long, dark winter into a fresh, green spring; I can’t explain it. I knew I needed seasons.”
This year in Explorations we’ve been exploring our rhythms of life: the patterns of living through which, intentionally or otherwise, we express our desire to follow Jesus Christ, to be his disciples and apprentices. In the first issue we considered the rhythms of our individual lives, seeking to understand how our daily routines can be molded around our longing for God, allowing us to become increasingly open to the work of God’s grace. The second issue looked at our communal life and reflected on ways in which the shape of our life together might be more than an accident of history and culture, instead allowing us to become communities of intentional discipleship.
In this, the final issue of our series on rhythms of life, we step back to take the long view, as we look at the ways in which our months, years, and ultimately our whole lives, are shaped by seasons – and how we can become more intentional about using those seasons to live out our passion for Christ.
The Christian Year
For many centuries, the wider rhythm of Christian living was shaped by the Christian Year: a pattern of seasons and celebrations that dramatized the gospel story, incarnating it into people’s everyday lives. As winter drew around them, people waited expectantly with the prophets for the coming of the Messiah. In the midst of the deepest,darkest nights, the birth of Christ was celebrated with light and pageantry. Spring began to thaw the ground, and people allowed their hearts to be warmed, melted, renewed by God’s love, hearing the call to conversion of life. As new life burst forth in the fields around them, God’s people gathered for the Easter festivals, rejoicing in the news that Christ had erupted from the tomb as victor over death itself. Then, through the long days of summer and into the autumnal months, the insights gained from meditating on the gospel were worked into the fabric of daily life – until the nights began to grow long, and the cycle began afresh.
Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Ordinary Time – this pattern of seasons can speak usefully to all of us, whether our churches still consciously follow the rhythm of the Christian Year or not. Keeping Lent, for example, is a good spiritual experience whether we do it at the traditional time of year (early spring) or not – Francis of Assisi used to keep Lent twice every year, once during spring, and again in October and November! Understanding the Christian Year can help us participate in it more fully, if we are in a community which keeps these seasons.
Understanding the Christian Year can help us participate in it more fully…
Even if not, it can help us understand the patterns and rhythms of a gospel life, and perhaps consider how we might intentionally engage with each season in turn in our lives, our families, our communities, and our churches.
Early Winter: Advent
Advent begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas (usually at the end of November), and continues until nightfall on Christmas Eve. The traditional beginning of the Christian Year, it is marked by anticipation: a period of looking ahead, a time of hope – but hope not yet fully realized. The familiar
Advent hymn, “O come, o come, Emmanuel” (an English translation of Latin refrains used in the church’s worship for centuries), perfectly captures the spirit of this season; even though Jesus is among us, and we dwell in his presence, still we long for a nearer and greater vision of him, for his return among us.
Bernard of Clairvaux, the great twelfth century Cistercian abbot, once wrote about Advent:
“During my frequent ponderings on the burning desire with which the patriarchs longed for the incarnation of Christ, I am stung with sorrow and shame … Very soon now there will be great rejoicing as we celebrate the feast of Christ’s birth. But how I wish it were inspired by his birth! All the more, therefore, do I pray that the intense longing of those men of old, their heartfelt expectation, may be enkindled in me.”
(Sermons on the Song of Songs, 5:1) Many of us, watching the unfolding of the early winter months, might share Bernard’s wish that the seasonal celebrations be a little more Christ centered. Shop windows full with fluffy snow and angels. Lights festoon houses, lamp-posts, and stores, and wind in long bright strings overhead in the streets. Santa is everywhere: handing out gifts from grottos, ringing his bell outside grocery stores, falling into unlikely scrapes on the television – and taking every opportunity, presumably, to keep an eye out for who is naughty or nice. Carolers in flickering lamplight sing of joy to the world and of sleigh bells ringing. Children wait breathlessly for school’s end and the promise of toys and candy.
Where in all this, we might wonder, is Jesus? Confronted with an increasingly secular celebration – a Christless Christmas – it would be easy to sigh along with Bernard: “How I wish this were inspired by his birth!” But the abbot points us away from such lamentation, and towards a more positive road.
For us, even if for no-one else, the Advent season is a time when our longing for God can be enkindled in us, when the fires of our passion for Christ can be stoked until they blaze.
Advent calls us to disciplines of expectancy:
- Meditation on scripture, especially the prophetic books (the back third of the Old Testament). Many liturgical churches will spend a good part of this season reflecting on the second half of the book of Isaiah, which is filled with longing for the coming of God and his Messiah. The Song of Songs is also deeply expressive on desire and yearning.
- Worship helps turn our hearts towards God, and in the weeks leading up to Christmas opportunities to sing and pray with others abound. Last year I spent a winter evening singing Handel’s Messiah with the local Mormons. I don’t agree with their theology, but was still able make the experience an offering of love to Christ. Likewise, that school choir concert can become so much more, if we open ourselves to God’s presence in it.
- Compassion to the poor can help us refocus on the values of the coming Kingdom of God, for which we fervently wait and hope. An evening in a homeless shelter or soup kitchen; a shared meal in a senior center; volunteering in the thrift store; participating in a political action group – all this and more serves to recall us to life in the Kingdom, the radical and transformative reality which Jesus came to inaugurate.
Advent stirs up the restlessness and homelessness in our souls, reminding us that we are “strangers and foreigners on the earth,” (Hebrews 11:13) whose only true home is in God. Maria Boulding, a contemporary English Benedictine nun, once wrote:
“If you want God, and long for union with him, yet sometimes wonder what that means or whether it can mean anything at all, you are already walking with the God who comes. If you are at times so weary and involved with the struggle of living that you have no strength even to want him, yet are still dissatisfied that you don’t, you are already keeping Advent in your life. If you have ever had an obscure intuition that the truth of things is somehow better, greater, more wonderful than you deserve or desire, that the touch of God in your life still you by its gentleness, that there is a mercy beyond anything you could ever suspect, you are already drawn into the central mystery of salvation.”
(The Coming of God, Chapter 1)
Late Winter: Christmas and Epiphany
Christians have historically celebrated a Christmas and Epiphany season which begins on Christmas Day and ends on February 2. The latter date was the celebration of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple (described in Luke 2:22-38); during the celebration candles would be blessed as a symbol of Christ, “a light for revelation to the Gentiles” (Luke 2:32), and so the festival was also known as Candlemas – the mass (or communion service) of the candles. Partway through the season, on January 6, fell Epiphany, a feast day marking the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus. The common element linking all these holy days was revelation; the very word ‘epiphany’ means ‘to make known’ or ‘to reveal’. At Christmas, God makes himself known in human form: “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” (John 1:14) The Presentation showed Christ being recognized by Simeon, a model of the prophets of the Old Testament, faithfully waiting for the fulÞ llment of God’s promises; as he cradles the child Jesus in his arms, he speaks from Jewish expectation: “my eyes have seen your salvation.”
(Luke 2:30) Epiphany looks to an even wider canvas: since the Magi were almost certainly Gentiles, Epiphany became a celebration of Christ being revealed not only to the Jews, but to the whole world.
One of the great themes of these various celebrations was light. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it,” wrote John, reflecting on the significance of that first Christmas morning. “The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world” (John 1:5,9). In past generations, this imagery had perhaps more resonance than it does for many of us today. Just a few generations back, our ancestors experienced the long, dark winter nights without the benefit of electric light. Flickering lamps and candles softened the gloom, but hardly pierced it. All around, the darkness was cold and dangerous. Thomas Cranmer adapted an ancient prayer for the English church’s Book of Common Prayer which was used at every evening service; it caught well the menace of twilight:
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
The image of Christ as light bursting into the darkness and shattering it was, then, both powerful and reassuring. These late winter celebrations were alive with light: burning fires, generous swathes of candles, singing by lamplight. Our gorgeous winter displays of light – fireworks, street and house illuminations – echo the same instinct. Christmas, then, can invite us to disciplines of illumination:
- The practice of hospitality – opening the light and warmth of our homes to others – helps remind us that Jesus and his parents were dependent on the hospitality of others, both in Bethlehem and during their exile in Egypt.
- Friendship can be an intentional practice as well as an accidental delight. During the winter months many people experience acute loneliness and deep depression; the suicide rate typically peaks once the Christmas festivities are over and the dreariness of the long march to spring sets in. A vast number of people in our society ache for companionship – including many elderly people, migrant workers, homeless travelers, and those who have been bereaved. We can bring light into their darkness by reaching out a hand of warm friendship.
- Evangelism – sharing the light of Christ with others – can be natural, easy, and life-giving during the Christmas and New Year seasons. As our culture focuses on some of the foundational narratives of the gospel, we are present with a remarkable opportunity to tell the whole story of Jesus, from this beginning point onwards. Why not dream with others in your local church of creative, provocative, and inspiring ways to communicate Christ at the heart of Christmas.!
I once attended a Christmas carol celebration in south Wales. A choir of local school children treated us to beautiful songs, thoughtful readings, and a series of delightful skits on the Christmas narrative. Afterwards, a preacher stood up to say “a few words” … and proceeded to preach for half an hour about the crucifixion. “Remember,” he warned us sternly, “the child in that crib became the man on the cross.” He was right, of course. But perhaps we are too eager sometimes to rush from Bethlehem to Calvary. The manger is not the mercy seat. But it is an astounding revelation of the love of God reaching out into our world and our lives. There is something profound here to mark and to celebrate. Light has dawned.
Early Spring: Lent
Lent comes around when the world is emerging from the darkness of winter and throwing out signs of new life everywhere. The Christian season reß ects this spirit: it is a time of repentance, an opportunity to experience the mercy of God, to be set free from past patterns of behavior, and to embrace a life of joyful holiness. The pattern for Lent was set by Jesus during his forty days of fasting and solitude in the Judean desert, an essential period of preparation for his public ministry during which he laid aside all other distractions and gave himself fully and attentively to his Father. The season stretches across six long weeks from Ash Wednesday to the Saturday before Easter Day – forty six days in all, rather than the original forty, since at some point it was decided to exclude Sundays from the fast. The Christian gospel is, after all, rooted more in hope than negation, so celebrating the resurrection trumps our own ascetic endeavors. Self-denial is a poorly understood virtue in our indulgent and hedonistic society, and it seems that even many Christians have little understanding of the importance and value of fasting and relinquishment. Perhaps this is why we have such difficulty in reading the temptation narratives in the gospels. We tend to assume that the devil, coming to Jesus at the end of his forty day fast, finds him weak and vulnerable. That sneaky fiend! He creeps up on Jesus at his lowest moment, trying to kick a man while he’s down … The Christian gospel is, after all, rooted more in hope than negation.
The truth, though, is quite the opposite. Jesus, we are told, is led into the wilderness by the Spirit, the voice of his Father still ringing in his ears: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:22) Jews saw the desert as the realm of the demons and evil spirits, a godless and lifeless place far from civilization in which the malevolent forces of chaos could fester. Jesus is heading into the wilderness to confront evil in its stronghold. And so he prepares himself. He dwells in silence, in prayer, in the presence of his Father. He fasts, building resistance to the demands of the very appetites which Satan will use to tempt him later. And after forty days, he is tired and hungry – but he is also strong. He is ready to confront evil on its home turf. It’s a mistake to believe the devil sneakily attacks Jesus at his weakest. It is Jesus who is active – Jesus who crosses the border, Jesus who confronts, Jesus who is the force to be reckoned with. “The gate of Hades,” Jesus once said, “shall not prevail”; it’s worth remembering that when the enemy’s gate is being battered down, it is not you who is under attack. Lent summons us to practice disciplines of abstinence:
- Fasting is probably the central discipline of self-denial, and has strong historical associations with Lent. Some of us have become so fond of pointing out that fasting can mean withdrawing from any significant aspect of life (fasting from television, or email, or restaurants, for example) that it might be worth reminding ourselves of the basic meaning of fasting: withdrawing from food. Fasting from food during Lent (whether from certain types of food, or an appropriate fast of total abstention) can help us reprioritize our lives as we place our passion for God on a higher level even than the bread that sustains our physical existence.
- Solitude is necessary for a full and healthy spiritual life. Periods of withdrawal from the company of others draws our hearts and souls back into the vibrant presence of the living God. Many people plan to take a retreat during spring, often in Lent itself, to help them refocus for the coming year. After forty days, he is tired and hungry – but he is also strong.
- Practicing silence helps us to step back from the constant flood of words and noise generated by our culture, our environment, and by ourselves, and allows space for us to be attentive to the still, small voice of God. Silence is hard for those of us taught that stillness equates to inactivity, which amounts to little more than unproductive laziness. We might want to consider, though, whether an hour spent without agenda in God’s presence is time wasted or time invested. St Benedict, reflecting on the particularly ascetic and self-denying lifestyle of monastic life, wrote in his Rule: “The life of the monk is to be a continual Lent.” While we may not all be called to such an austere existence, we do need to recognize that growth into mature faith will summon every one of us to periods of withdrawal, denial, fasting, and penitence from time to time. It is these seasons that strengthen our souls. Late Spring: Easter
Easter defines Christianity. Paul writes straightforwardly to the church in Corinth: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1
Corinthians 15:19). If there had been no resurrection, then, our faith would be worthless. But since Christ has been raised from the dead, our world has been shaken and redeÞ ned. The empty tomb is the geographic center of creation; the risen Jesus is the focal point of history. We are an Easter
people. Even if we downplay the celebration of the rest of the Christian Year, every Christian and every church should raise a holy hullabaloo over Easter. The author Frederica Mathewes-Green once received this letter from a Jewish friend at Christmas:
“The big celebration in Christianity should be Easter. No Easter, no Christianity. So all the focus on Christmas, at least to me, seems misdirected. Why Christians don’t whoop it up more at Easter is a
mystery to me. How inspirational! How joyful! That is the time to toast each other, lay on gifts, attend worship services, pack in the rich food. Something really substantial and holy to remember.”
(Easter Changes Everything)
The significance of Easter is huge, and it calls us to huge festivity. The dark night is over! Death has been conquered! The grave has been shattered! No more need we live in fear of extinction, of the borderland between life and the afterlife: Christ is risen! How are we to mark this extraordinary moment? With chocolate eggs and a special Sunday service? When we consider the hoopla we invest in Christmas, we might believe we could go a little further. Perhaps it’s time to find ways to remake the Easter season as a sustained, explosive carnival of hope and joy. Easter, then, draws us into a period of celebration:
- The discipline of festival is too much neglected by today’s church, and is in urgent need of recovery. Our ancestors used to celebrate their faith in the open, with riots of color, music, and gaiety. Perhaps we could learn, in our churches and in our families, how to put joy back onto the streets. How about an Easter carnival on the church grounds, or even down Main Street? As winter eases off, we might think of holding an Easter party in the front yard. We could head out to the diner and buy dinner for a few friends. We have so much to celebrate – let’s not hold back!
- Easter is a great time to offer praise and thanksgiving. We could deliberately lace our prayers with more gratitude than intercession. It is so easy to lapse into a life of prayer which is little more than informing God of our needs, wants, and desires. Perhaps this season provides an opportunity to ask a little less and thank a little more.
- The practice of Sabbath rest Þ ts perfectly with the spirit of Easter. We are often pushing ourselves so hard to achieve, to succeed, to be signiÞ cant – even in our churches – that we lose sight of the fact that everything we have is a gift of grace. The discipline of Sabbath reminds us to take time for God, and time for one another, remembering that our lives are in his hands, and that his purposes for us are all good. To keep Sabbath is to demonstrate trust, and to grow into that trust. Celebrate Easter. Celebrate boldly, and loudly, and passionately.
Celebrate Easter. Celebrate boldly, and loudly, and passionately. The resurrection of Christ is everything; without it, humanity is lost forever, death wins, and we are without hope. The German theologian Karl Barth said powerfully in one of his sermons:
“Resurrection – not progress, not evolution, not enlightenment, but a call from heaven to us: ‘Rise up! You are dead, but I will give you life.’ That is what is proclaimed here, and it is the only way that the
world can be saved. Take away this summons, and make something else of it, something smaller, less than the absolute ultimate, or less than the absolutely powerful, and you will have taken away all, the
unique, the last hope there is for us on earth.”
(Threatened by Resurrection from Come Holy Spirit: Sermons)
Summer and Fall: Ordinary Time
‘Ordinary Time’ is the name given to the long months between Pentecost and the beginning of a new year at Advent. During this period, we turn ourselves back to the day to day business of our world – but with a renewed commitment to live from a gospel perspective, to live intentionally as
disciples and students of Jesus Christ. The experiences of Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter, have changed us, refreshed us, remade us. Now we discover what that means in life. The months of ordinary time draw us to disciplines of incarnation. There are countless incarnational disciplines, but they are a little more difÞ cult to enumerate – they are disciplines of the long-term, the large scale elements of
our life which give it shape and substance. Raising a family is one such discipline. Year upon year we invest ourselves in someone’s life – Þ rst a baby, then a child, a teenager, a young adult – guiding their
growth and development, helping to nurture their growing independence, fostering their faith and prayer. Developing a career is another, as over the years we learn to use our unique skills and talents in the service of God and others. Participating in the local neighborhood is the work of many years,
as we look for opportunities to serve, to volunteer, to make a difference in people’s lives, to share, to laugh and weep together with those around us. In the end, these are perhaps the disciplines that count the most. Shaping these The greatest saints are not spectacular.
14
Explorations
aspects of our lives as expressions of a deep-seated intention to devote our entire lives to Christ is the great work of discipleship. The greatest saints are not spectacular. They are those whose ordinary lives have become nothing less than an offering of love to God.
We all live by rhythms. But the way we structure our days not only reveals our character and priorities, it can also help to shape them. We can intentionally pattern our lives as a loving response to the grace of God in Christ. In this series of Explorations we look at how the wisdom and practices of the ancient church can help us to form Christ-like rhythms of living even as we wrestle with the pressures and challenges of today’s world. “Explorations is a wonderful companion on the
spiritual journey for those who long for a deeper and richer experience of life with Christ.”
– Richard J. Foster
Chris is President of Renovaré USA. A graduate of the University of Wales and Trinity College
in Bristol, England, he served for eleven years as an Anglican priest in various parts of Wales.
He lives in Castle Rock, Colorado, with his wife, Sally, and their four children.
Renovaré is a nonproÞ t Christian organization that resources, fuels, models, and advocates fullness of life with God, experienced through the life and spiritual practices of Jesus and the historical
church. For more information on Renovaré and how you can get involved,
visit www.Renovaré.org.
What is Sacred Time?
Humans exist in time. We measure time. We give time. We mark time. We spend time. We waste time.
We make time (we think). Rarely, however, do we stop to consider time. We keep track of birthdays,
anniversaries and deaths. We celebrate notable days of the civic, academic and religious calendars.
We anticipate future events that we plan or imagine will happen, all the while existing only in the
present. But what is time?
Augustine speaks of Time in terms of “memory (past), attention (present; also, “sight: or “attending
to”), and expectation (future).”[1] He mused over the ability of the mind to encompass past and
present, even imagining the future, all outside the confines of actual time and space. He is said to have
stated “whenever I imagine that I am in the present, it is already past to me.”[2] Stookey, who is a
professor and coauthor of Handbook of the Christian Year, adds that in some sense, “the present
barely exists.”[3] He continues, “The present cannot be conceived in isolation, as if it had a life of its
own,”[4] and considers time a continuum, where the present is simply a moving edge between the
past and the future. Ricoeur adds that “the mind itself [is] the fixed element . . . [and] the important
verb is no longer ‘to pass’ (transire) but ‘to remain’ (manet).”[5] Whatever it is, time is
“interconnected with motion and change in the universe.”[6]
Why, then, do Humans mark time? Early nomadic peoples chased the game and weather patterns,
while agrarians planned for planting and harvest. Some of these ancient cultures based their calendars
on the moon, while others looked to the sun to calculate a course of action. In each case, it seems that
the measuring of time allows a People to measure and assess their progress. It enables them to
participate and construct life, rather than merely watching it go by. Lastly, the measurement of time
provides a lens through which to examine the patterns and principles at work in the universe.
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A Theology of Time
The deliberation of natural patterns and principles of time necessarily introduces an investigation into
a theology of time. An examination of this kind must shed light on both the past, revealing human
worth, and on the future, revealing human hope. The fact that time and eternity have intersected and
continue to do so is “grounded in the most basic of Christian affirmations . . . for our scriptures insist
that in the days of the Emperor Augustus the eternal Word of God became flesh and dwelt among
us.”[7]
An abbreviated review of this Biblical convergence of time and eternity is in order. Genesis 1 reveals
that time was created on day four, as well as time within time (i.e. it is measured). Day five
documents life within time, while day seven is set apart as holy, with cessation from work as the
demonstration of Sabbath’s holiness. In John 1, time and eternity intersect as the Logos exists both
out of time (v.1) and is made in time (v. 14). In John 17:5 we overhear Jesus pray to be glorified with
the glory that he had before the world was made. Hebrews chapter 1 also reflects this concept,
speaking of Jesus making purification for sins (a temporal act) before sitting down “at the right hand
of the Majesty on high.” 1 John 1:2 again reminds the reader that Jesus was “with the Father and was
manifested to us.”
Sacred Time
Because ancient cultures were oriented towards the seasons, early religions understood that life was
cyclical. The Hebrew calendar, however, began to distinguish itself by marking events as well as
agricultural patterns. The Christian calendar went even further by rejecting seasonal time in favor of
time centered on the Pascha (death and resurrection) of Jesus Christ. New Testament time is not some
“distinctive theory of time, but the fullness of time. What distinguishes it is its completeness, its
pleroma . . . [it is] not some new philosophy of time, but a new quality of life.”[8] Time, then, has a
sense of completeness in God, while at the same time continuing on to its end.
Time has no sacredness of its own, but rather, is a tool to be redeemed and employed by humans in
order to participate and celebrate the eternal. Sacred time, according to Patricia Wilson-Kastner, does
three things. It connects Christians as members of the Body of Christ, and draws the worshiping
community into its broader union with Christ and with the World. Sacred Time serves to focus
Christians on the great feasts of the life, death and resurrection of Christ.[9]
Robert Weber, professor and author of Ancient-Future Time, adds that the events of Christianity
communicate time in the following ways: The incarnation presents time as fulfilled time (Mark 1:15;
Acts 2:14-36), while the crucifixion epitomizes the time of salvation (Romans 5:6; Matthew 26:18;
John 7:6; Colossians 2:15; II Corinthians 6:2). The resurrection, ascension and second coming of
Christ all impart anticipatory time
(I Timothy 6:14; John 5:28-30; I Corinthians 4:5; I Peter 4:17; Revelation 11:18).[10] Time for the
Christian, then, is “the measure of purposeful life . . . [and] Liturgy is the medium for such
expression.”[11]
Because of the conflict between sacred time and secular time, Christians must have a correct theology
of time in order to redeem it. Andrew Hill presents a summary of redeemed time as follows:[12]
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-Time is God’s time (Job 12:10; 33:4)
-Time is a divine gift, an act of grace (Psalm 139)
-Time is cyclical in the Bible (Eccl 3)
-Time is linear in the Bible (Dan 9:24-27)
-Time has purpose and meaning (Zeph 1; Matt 24)
-Time is short (Psalm 90)
-Time is for rejoicing (Psalm 124)
-Time is for praising God (Psalm 119:175)
A Vocabulary of Time
The vocabulary of a language often reveals what is valuable to the people who speak that language.
For example, our thinking about “time” is necessarily limited by the English vocabulary of “time.”
Therefore, the study of time, and specifically liturgical time, demands a broader vocabulary than
English affords. The following terms derived from the Greek will be useful in understanding and
describing concepts related to sacred time.
-Chronos: This is “clock” time, where we get our word “chronology.” It speaks of time in sequence.
-Kairos: This speaks of an event in time, a specific moment, or even a crisis.
-Anamnesis: Literally, a drawing near of memory.
Stookey says that this “does not imply a mental process, but a ritual process . . . remembrance by
doing rather than by cogitation.”[13] Zimmerman says that it is “not mere recall, but a remembering
action, which is the present of the past.”[14] It is in this sense, for example, that the Jewish Passover
is both memorialized and experienced again in the enactment of the Seder.
-Prolepsis: Literally, to take beforehand. It is “the bringing of God’s future into our present.”[15] We
sometimes experience this through songs like “We Shall Behold Him” and “I Can Only Imagine.”
-Kenosis: Literally, to make empty. This is the word used to describe Christ laying aside his nature in
Philippians 2:6-9. The great humiliation of Christ implies the great dignity of his divine nature, and
the intersection of time and eternity.
-Incarnation: Literally, in meat, or in flesh. This is an obvious intersection of time and eternity. John
- Baldovin says that the fact of the incarnation and redemption of Christ “implies an irreducible
tension between the already and the not-yet in the Christian experience of the world.”[16]
-Resurrection (anastasis): Literally “the standing up again.” It is yet another concrete instance of the
eternal dimension at work in our midst. The resurrection is not so much resuscitation as it is
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restoration to Christ’s former existence. It is the center of both the weekly (Sunday) and yearly
(Easter) cycles.
These terms help us consider how an individual or a Body of believers can maintain a vital
relationship with God, Who exists out of time. Joyce Zimmerman states the challenge in this way:
“How do we participate in a historical event that is past and not yet come?” and “How do we live this
mystery today?”[17] The observance of the Christian or liturgical year provides opportunities to live
in this intersection between time and eternity.
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THE LITURGICAL YEAR
The Liturgical Year, also known as the Christian Year, proceeds from the conviction that God is
Creator of all that is, including time. This application of Sacred Time reveals itself in the development
of the Liturgical Week, Day and Year.
The Week
The Importance of Sunday
The Week is a primary element of the liturgical year, and is demarcated by the Sunday observance.
While Wednesday and Friday were incorporated by the early Church as fast days (a break from
Judaism, where Monday and Thursday were fast days), Sunday is the oldest element of the Christian
calendar, and is central to both the weekly and yearly cycles. Because of its relation to the
resurrection, it trumps all other celebrations and seasons. Mark Searle notes that Sunday is “the
nucleus around and out of which the feasts and seasons of the year have evolved, and still it retains in
itself the kernel of the whole Christian mystery . . . it encapsulates the whole economy of
salvation.”[18] He notes that the centrality of Sunday worship affects the local church in a significant
way, stating “it is the day when the local church comes to realize itself as Church when all the faithful
are called to find themselves within the whole story of God.”[19] In fact, historically, the Sunday
celebration is so important that “both kneeling and fasting were forbidden on this day in the early
Church, as they were thought incompatible with its joyful character as a foretaste of the kingdom of
God.”[20]
Searle asserts “Sunday is essentially a post-resurrection appearance of the Risen Christ in which he
breathes his Spirit upon his disciples for the forgiveness of sins and for the life of the world. As such,
it is the point at which all the central images of the Christian life converge.”[21] Robert Weber adds
that “historically, Sunday worship expresses three truths: it remembers God’s saving action in history;
it experiences God’s renewing presence; and it anticipates the consummation of God’s work in the
new heavens and the new earth.”[22] The Sunday gathering, then, is the venue in which anamnesis
and prolepsis connect and interact.
The Development of Sunday
The New Testament writers also attest to the centrality of Sunday in the liturgical year. But how and
why did these Jewish Christians transition from keeping the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) to a gathering
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on Sunday? Adolph Adam, noted German Scholar, writes that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all
document Sunday, the first day of the Jewish week, as “the day of the Lord’s resurrection”[23] (Mt
28:1 ff; Mk 16:1 ff; Lk 24:1 ff; Jn 20:1 ff). It is apparent that the early Christians gathered to eat
together (Acts 20:7) and to contribute to the needs of others (I Cor 16:1-2) on Sunday. Paul also
implies that the central activity of the Christian gathering, participating in the Lord’s Supper, occurred
on Sunday (I Cor 11). There is also extra-biblical reference to the Sunday gathering, found in a letter
from Pliny the Younger (c. 112), governor of Bithynia, to Emperor Trajan. He states “On an appointed
day, they had been accustomed to meet before daybreak, and to recite a hymn antiphonally to Christ,
as to a god.”[24] Adam states that this letter describes both an early Sunday morning liturgy and a
Sunday evening meal, which later was abandoned “under the pressure, evidently of imperial decrees
forbidding suspicious gatherings in the evening.”[25]
The Meaning of Sunday
A brief review of the Jewish Sabbath is essential in understanding the development and meaning of
Sunday to the early Church, and its centrality to the liturgical year. As we have seen in Genesis 1, God
chose to cease from His work on the seventh day. In Moses’ presentation of the Ten Commandments
(Ex 20:8-11), the explanation of the Sabbath day is linked to the work/rest pattern of creation, and is
assigned stipulations in its observance, i.e. to keep it holy and to cease from work. Later, Moses
attached an additional Sabbath stipulation in Deuteronomy 5:12-15, compelling the people to observe
the Sabbath by remembering their deliverance from Egypt. Searle notes “these two sets of images of
the Sabbath link it with the creation story and the Exodus.”[26]
Jesus is the first to initiate transition from the Sabbath by declaring Himself to be “Lord of the
Sabbath” (Mt. 12:8). Searle believes that Christ was “neither purifying the Sabbath law nor destroying
- Rather, he seems to be proclaiming that the Sabbath represented a vision whose time had
come.”[27] The twin themes of “Rest” (Genesis) and “Liberation” (Exodus) were now positioned in
Christ.
Sunday was not deemed to be intrinsically sacred, especially to “Gentile Christians who adhered to St.
Paul’s view of the Jewish law as no longer binding upon them . . . they would have had no interest in
keeping any day of the week as a Sabbath.”[28] It was “observed because of its historical connection
with Jesus’ resurrection.”[29] Additionally, since Sunday was the first day of the week, early
Christians did not view it as a day to abstain from their work. They did, however, employ a bit of
“theological inventiveness” to the name of the day on which they celebrated the resurrection of Jesus.
Talley, professor and leading liturgist in the United States, says that John’s testimony of “being in the
Spirit on the Lord’s day” (Rev 1:10) has commonly been “identified with the Christian observance of
the first day of the week, the day assigned to the sun in the planetary week, as the day of worship
celebrating the resurrection of Christ.”[30] Because Christ declared himself to be the Light of the
world, and because he rose from the dead on that day, the early Church appropriated Malachi 4:2 to
proof-text their new day of observance: “The sun of justice will rise with healing in its wings.”
Other Names and Images of Sunday
The Sunday gathering went by a variety of titles. “The first day” obviously refers to the resurrection
of Christ on the “first day of the week” (Mt 28:1 ff; Mk 16:1 ff; Lk 24:1 ff; Jn 20:1 ff). Also, because
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many encounters with the risen Christ took place on the first day of the week, there was an underlying
hope of encounter with the returning Christ on that day. A second reference, “The Lord’s Day,” could
be a word-play on the phrase “the day of the Lord” implying the judgment and final reign of Christ. A
third reference to Sunday also had this eschatological dimension. The title “The Eighth Day” extends
the Jewish idea of seven as a perfect number. The concept of an eighth day “obviously signified
something greater still.”[31]
The Day
A second segment of the Liturgical Year is simply known as The Day. Brief weekday services, known
as “the Daily Office,” took place both in the city and in the monasteries. The city’s Daily Office,
known as The Cathedral Office, was designed for the townspeople who would attend when going
either to or from work. The Cathedral Office consisted of two services: Matins, held in the morning,
and Evensong or Vespers, which was held in the evening.
A typical Cathedral Vespers would include the following:
- Psalms 140, 141, 129, 116
- Incensation
- Entrance with thurible
- Introit prayer
- Hymn of light: Phos hilaron
- Readings (set for particular feasts and days in Lent)
- Multiple intercessions
- Appropriate hymnody for the day
- Nunc dimittis
- Concluding prayers
In the West, the monastic communities developed a system of seven or eight offices to be said daily,
in an attempt to apply the exhortation to “pray without ceasing”
(1 Thess 5:17). The Western Monastic Cycle of the Daily Office is as follows:
- Vespers (at the end of the working day)
- Compline (before bedtime)
- Nocturns or Vigils or Matins (during middle of the night)
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- Prime (shortly thereafter)
- Terce (during the middle of the morning)
- Sext (at noon)
- None (during the middle of the afternoon)
A rhyme is useful to remember both the name and focus of each of the hours.
“At Mattins bound, at Prime reviled,
Condemned to death at Terce
Nailed to the cross at Sext
At none his blessed side they pierce.
They take him down at vesper-tide
In grave at compline lay
Who henceforth bids his Church observe
Her sevenfold hours always.”
A typical Monastic Vespers would include the following:
- Initial blessing and prayers
- Invitatory psalm 103
- 7 prayers said before the altar, silently, by the priest during psalm 103
- Great ektenia (an intercessory prayer)
- Psalmody
Brian Wren envisions the austere existence of monastic life, and writes “the six hours of prayer are
spread between eight services of worship, the Divine Office, which punctuate the day. The members
of this faith community will meet more often for worship than for meals, and spend more time at
prayer than at agricultural labor.”[32]
The Year
The third segment of the Liturgical Year partitions the year itself into cycles. Andrew Hill writes “The
Western church – Roman Catholic and Anglican – adopted a chronological scheme highlighting two
cycles of time in the church year: Advent and Easter. The Eastern Church – Byzantine and Orthodox –
divided the church year into three cycles of time: the Menaia, the Octoechos, and the Triodion and
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Pentekostarion.”[33] This report is from the perspective of the Western Church, and will focus on the
cycles of Easter and Christmas. First, however, a brief review of the Hebrew festival cycle is essential
in order to understand the context and development of the Christian Liturgical Year.
Jewish Feasts
In the book of Leviticus, Moses received from the LORD (Lev 23) a mandate regarding what are
called “holy convocations” (verse 4 ff). This list included Sabbath, Passover, the Feast of Unleavened
Bread, the Feast of First Fruits, Pentecost, the Feast of Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah, or the New Year),
the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), the Feast of Huts, Sabbath Year, and the Year of Jubilee. These
Feasts connected the worship of God with concrete historical events, and provided annual
opportunities for theological instruction.
Three of the above-mentioned feasts were considered pilgrimage feasts because “every male Jew of
twelve years and older was obliged each year to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem for at least one of
these feasts.”[34] These particular festivals were connected to (2.14) either flocks or crops, and
included Passover (which fused with the Feast of Unleavened Bread during the Exodus event), The
Feast of Weeks (later called Pentecost) and the Feast of Huts. The additional feasts of Rosh Hashanah,
Yom Kippur, Hanukkah and Purim were feasts that commemorated God’s saving events.
It is an interesting sidelight to examine certain New Testament events within the context of the
pilgrimage feasts. Within the context of Passover, Jesus (age 12) talks with the teachers in the temple
(Lk 2:41 ff), cleanses the temple (Jn 3:13-17) and endures his passion (Mt 26:17 ff). During the Feast
of Booths He taught and prophesied in the temple (Jn 7:14-39). The Holy Spirit descends (Acts 2) and
Paul hurries to Jerusalem (Acts 20:16) within the context of Pentecost.
The Christian Feasts
During the Apostolic era, the early Church gradually laid the Jewish feasts aside. The reason for this
is twofold: Jesus became the once-for-all sacrifice (Heb 9:10; 10:10), and his resurrection canceled
the requirement of ceremonial law (Col 2:13-14). To
understand the basic principle in the development of the Christian Year one must come to terms with
the fact that the holistic feasts “refracted into greater precision and spread over a period of time.”[35]
In the first Christian century, for example, the feast of Pentecost memorialized the passion,
resurrection and ascension of Christ, as well as the giving of The Holy Spirit. In the third century,
Epiphany became the second holistic feast, and included the birth, baptism and first miracle of Christ
(or a combination thereof, depending on the region). At the same time, Pentecost (the Great 50 Days)
had divided into Pascha and Pentecost. By the fourth century, Pentecost divided into the feasts of
Ascension and Pentecost, while Pascha divided into Holy week and the Triduum. Epiphany divided
into Christmas and Epiphany. By the fifth century the Liturgical or Christian Year has fully developed
into the cycle of life (based upon Easter) and the cycle of light (based upon Christmas). The time not
directly included in one of these two cycles is called Ordinary time, so named for the ordinals, or
numbers assigned to each Sunday.
A third cycle, called Sanctoral, developed originally to celebrate those martyred for the Faith, but
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continued to grow until every day in the year was assigned. To help “clean up” the calendar, All
Saints Day was adopted as a way to both consolidate and to celebrate the lives of believers who had
died.
The development of Christian doctrine was a driving force in the evolution of the Christian year. The
great festivals of the Church embody important doctrines that “celebrate in our present experience
what has occurred or what we resolutely believe will happen.”[36] And like the Jewish Passover
observance, the great Christian feasts “recalled an event to transform life.”[37] Robert Taft, who has
written widely on liturgical understanding, expounds, saying “liturgical feasts, therefore, have the
same purpose as the Gospel: to present this new reality in “anamnesis” as a continual sign to us not of
a past history, but of the present reality of our lives in him.”[38]
Purpose
Because the Christian Year presents events in sequence, it can be an effective medium for presenting
the whole cosmic story of God, rather than just the preferred elements. One challenge Christians have
faced, from the ascension to the present, is how to maintain a vital relationship with someone whom
you cannot see. The Christian Year bridges the gap between contemporary followers and the historical
events of Christianity. As a discipleship tool, it is an invaluable resource for presenting the unseen in a
tangible and historic manner. The Christian Year is an important and effective way in which both
communities and individuals experience the convergence of time and eternity.
Inference to Worship
Observance of the Christian Year can shape both corporate worship and the individual worshiper. A
worshiper’s theology is shaped and formed as one navigates the tension between the Christian and
secular calendar. This tension is not to be avoided, but rather, embraced as a tool of discipleship.
Observance of the Christian Year is something tangible, and helps to keep the mystery of Christ
central to the worshiper’s experience.
Additionally, the Liturgical Year shapes corporate worship by providing a pattern by which to
celebrate the entire cosmic story. It assimilates the pattern of dying to self and living to Christ, and
provides Biblical patterns and expressions for the Church’s adoration of God. Robert Weber submits a
set of worship principles that are both rooted and fulfilled in the practice of the Liturgical Year. He
says that this practice directs corporate worship to celebrate Christ as it “tells and acts out the Christ
event.”[39] As with any cycle or pattern, ritualism and boredom can replace enthusiasm. On the other
hand, the possibility of spiritual growth and discipleship through the observance of Sacred Time can
be worth the risk. Rather than a repeating and unending circle, the Liturgical Year should be viewed
as an ascending spiral, lifting both worship and the worshiper to new understandings and expressions
of the mystery of Christ.
Sacred Time
by Beth Davies-Stofka
(http://www.patheos.com/Library/Eastern-Orthodoxy/Ritual-Worship-Devotion-
Symbolism/Sacred-Time?offset=0&max=1)
Many Christian festivals and holy days are shared by most Christian communities,
including the Eastern Orthodox. This article identifies several of the unique features of
the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Along with the great majority of Christians worldwide,
Eastern Orthodox Christians worship daily, weekly, and at special times throughout the
year. Eastern Orthodoxy is a liturgical faith, meaning that Orthodox services use carefully
structured and prescribed rituals, called liturgy.
Eastern Orthodoxy places great emphasis on tradition, and regards its traditions as holy.
Holy tradition includes scripture, the Nicene Creed, the decrees of the ecumenical
councils, the writings of the Church Fathers, the icons, and the books of liturgical service,
which extend to twenty volumes. Although the liturgy has developed and changed, it is
characterized by a sense of faithfulness to practices rooted in ancient traditions, perhaps
dating from the days of the apostles. Romanian theologian Dumitru Staniloae famously
described the spirit of Orthodox tradition as “lived experience . . . the uninterrupted life
of the church.” At the heart of Eastern Orthodox tradition is the commitment to
maintaining the beliefs and practices of the apostolic churches, so that the experience of
contemporary Orthodox Christians will conform to the experience of the very first
Christians, in an uninterrupted stream of worship and sacrament. Though the word
“orthodox” means “correct belief,” its connection with “correct practice” is intrinsic to
Orthodox faith.
In adherence to tradition, some Orthodox churches still use the old Julian calendar to
calculate the dates of the principal festivals of the Christian year. This includes the
churches in Jerusalem, Russia, and Serbia. These churches celebrate such principal feasts
as Christmas and Easter later than their western counterparts. The Julian calendar is
currently 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar, thus westerners will often see Orthodox
Christians in Jerusalem and Moscow celebrating major Christian holy days about two
weeks later than Christians in the west. However, other Orthodox churches have begun to
use the modern Gregorian calendar.
Easter is called Pascha and is the central celebration of the liturgical year. In addition to
Easter, which is the Feast of Feasts, the Orthodox liturgical year (which traditionally
begins on September 1) is highlighted by the Twelve Great Feasts, eight of which honor
Jesus, and four of which honor his mother. They are, in chronological order:
September 8: The Nativity of the Mother of God
September 14: The Exaltation of the Cross
November 21: The Presentation of the Mother of God
December 25: The Nativity of Christ
January 6: The Baptism of Christ
February 2: The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple
March 25: The Annunciation
The Sunday before Easter: Palm Sunday, Jesus’ entry in Jerusalem
Forty Days after Easter: The Ascension of Christ
Fifty Days after Easter: Pentecost
August 6: The Transfiguration
August 15: The Dormition (Falling Asleep) of the Mother of GodThree of the feasts are
dated in relation to the feast of Easter. The date of Easter is determined by the lunar
calendar, which means the date of Easter changes. Easter and these three feasts, Palm
Sunday, the Ascension, and the Pentecost, are called “movable” feasts, while the others
are “fixed.” There is a host of other festivals or feasts, generally fixed, throughout the
liturgical year, some of which commemorate significant events in the Gospels, and others
that commemorate significant individuals from the Bible, along with angels, saints, and
martyrs.
Many liturgical Christians such as Roman Catholics and Anglicans fast in penitence
during Advent and Lent. Eastern Orthodox Christians also fast in penitential preparation
for significant holy days, but fasting in the east tends to be more rigorous than fasting in
the west. Fasting is seen as an important aspect of Christian discipline, purifying the body
as well as the soul, and self-control is regarded as a virtue.
There are Four Great Fasts during the Christian year. The Lenten fast begins seven weeks
before Easter. The Christmas Fast, which occurs during Advent, lasts 40 days, from
November 15 to Christmas Eve. The Fast of the Apostles begins on Monday, eight days
after Pentecost, and lasts until June 28, the eve of the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul. The
length of this fast varies significantly, from one to six weeks, depending on the date of
Easter. Lastly, the Dormition Fast lasts from August 1 to August 14, which is the eve of
the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. This commemorates the “falling asleep” or
death of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Orthodox Christians may also fast every Wednesday,
the day of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, and every Friday, the day of the crucifixion.
Fasting is strict by western standards. Devout Orthodox Christians abstain from meat,
fish, dairy, wine, and oil, while others might practice different kinds of fasts, less severe,
throughout the year. Married couples will abstain from sex, instead devoting themselves
to prayer. Dispensation is granted to those who are physically unable to withstand the
deprivations of fasting, such as pregnant and nursing mothers, the very young and the
very old, the sick, and those who don’t control their diets, such as prisoners and soldiers.
Orthodoxy normally relaxes the fast on feast days that occur during the Great Fasts, such
as on the Feast of the Transfiguration, which falls during the Dormition Fast.
The repetitive rhythms of feast and fast throughout the calendar year conspire to create a
sense of timelessness, connecting the believer to the communion of saints and enfolding
the believer in the love of the eternal God.
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Online Edition – Vol. VIII, No. 7: October 2002
Restoring Sacred Time
How the Liturgical Year deepens Catholic faith
by Monsignor Peter Elliott
In his new book, Ceremonies of the Liturgical Year According to the Modern Roman Rite
(Ignatius Press, 254 pp, $17.95), Monsignor Peter Elliott presents a “manual for clergy
and all involved in liturgical ministries” as a guide to the most important moments of the
Church year from its beginning at Advent, through Christmas, Holy Week, and Corpus
Christi to the solemnity of Christ the King. It is intended as a companion to his earlier
book, Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite, and is in accord with the regulations in the
new Roman Missal (2000).
In his Introduction, Monsignor Elliott discusses the significance of the Liturgical Year as
an “instrument for catechesis and evangelization” and the importance of Sacred time.
This introduction is published here with the permission of Ignatius Press. — Editor
Christians understand time in a different way from other people because of the Liturgical
Year. We are drawn into a cycle that can become such a part of our lives that it
determines how we understand the structure of each passing year.
In the mind of the Christian, each passing year takes shape, not so much around the cycle
of natural seasons, the financial or sporting year or academic semesters, but around the
feasts, fasts and seasons of the Catholic Church. Without thinking much about it, from
early childhood, we gradually learn to see time itself, past, present and future, in a new
way.
All of the great moments of the Liturgical Year look back to the salvific events of Jesus
Christ, the Lord of History. Those events are made present here and now as offers of
grace, yet they bear strong presentments of eternity.
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Based on a common human consciousness of past, present and future, awareness of
sacred time surely marks one of the profound differences between a Christian and a
secularized person today. Before reflecting on the past, present and future dimensions of
the Liturgical Year, it is important to understand the challenge we face in a secularized
society.
Re-sacralizing Time
Sacred time is an instrument for catechesis and evangelization. The missionary monks
who evangelized Northern Europe knew that well when they transformed and adapted the
existing pagan time cycles. They noted how the natural season of Spring coincided with
the Christian season of catechesis and penance leading to Easter, with the result that it
became known among Anglo-Saxon people simply as “Lenthen”, “Spring”. This is the
source of our English word “Lent”, rather than the expression “Forty Days”
(Quadragesima) that is still used around the Mediterranean. Lent is a spiritual Springtime
of growth and new life. Another example was the way the date of Christ’s birth
apparently replaced the pagan celebration of the Winter solstice, December 25th. Time
itself was “baptized” as new peoples entered the Church.
We face a rather different challenge in the Third Christian Millennium. We need to
re-sacralize time in a secularized society that has abandoned our way of looking at the
passing year. This surely challenges us to make the most of the powerful cycle of
Christian feasts, fasts and seasons in the life of diocese, parish or religious community,
above all in the reverent celebration of the customary rites and ceremonies of the Roman
Rite that mark out sacred times. These ceremonies are described in detail in this book in
order to make them better proclaim the saving mysteries of the Incarnation and
Redemption to Christ’s faithful. The more noble, evocative and vivid is the ceremonial of
our seasonal liturgies, the more they draw people into the mystery of Christ. Holy Week
is the supreme example.
There are other practical ways of achieving this end, such as announcing the feasts and
seasons well in advance, planning and preparing the ceremonies well, bringing the
meaning of a day or season into preaching, catechesis and public prayer. As part of this
work of resacralizing time, the visual signs and symbols of the seasons should be
exploited more than ever. Yet one still enters churches where the environment for the
liturgy remains neutral for the whole year. There are no visible indications of where
God’s Pilgrim People are at this point in their journey through the Year of Grace. Look
around the church. The bare altar suggests that this might be Good Friday, while a
mountain of flowers, left over from a wedding, tells us that it could just as well be Easter
Day. Even the celebration of the Liturgy only faintly reflects the day or season, perhaps in
the color of vestments, and the result is monotony. There is no place for monotony in the
rich texture of Christian life and worship.
We are carried forward and freed from the monotony of the mundane through the mystery
and splendor of Catholic worship. The secular year may be rather monotonous. Any
variety it may have is derived from a few civil or national holidays or commercialized
versions of religious celebrations, such a Christmas, or frankly commercial ventures such
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as Mother’s Day. But the Christian year has its own inner vitality. It does not need to be
propped up by civil celebrations. Where these are customarily observed with Christian
rites, they cannot be allowed to intrude into the order of the liturgy of the Church,
otherwise we can lose sight of the priority of sacred time.
The genius of the Liturgical Year is the way it reminds us that time was transformed
when the Divine Word became flesh. In that mystery of the Incarnation we may perceive
that, in a sense, the Word became time. To put it another way, in Christ time takes on a
sacramental dimension. The Liturgical Year bears this sacramental quality of memorial,
actuation and prophecy. Time becomes a re-enactment of Christ’s saving events, His
being born in our flesh, His dying and rising for us in that human flesh. Time thus
becomes a pressing sign of salvation, the “day of the Lord”, His ever present “hour of
salvation”, the kairos. Time on earth then becomes our pilgrimage through and beyond
death toward the future Kingdom. The Liturgical Year is best understood both in its
origins and current form in the way we experience time: in the light of the past, present
and future.
Remembering the Past
To recall the past and remember is a universal human experience. We naturally celebrate
past events in our own lives, beginning with birthdays. In Christian families, we recall
anniversaries of marriage, ordination, religious profession and death, and in some
cultures the name days of children or adults. In the life of a city, nation or race great
events are remembered and celebrated. This natural human focus on a “great event” was
the cause and beginning of the development of the Liturgical Year. Just as the Passover in
Egypt was the key to the Jewish calendar, so the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, at the
time of Passover probably in the Year 29 AD, was the cause and beginning of
Christianity, Christians and the Church.
The Christian calendar found its origins in Israel and the Jewish seven day week. The
“seventh day”, the Sabbath, sanctified the whole Jewish week, with Monday and
Thursday as two associated days of fasting among devout Jews at the time of Christ. So
the Pharisee could say, “I fast twice on the Sabbath” (Luke 18:12).
In apostolic times, Christians replaced the Sabbath with Sunday, the first day of the week,
when Jesus Christ rose from the dead (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:2; Acts 20: 7; and “the day of
the Lord” in Revelation 1:10), although some Christians still retained an observance of
the Sabbath alongside Sunday. The early Christians also retained two days of fasting,
Wednesday and Friday (cf. The Didache, 8). Later, in the West, Saturday became a fast
day. The Christian celebration of the Eucharist on Sunday was often preceded by vigils,
in the night or at daybreak, a form of worship partly influenced by Jewish domestic or
synagogue prayer. Here we find the roots of the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours.
However, the weekly Sunday remembrance of the saving event of Easter was soon
accompanied by a more solemn annual recalling of the Resurrection. This was the new
Passover of the new Israel, Easter Sunday. In preparation for Easter, the days of Holy
Week recalled the events of Christ’s Passion through prayer and preaching. By the Fourth
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Century, a variety of ceremonies and customs had developed to celebrate Holy Week.
Through the recollections of the pilgrim lady Egeria we are able to see how the “great
week” was observed in Jerusalem at the end of the Fourth Century.
Easter is the “mother of all the Christian feasts”, not only because it is the supreme
celebration of the Lord but because it is regarded as the “great Sunday”, the original
Christian holy day. Calculated in different ways so as to coincide with the Jewish
Passover, the date of Easter became the subject of a fierce and divisive debate among
Christians. The first round was fought between Asian Christians and the other churches in
the Second and Third Centuries. Later, when Roman and Celtic Christians came together,
they faced the same differences and the debate was taken up again.
We find it difficult to understand the rancor and intensity of these early Christian
arguments about sacred time. Saint Paul had already rejected a scrupulous preoccupation
with the subtleties of the Jewish religious calendar (cf. Galatians 4: 10, 11; Colossians 2:
16), but this was something quite different.
For our forebears in the faith, it was very important to get the memories right. This was
part of a conserving mentality that sought to hand on and keep the apostolic tradition in
its pristine purity. This applied whether Christians wanted to retain continuity with some
elements in the Jewish Calendar, such as the Passover and Pentecost, or whether they
sought to distance themselves from Judaism, as in Syria. The Second Century debates
over the correct date of Easter reflect some of that tension, but more importantly they
bear witness to the innate conservatism of early Christians.
The majority practice was to celebrate Easter on the Sunday following the first full moon
of springtime. But this collided with a minority tradition in Asia Minor, allegedly derived
from Saint John. Here Easter was celebrated on the fourteenth day of the first full moon
of springtime, the fourteenth of Nisan. Putting aside the rights and wrongs of the issue,
that the issue was taken so seriously tells us much of the mind of Christians in the
imperial Roman age. Choosing the “right” times to celebrate or fast were important to our
forebears in the Faith. They regarded the calendar itself as a way of holding onto and
passing on the apostolic tradition. Sacred time offered them a kind of “orthopraxis” that
sustained their orthodoxy.
This distant debate reminds us that we may fail to appreciate the power and precision of
memory in the ancient world. This failure is only too evident in those scriptural critics
who are skeptical about the historical roots of our faith, above all the historicity of events
recorded in the Gospels. But ours is a historical religion and the historical basis of
Christianity is reflected in the minds behind the early developments of the sacred
calendar that became our Liturgical Year. They knew what some of us tend to forget, that
Christianity stands or falls on the reality of specific events that occurred in the First
Century. Close to those events, influenced by disciples of the first witnesses, they passed
on those unique revelatory moments within the community of the Church, not only in
Scripture and Tradition, in doctrines and sacraments but in the way they celebrated times
and seasons. Through the temporal cycle they relived and proclaimed the saving events of
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the Lord.
Anamnesis, memorial, is the Jewish principle behind this Christian celebration of time,
derived as it is in part from the calendar of Israel. Memorial has been developed well in
the Catechism of the Catholic Church (1362-1372), that is, in terms of the “great
memorial” of the Holy Eucharist. What is remembered is not merely celebrated, but
re-lived or made present again, re-presented or re-played. This is a key to Catholic
teaching on how the Eucharistic Sacrifice is the re-presentation of the Paschal Mystery,
the Cross and Resurrection. But it also shows us how our Liturgical Year is much more
than a series of anniversaries.
Through anamnesis, the passing days and months become the Year of Grace. Events that
happened in time are now extended in Sacrifice and Sacrament throughout one recurring
year of our time. The prescribed ceremonies for Holy Week and the Easter Triduum,
especially the Easter Vigil, are the clearest examples of anamnesis focused around the
solemn rites of Christian Initiation and the Eucharist. The timing and process of preparing
people for sacramental incorporation into the Church was determined in part by the
celebration of Easter, regarded as the right moment to incorporate converts into the
saving grace of the risen Christ. But the catechumenate also partly influenced the
development in the calendar of a Lenten fast for all believers, as well as the catechumenal
Advent that emerged in Gaul. The catechumens were brought into the memory of the
Church through observing the sacred times of the community of faith. Conversion meant
entering a new structure of time.
By the late Fourth Century, the basic shape of our Liturgical Year was well established.
The birth of Christ was celebrated on December 25 in the West and January 6 in the East,
although the precise origins of these dates remain a matter for academic speculation. A
Lenten fast was observed, varying in length and intensity from place to place. Holy Week
or the Great Week of Easter was a time of prayer and fasting leading to the supreme
celebration, Easter Day, which was extended into the fifty days of Easter culminating
with the feast of Pentecost, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Within a relatively short
time the season of Advent was added to this basic calendar in Rome. Days of fasting,
such as the Ember Days, days associated with papal Mass celebrated at specific stational
churches, vigils, and octaves gradually entered the Roman calendar as ways the faithful
prepared for or extended the celebration of great feasts. But the whole annual cycle
encapsulated salvation history. Through festival and fast, believers could relive and enter
the events of the Savior, celebrated and made present in the liturgy and sacraments.
The cycle of saints days represents a second level of this form of anamnesis. It would be
wrong to imagine that saints days were later medieval additions to a primitive Eastercentered
Liturgical Year. Keeping careful record of the days when martyrs died and
celebrating these anniversaries goes back to the Second Century. Well before the imperial
persecutions ceased, in East and West there were lists of the anniversaries of the martyrs,
the basic martyrologies. This early development also set up the distinction that continues
to our times, between universal or regional calendars and local calendars. The memory of
the Universal Church includes the memories of particular churches gathered in one
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communion. The calendars embrace all the saints, heroes and heroines of the Church who
now share in the eternal Easter that we can enter through anamnesis.
The Present offer of Grace
The “Year of Grace” reflects the kairos of the Lord, His “chosen time”. The kairos is
God’s ever-present offer of grace to us in chosen moments of time, above all in the
sacraments. Jesus Christ, “the same, yesterday, today or tomorrow” is God’s “now”.
The Liturgical Year thus suggests the sovereignty of the grace of Christ. We say that we
“follow” or “observe” the Liturgical Year, but this Year of Grace also carries us along.
Once we enter it faithfully we must allow it to determine the shape of our daily lives. It
sets up a series of “appointments” with the Lord. We know there are set days, moments,
occasions when He expects us. Within this framework of obligation, duty and covenant,
we are part of something greater than ourselves. We can detect a sense of being sustained
or borne forward by the power and pace of a sacred cycle that is beyond our control. It
will run its course whether we like it or not. This should give us an awareness of the
divine dimension of the Liturgical Year as an expression the power and authority of Jesus
who is the Lord of History. As the blessing of the Paschal Candle recalls: “all time
belongs to Him and all the ages”. The sacred cycle thus becomes a sacrament of God’s
time. Salvation history is among us here and now. This time is His offer of grace.
Considered from one aspect this awareness of time can be intimidating. But it should be
interpreted in the perspective of a spirituality of divine Providence. Awareness that “my
time” rests in God’s hands is a call to trust, to faith, to letting go of self. The Jesuit
director Jean-Pierre De Caussade proposed this as a “self abandonment to divine
providence”. Once time is recognized as salvation history, once each passing day or week
is seen as sacred time, it is easier for us to review our relationship with the Lord of time
and let time pass into his hands.
Sacred time also gives us a strong sense of being members of the Church. I have already
observed how our sense of time is reshaped by the subtle catechesis of each Liturgical
Year. We become conscious of this especially when we are called to teach the faith to
children and young people. Any perusal of catechetical texts shows the pedagogical value
of liturgical time. The same catechetical opportunities are available to the clergy in
preaching and teaching during the liturgy, above all in drawing out the meaning of the
major rites and ceremonies described in this book.
The Liturgical Year is a means of evangelization. Stories of conversion often include
references to Christian feast days that were key moments in the process. A critical event
may have been an invitation to enter a totally unfamiliar experience. Someone is taken to
Christmas Midnight Mass in a Catholic church, and that experience ultimately leads to
Catholic faith. But returning to the faith is also made easier through sacred time. Even the
most casual members of the Church recall their Catholic identity when the time comes
around each year for the observance of Christmas and Easter. On those days, many
fallen-away Catholics know that the Lord awaits them, and where He waits, even if they
do not feel inclined to respond to this invitation. But the Liturgical Year and its vivid rites
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gently open other doors for them to return to the life of grace. Anyone can accept the
blessed ashes on Ash Wednesday. The greatest sinner can come forward to venerate the
cross on Good Friday. These simple acts of penance pave the way to a good confession,
that is, the recovery of the grace of baptism that leads to the altar of the Eucharist.
The evangelical dimension of the Year of Grace is one rationale behind the two major
seasons of preparation and conversion, Advent and Lent. As already noted, Advent
originated in Gaul in the Third Century where it was an alternative time for preparing
catechumens for baptism, given on January 6, the Epiphany. In Rome this form of Advent
became a season of preparation for the feasts of Christmas and the Epiphany. Today we
maintain the emphasis of the Roman tradition, but the anticipation of the Incarnation calls
for interior preparation and conversion.
Testimony to the penitential observance of Lent is found in Saint Athanasius and other
Fathers and the forty days was well established by the Fourth Century, although Sundays
were counted as part of this cycle. Ash Wednesday and the three days that follow it were
added later so that the forty days could be weekdays because Sunday is never a day for
fasting. The seasons of penance and preparation remind us that God’s past events are
present in our events, refashioning our lives in the continuous process of conversion to
Christ.
The Divine Future
The future orientation of the liturgical year is best appreciated in the light of pastoral
opportunities. The attentive celebrant of the liturgy and sacraments assists the faithful to
celebrate Christian time by remembering past events that embody a saving offer of grace
here and now.
But the future offers another possibility for his pastoral use of time. He should encourage
his people to look forward, through and beyond the transitory moments of this life, to the
telos, to the finality and purpose of it all. As a pastor, he is leading his people toward the
eschaton, to the goal and beatific fulfillment of our journey through time to eternity. That
is the eschatological meaning of the annual cycles of Christian seasons and celebrations.
It is also the reason Christians have traditionally turned to pray toward the East, where
the dawn of Christ lights this world in anticipation of His eternal Day.
Like liturgical orientation, the Church Year points beyond itself. It is never an end in
itself. It constantly speaks of eternity. Each year recapitulates the Christian’s journey
towards heaven. Each year is another dawn containing the eternal Day.
The Liturgical Year is eschatological in a basic sense because it reveals how reality
moves forward in a specific way. The history of the universe is not merely a series of
great cycles, of going back to the beginning and starting all over again. Indeed a
relentless understanding of time as repetitive cycles is pagan rather than Christian. Our
Judo-Christian understanding of time is teleological, that is, of progressing toward a goal,
an end, to God.
In considering the teleological way we view the flow of time, we should read the “signs
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of the times” in the twenty-first century and sharpen our perception of the current erosion
of faith and reason. As the era of old ideologies recedes, people in our complex societies
are taking up a variety of contrasting world views. “Post-modern” forms of irrationalism
are being challenged by a revived rationalist scientism, accompanied by an underlying
secularist ideology of dogmatic individualism, which simply means gross selfishness. It
is interesting to reflect how these world views all include a misunderstanding of the
meaning and purpose of time.
It is obvious that post-modernism in its rationalist and secularist forms is nihilism.
Nothing is valued. Nothing has inherent meaning. The human person has no value, no
inherent dignity or rights. We are lost in an indifferent process of time where we do not
matter. On the other hand, the irrational neo-paganism of the “new age” includes a revival
of a cyclic understanding of reality, and that is another basic misunderstanding of reality.
In a cyclic understanding of time and reality the error of reincarnation flourishes and with
it the dignity, value and uniqueness of the human person is eroded. The rise of the “new
age” phenomenon may not be merely a passing phase, as we may have imagined some
years ago. It bears with it a fatalism and a determinism that undermines moral
responsibility and creates indifference. The “new age” is as ethically bankrupt as
secularist individualism. Its forms and disciplines are soft and permissive. It tolerates evil
and can even conjure it up.
Christianity offers an alternative vision of the future in terms not only of a progress
toward a goal but of a choice. There will be a point to resolve my past, a moment of
judgment. This is brought to us in the apocalyptic quality of the Liturgical Year, which
bears the message: “the Lord is coming again”. Faced with the prospect that “He will
come again to judge the living and the dead”, we are reminded of a series of challenging
truths revealed in Jesus Christ: we are responsible beings; our actions in time have eternal
repercussions; each of us is taken seriously by a personal God who loves us; our life span
and all time bears His purpose. Therefore we will be called to give an account of our
temporal lives when we return to our Creator.
Eternal life thus raises the question of the end of our allotted time or the meaning of
death. In this regard, November is an important month in the Liturgical Year, offering
opportunities for catechesis and preaching. While All Souls Day is described as the
“commemoration of all the faithful departed” it is not so much an occasion for looking
back over the lives of dead people but rather a challenge to look forward to where they —
and we — are going. Praying for the souls in purgatory brings with it a sense of the future,
our future, even if this is only the passing thought, “But will someone remember me
when I die and need prayers?” Purgatory also seems to be a kind of half-way house
between this life and the next, that is, between time and eternity. Speculative theology
raises the question of a kind of “time” in purgatory because it is a merciful process, or a
progress into what C.S. Lewis called “deep heaven”. Purgatory is surely the most
intensely teleological “moment” in the future that awaits us beyond the death we all must
experience.
Prayer for the dead is a dimension of our faith in the Communion of Saints that we
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profess in the Apostles Creed. This Communion is an understanding of the Church that
helps us look beyond time to another great truth we proclaim in the Nicene Creed, “the
resurrection of the Body and life everlasting”. The Communion of Saints runs through the
Liturgical Year in the “sanctoral cycle” of familiar solemnities, feasts, memorials and
commemorations in honor of saints, above all in those associated with Our Blessed Lady,
the Queen of Saints. There is a catechetical or homiletic value in marking these saints’
days and setting up their lives as good examples of virtue and cooperation with grace. But
as we seek their intercession we also reinforce the sense of being surrounded by a “great
cloud of witnesses”. They point to the future as they encourage us on in our journey
toward eternity. They remind us what that journey will entail in terms of participating in
the renewal of the whole cosmos, the general resurrection of the dead and restoration of
all things in Christ. The saints are already “there”, in eternity, welcoming us into the
divine future.
As the Millennium celebrations unfolded and ushered in January 1, 2000 AD, a strange
incident occurred in Australia. It was seen on television by millions all around the world,
but it was not widely comprehended. The famous Sydney Harbor Bridge was being used
as the framework for a spectacular display of fireworks. Suddenly, the colors faded and in
blazing white letters the fireworks formed one word: Eternity.
Everyone in that city knew what it meant, not theologically of course, but at least as a
fragment of their local history. Many years ago a somewhat eccentric man was converted
to Christianity. He spent the rest of his life on a simple mission — scrawling that word
“Eternity” on the walls of his city. He wanted to remind people, to make them face God’s
present moment, to point them beyond time to the real future.
Ultimately that is what the Liturgical Year does. It transforms our time into a sacrament
of eternity.
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pastera! focus
liturgical ministry 7 (Summer, 1998) 129-135
The Hispanic Liturgical Year
The People’s Calendar
Mark R. Francis
The title of this article may strike some as inaccurate or even strange Is there really a “Hispanic” liturgical year9 Officially, the answer to that question is clearly “no ” There has not been an officially promulgated “Hispanic” variation to the Roman document that explains and governs the church year, General Norms for the Liturgical Year and Calendar (hereafter GNLYC;’ Yet, for many who work hturgically within the Hispanic community—especially those who work in a multicultural context— there are moments when the non-Hispanic and Hispanic communities regard the relative importance of certain seasons and celebrations in quite a different light Even apart from particular celebrations in honor of the Virgin Mary venerated under titles special to Híspanles, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe (Mexico) or Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre (Cuba), it seems obvious to even the most casual observers that the Hispanic interpretation of the liturgical year often follows different emphases and rhythms
Mark R Francis, C SV, is associate professor of liturgy at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago and is the co-author with Arturo Pérez of Primero Dios A Hispanic Liturgical Resource
1 The text for this document is readily available in several editions See, for example, The Liturgy Documents A Parish Resource (Chicago Liturgy Training Publications, 1991) 171 84
Insofar as the way the liturgical year is variously “received” by people of Hispanic/Latino background in light of their history and deeply held popular religious practices, one can maintain that a “Hispanic” liturgical year really does exist But it would not be accurate to overly dichotomize the “official” liturgical year with its “popular” Hispanic version since, in a sense, we are dealing with two different but overlapping phenomena The HLY (Hispanic liturgical year) is not conceptually organized, nor can it be neatly reduced to a set of rubrical norms such as those outlined in “The Table of Liturgical Days according to Their Order of Precedence “2 Rather, it is the year of grace lived by people that serves to sacrahze their existence and mark the passage of time in a cosmos filled with God’s presence While it is certainly related to the Church’s universal calendar, it is also a manner of viewing time through a particular lens that both focuses and sometimes readjusts the view of the official liturgical year outlined by the Roman documents Given the long history (more than 500 years) of Hispanic interaction with the liturgical year, this should surprise no one—nor should it be a cause for alarm since it is the result of the process we now call mculturation
The word “people” used in the title of this article also deserves some explanation Clearly, what is intended by the use of this possessive is that the liturgical
2 GNLYC §59
year belongs to “the people” and is a facet of what is called Hispanic popular religiosity It is important, though, not to construe the words “people” or “popular” m this context as referring only to something that is commonly observed in the Hispanic community As Orlando Espin notes, “Popular religion is ‘popular’ not because it is widespread but because its creators and practitioners are the people, and more concretely the marginalized people in society (ι e, those social sectors pushed against their will to the dispensable or disposable margins of society) “3 It is in this sense that the people’s liturgical year depends less on the official descriptions contained in the liturgical books and more on oral tradition passed on from one generation to the next This is especially crucial since the liturgical year, as a way of hallowing time, is very much influenced by popular religious practices that bring the sacred into the everyday
Interestingly, the intrinsic relationship between the liturgical year and devotional practices is also noted by the General Norms for the Liturgical Year and Calendar (GNLYC, §1) “During the different seasons of the liturgical year, the Church, in accord with traditional discipline, carries out the formation of the faithful by means of devotional practices, both interior and exterior, instruction, and works of
3 Orlando Espin Popular Religion as an Epistemology (of Suffering) Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 2 2 (1994) 66
130
liturgical ministry- 7 (Summer, 1998)
penance and mercy.” In order for this description of the liturgical year to relate to our theme, “Church” in this sentence, of course, needs to be interpreted in a broader sense than simply the hierarchical authority and understood as the tradition of the Gospel as received and celebrated by the people. Nevertheless, the close connection between what many consider “extra-liturgical” observances or devotions and the liturgical year is necessary to keep in mind especially in the Hispanic context.
The focus of this article, then, will be on how the liturgical year received from the Roman tradition is experienced and interpreted by Hispanics. In order to explore the liturgical year from this perspective, the first step is to review briefly the genesis and the matrices of the Hispanic liturgical year. Second, we need to find an interpretive key that will enable us to look at what we see with some level of understanding. I believe that this key is found in the general way in which Hispanics refer to the congruence between their deeply held values and their spirituality: the mística. I will begin by describing briefly some of the key characteristics of the mística as well as its underlying theological and anthropological presuppositions. Third, the three principal seasons of the Hispanic liturgical year will then be described through this lens. Finally, I will suggest that it is crucial that the Hispanic interpretation of the liturgical year be respected—not only because it eloquently celebrates the Gospel in particular cultural
idioms, but also, being an example of the inculturation of the Gospel, it has much ίο offer the non-Hispanic North American Catholic community.
How is the
liturgical year
received from
the Roman tradition
experienced and
interpreted by Hispanics?
The Genesis of the Hispanic Liturgical Year
The form of Christianity that the Spanish conquistadores brought to the western hemisphere was essentially that of medieval Spain and not that of the Counter-Reformation. It should be remembered that the liturgical reform and standardization mandated by the Council of Trent did not really start until 1570 with the promulgation of the Missal of Pius V. By that time the Spanish evangelization of the “New World” was already seventy-eight years old. Given the slowness of communication in the sixteenth century, the natural reluctance on the part of many of the missionaries to embrace the Tridentine reform from what they had known all of their lives, and the fact that the Spanish crown did not allow the decrees of this
Council to be published in its territories until much later, all guaranteed that the liturgy celebrated in Ibero-America was that of the Middle Ages for the first century of evangelization and perhaps longer.4 What were the characteristics of this Catholicism—especially in regard to the liturgical year? One of the key aspects of this Catholicism was its emphasis on symbol and celebration as the principal means of evangelizing the indigenous people and handing on the faith. Unlike the Counter-Reformation Church, which would increasingly rely on written catechisms—a strategy made possible by the invention of the printing press—the essentially medieval Church of the Spanish New World would preach and catechize in the more ancient manner, with what Orlando Espin refers to as the more patristic notion of traditio.
Traditio
canno
t be simply translated today as “tradition.” Traditio, during the Iberian Middle Ages, included the beliefs held by Christians as part of revelation and as part of the ancient credal definitions. It involved the liturgical and sacramental practices of one’s local and regional Church. But traditio also implied the behavior that was expected of Christians, the pious devotions of one’s community, many other religious beliefs and demands held to be important for Christian living, the (canonical and consuetudinal) discipline of the local and western Church, and just about every customary facet of daily life in which religion was involved. As can be deduced from this description, the medieval Iberian concept of traditio was practically coextensive with what Christians believed, how they worshiped, and how they lived.5
- Among the many works that speak of the per-durance of the Medieval Christianity of Spain in the New World, see Luis Weckmann, The Medieval Heritage of Mexico, trans. Frances M López-Monllas (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), especially chapter 19, “Doctrine, Rite and Liturgy,” pp. 296-312 Also, Orlando Espin, “Popular Catholicism among Latinos” in Hispanic Catholic Culture in the U.S : Issues and Concerns, ed. Jay P. Dolan and Allan Figueroa Deck (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994) 308-59.
- Espin, “Popular Catholicism among Latinos,” 317
Francis:
The Hispanic Liturgical Year
131
Working in a primarily oral society (like Spain of the Middle Ages), it was only natural that the first generations of evangelizers who ministered in the Americas—primarily Dominican, Franciscan, and Augustinian frailes— would present the faith to the new converts by means of ritual, symbol, and their own popular religious practices. Thus, the celebrations of the liturgical year, so much a part of the rhythm of Spanish life and the Christian “traditio,” became one of the principal means of presenting the content of the faith and of inspiring fervor and commitment in the people. Processions, images, lights, music, and drama—all of the ways the medieval Church celebrated its principal feasts—were used not only to proclaim the Christian message, but to teach and inform the native peoples about the new faith. Although there would be a later (Tridentine) concern for “orthodoxy” of expression, which would proscribe some of the more exuberant and dramatic ways of expressing the faith, the Catholicism presented to the people of early America was essentially that of the popular faith as it was lived in the villages of Spain. In fact, after the first wave of religious order missionaries, it is quite likely that most of the actual communication of Christianity was done by the lay Spaniards who came to this continent (and these were by and large, Spain’s poor) and, as time went on, by the Amerindian, African, and mestizo populations that entered the Church.6
It would be a mistake, though, to think that the native peoples and, later, the African slaves, passively received this instruction without transforming it. After the terrible destruction of their social, political, and religious world, the suffering inflicted upon the inhabitants of Central and South America by the rapacious conquistadores, and the continued oppression of the native peoples by the colonial government, remnants of the old Amerindian world and culture remain just below the surface of newly adopted Christian practices. The more far-seeing
- Orlando Espin, The Faith of the People: Theological Reflections on Popular Catholicism (Maryknoll. Orbis Books, 1997) 70.
of the missionaries, repeating a time-honored missiological practice of only changing those aspects of life that run counter to the Gospel, consciously al-
This method of
presenting Christianity,
filtered through
the medieval,
popular religion
of the Spaniards,
was relatively congenial
to the
cosmovision
of the native people.
lowed the converts to retain some of their age-old customs. José de Acosta, a Jesuit, described how he envisioned the missionary task in the New World in a Pastoral Manual of 1577:
Our task is to gradually form the Indians in Christian customs and discipline, and to do away quietly with superstitious and sacrilegious rites… but I don’t believe we should change their customs in those areas where they do not oppose religion or justice—just the opposite—their native and national customs ought to be retained as long as they are not contrary to reason….7
He also described how their rites and celebrations that were contrary to Christian belief should be transformed by substituting Christian symbols for the pagan ones.
Despite the terrible violence and repression perpetrated on countless indigenous people in the name of Christ, this more enlightened method of evangel iza-
7.
“…oficio
nuestro es ir poco a poco formando a los indios en las costumbres y la disciplina cristiana, y cortar sin estrépito los ritos supersticiosos y sacrilegos, mas en los puntos en que costumbres no se oponen a la religión o la justicia, no creo conveniente cambiarles, antes al contrario retener todo lo paterno y gentilicio, con tal que no sea contrario a la razón.. ” José de Acosta, De procurando indorum salute (1577) quoted in Diego Irarrázaval, Rito y Pensar Cristiano (Lima. Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1993) 19.
tion
describe
d by Acosta seemed to be quite effective. This method of presenting Christianity, filtered through the medieval, popular religion of the Spaniards, was relatively congenial to the cosmovision of the native people. The celebration of the sacraments, images, processions, drama all had parallels in their native religious observances and therefore appealed to the new subjects of the Spanish crown, making it easier for them to embrace the Christian God.8 In embracing these practices, however, the native peoples also received them in light of their particular religious understanding that was naturally influenced by their pre-Columbian world view. What this produced, then, was a fusion or mixture of religious practices, some originating in Spain, others that developed as a means of catechizing the new converts, and still others that drew more or less directly on pre-Christian practices and beliefs. Because of the crucial importance of the liturgical year as a means of communicating the faith, it is natural that the year would bear the imprint of these various traditions.
For example, some of the seasonal customs were imported directly from old Spain. The use of andas or floats upon which statues are carried in procession throughout Holy Week comes from medieval Spanish practice. Other observances were purposefully designed by the missionaries to teach about the Christian faith. The Christmas custom of the posadas, for example, dates from the sixteenth century and was promoted by the Augustinians in Mexico as a substitution for an Aztec celebration in honor of the god Huitzilopochtli that was celebrated around the same time of year. It is a dramatic representation of Mary and Joseph’s trip to Bethlehem from Nazareth during which they seek “lodging” (posada) along the way in the homes of the people.9 Finally, a celebration as ostensibly
8 See Jaime Vidal, “Synthesis in Iberian and Hispanic American Popular Religiosity” in An Enduring Flame· Studies on Latino Popular Religiosity, ed Anthony Stevens-Arroyo and Ana Maria Diaz-Stevens (New York PARAL, 1994) 69-95, esp 70.
9
José Luís Fernández, Ui Navidad en México Orígenes y Celebraciones II (México, DF Publicaciones Paulinas, 1992) 17-20
132
liturgical ministry 7 (Summer, 1998)
“Roman” as that of Ash Wednesday finds particular resonance with Hispanic peoples because of its recognition and affirmation of themes important to pre-Columbian spirituality: the human relationship to the earth, the recognition of human weakness and sinfulness, and the need to face death as a reality of life. It has been noted that “if the number of people going to church were a valid measure of the importance of a particular feast, then Ash Wednesday is the most important feast of the Hispanic calendar.”10
Finally, another major influence on the Hispanic liturgical year was the gradually increasing direction and control of the Roman authorities on the devotional life of the people. This influence on the whole Western Church is well documented elsewhere.11 It reached its peak during the pontificate of Pius IX and was especially important among the European immigrant groups that came to the large urban centers of the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These Counter-Reformation devotions, especially those to which indulgences were attached, such as to the Sacred Heart and to our Lady of Lourdes, were also received enthusiastically by many Latin Americans in the nineteenth century and still affect the rhythm of the liturgical year as lived by Hispanics.
The Mística Having briefly reviewed the origin and matrices of the Hispanic liturgical year, we now turn to the spirituality that gives it continued cohesion. The key to understanding how the traditional Roman liturgical year is received and interpreted in Hispanic communities is to be found
- Mexican American Cultural Center, Faith Expression of Hispanics in the Southwest (San Antonio: MAAC, 1990) 16. See also José López, “The Liturgical Year and Hispanic Customs” in Misa, Mesa y Musa: Liturgy in the US Hispanic Church, ed. Κ. Davis (Chicago: World Library Publications, 1997) 37-38.
- Carl Dehne, “Devotions, Popular” in The New Dictionary of Sacramental Worship, ed. Peter E. Fink, (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1990) 331-40; Ann Taves, The Household of Faith· Roman Catholic Devotion in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986); Mark R. Francis, “Building Bridges Between Liturgy, Devotionahsm and Popular Religion,” Assembly 20 (April 1994) 636-38.
in what has been described as the mística—the particularly Hispanic manner of relating to God, the world, and others. A significant facet of this mística or spiri-
It is this
“familial” relationship
to the Holy
that informs the
Hispanic interpretation
of the Gospel
in general and
the liturgical year
in particular.
tuality is described in the 1987 National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic Ministry.
…one of the most important aspects of [the místicas] content is a sense of the presence of God, which serves as a stimulus for living out one’s daily commitments. In this sense the transcendent God is nevertheless present in human affairs and human lives. Indeed, one might go so far as to speak of God as a member of the family, with whom one has recourse, not only in moments of fervent prayer, but also in one’s daily living.12
It is this “familial” relationship to the Holy that informs the Hispanic interpretation of the Gospel in general and the liturgical year in particular. It situates relationships with God, Mary, and the saints in the context of human relationships. This relationality also extends to the way time itself is experienced. Rather than an impersonal abstraction, time provides the context for encountering and relating to this personalized sense of the Holy. It is to the mística that one must first refer in order to attempt an adequate pastoral approach to the liturgical year in a Hispanic
- “National Pastoral Plan for Hispanic Ministry” VIII, Origins 17:26 (December 10, 1987) ^62. This document was approved by the U.S. bishops Nov. 18, 1987 and “is a strategic elaboration based on the conclusions of the III Encuentro” or third meeting of ministers and others working with Hispanic communities throughout the U.S.
ambiente,
since this attitude permeates what is known as Hispanic popular religion and the way it interacts with the official church calendar. Although holy and transcendent, God, Jesus, and Mary are not abstractions or impersonal forces. They are persons with whom one needs to relate—and the way one relates to these members of the family is through ritual actions that take place at specified times throughout the year. All of the ritual gestures that surround celebrations of the liturgical year—being signed with ashes on Ash Wednesday, acclaiming Jesus by waving palms and walking in procession on Passion Sunday, tenderly kissing a statue of the bloody Christ “after he has been laid at the tomb” on Good Friday, offering condolences to Mary at the end of Good Friday, rising before dawn on December 12th to sing Las Mañanitas to an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe—are all ways that Hispanics both share gestures and symbols common to the Roman liturgical tradition as well as incorporate their particular observances that mark the church year.
As Roberto Goizueta points out, the motivation behind what some would consider the more exuberant aspects of Hispanic customs and observances of the church year is the decidedly personal and incarnational way in which Hispanic communities relate to the presence of the sacred. In discussing the celebration of Holy Week in San Antonio, he writes:
When…an elderly Mexican woman approaches the Crucified Jesus to plant a gentle kiss on his feet, or reaches to touch Mary’s veil during a procession, there is little doubt that for the elderly woman, Jesus and Mary are present here. These religious statues or figures are not mere representations of reality completely external to them, rather they are the concrete embodiment, in time and space, of Jesus and Mary. These are, in short, sacramental images: natural, particular entities that mediate, embody, and reveal a supernatural, universal and absolute reality.13
- Roberto S. Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesús: Toward a Hispanic/Latino Theology of Accompaniment (Maryknoll, NY- Orbis Books, 1995)48.
Francis The Hispanic Liturgical Year
In this context, then, the liturgical year is not simply a way of marking time—it is the context or home in which one meets the sacred embodied in the mysteries of Christ and Mary as well as the holy men and women who have preceded us in faith This is a resolutely sacramental and catholic way of looking at time—as kairos instead of mere chronos It moves constantly from the particular to the more general and in so doing reveals an important part of the religious anthropology that underlies the people’s year
One cannot love the universal and supernatural if one cannot love the particular and natural—and love these precisely as particular and natural One cannot love the Creator if one cannot love the creature—and love him, her, or it precisely as creature To suggest that the particular mediates the universal is to suggest that there is no such thing as an isolated, individual entity that is not intrinsically related to others every human person is a concrete, particular, and unique mediation of the universal14
One of the prime characteristics of the mística is the way that it reinforces human relationships Time and again, the popular religious customs that are part of celebrating the sacraments and the liturgical year help give color and life to these celebrations and serve to emphasize relationships, interdependence, dignity, and continuity of human life 15 The sacramental principle of the particular mediating the universal is well expressed throughout the Hispanic year To illustrate this principle, we will now look briefly at three periods of the Roman liturgical cycle through a Hispanic lens the Tnduum, the Fall anamnesis of the Dead, and Advent
14 R Goizueta, Caminemos con Jesus, 49, 50
15 Clearly, in the celebration of the sacraments—baptism, for example—the enactment of traditional popular religious customs that complete the official nte emphasize human as well as religious relationships of the godparents to the parents (la entrega) or the relationship of the parents to the poor (el bolo) See M Francis and A Pérez-Rodríguez, Primero Dios Hispanic Liturgical Resource (Chicago Liturgy Training Publications, 1997) 30-36
The Triduum
According to the GNLYC (§18), the culmination of the entire liturgical year is the Easter Triduum The official liturgical
Time and again, the popular religious
customs that are
part of celebrating
the sacraments and
the liturgical year
help give color and life
to these celebrations
and serve to emphasize
relationships,
interdependence,
dignity, and continuity
of human life.
celebrations prescribed for this penod are the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper, the Celebration of the Lord’s Passion on Good Fnday, and the Easter Vigil It is undeniable that the reform of Holy Week, first under Pius XII in the 1950s and then again as presented in the Missal of Paul
133
VI (1970), sought to restore the Easter Vigil to its rightful place as the mother of all vigils (GNLYC, §21) and the preeminent celebration of the liturgical year The need for this restoration was obvious Prior to the 1950s, throughout the Catholic world the Vigil was celebrated by clerics on Saturday morning and exercised little influence on the people’s celebration and understanding of Holy Week—especially m the Hispanic world
While the Easter Vigil is becoming more important m Hispanic parishes as the years go by, those ministering in a Hispanic ambiente know that in many ways Good Friday is the emotional and liturgical popular focus of Holy Week, rather than the Easter Vigil To some this may appear as unfortunate—a skewed theology of the Paschal Mystery that emphasizes suffering and death rather than resurrection But if we look through the lens of popular religion, we can see that this particular interpretation of the Triduum resonates with principal elements of the mística described above
This is clearly seen in the Hispanic popular celebrations that take place on Good Fnday and that serve as the context for the official celebrations presented in the sacramentary, such as the veneration of the cross Accompanying the andas or statues of the suffering Christ and Mary in procession, or in walking the dramati-
Sfe^”
134
liturgical ministry 7 (Summer, 1998)
cally reenacted Via Crucis Viviente (living way of the cross), Hispanics actively participate in Jesus’ suffering and death this day.16 The suffering and death of Jesus is not merely contemplated on this day, but it is re-lived with intensity and fervor. It is Jesus—one like us in all things but sin—who is the protagonist of this day and whose experience of condemnation and death parallels the experience of suffering of so many in the history of the Hispanic community. What is celebrated this day are not ideas about God and humanity but the tangible, the particular, the emotional way in which God reaches out to humanity in the painful, messy, and bloody death of the Son. We witness this death on several levels. We are not passive bystanders, but people whose lives are transformed by this suffering. On another level, Hispanics accompany Jesus as brother and friend on this, his path of pain.
This intense identification with Jesus as friend and family member continues throughout this day and finds poignant expression at the close of the day when many go to the church to give their psame a la Virgen or their condolences to Mary. It is there, in the subdued lighting and in the presence of a statue of Mary as La Soledad or La Dolorosa that Jesus is waked and Mary is comforted as the sorrowful mother who has lost her son. Death, as part of life, is not denied but acknowledged as an integral part of the human existence. Yet Jesus’ death is not remembered as the end of the story, but as a transition. The traditional “santo encuentro” beginning Mass at dawn on Easter (the meeting of statues of the risen Christ and Mary carried to the front door of the church) often to the strains of Regina Caeli Laetare serves as the joyous fulfillment to the many popular religious elements of the “Hispanic Triduum.”17
- See Roberto Goizueta’s moving account of Good Friday in San Antonio in his Caminemos con Jesús, 33-36.
- The Philippines was catechized by the Spaniards in much the same way as the Americas. On this, see a description of the dramatically staged santo encuentro in the Philippines (called the Salubong in Tagalog) in James Kroeger, “Catechesis in Popular Pageantry: Philippine Resurrection Rituals,” The Living Light 26 (1990) 109-12.
The Fall Anamnesis of the Dead
Another eloquent ritual expression of the Hispanic mística that in some ways parallels and domesticates the celebration of the Triduum is found in the traditional
At first glance,
some may find it
hard to reconcile
the focus of
the early part of Advent
on a Marian feast
with the rest of
the liturgical season.
Hispanic celebration of “The Day of the Dead” or All Souls Day on November 2. While this annual commemoration of the faithful departed has long been a feature of the Roman liturgical calendar, Raul Gómez points out that the Hispanic interpretation of this celebration “reveals the role death plays in life and life plays in death”18 and hints at the aspects of the Amerindian spirituality that underlie and complement the way the Christian faith deals with death. Just as the entire community accompanies Jesus and his mother during the Triduum in both death and life, so this time of year is set aside to accompany loved ones who have died by keeping their memory alive.
This remembering or anamnesis—at heart a very liturgical activity—is done in tangible ways during this celebration, which takes place over three days.19 On October 31 the mother of the home cleans the house and sets up a table adjacent to the altarcito or home altar upon which photographs and reminders of deceased loved ones are placed. Those who have most recently died are featured here but this first day is dedicated to the an-
- Raúl Gómez, “The Day of the Dead: Celebrating the Continuity of Life and Death,” Liturgy 17 (1997) 28.
19.1 am indebted to Raúl Gómez for much of the following description of the Day of the Dead. See R. Gómez, “The Day of the Dead,” 29-35.
gelitos, the little angels or children of the family who have died. On All Saints Day (November 1) Hispanics (especially Mexicans) look death straight in the eye …and laugh. On this day traditional “Day of the Dead” food is prepared that strikes non-Hispanics as macabre but which really mocks the power of death. Bread shaped like a cadaver or pile of bones (pan de muerto), candy formed into skulls or skeletons (alfeñique) is prepared. Many go to the cemetery to clean and decorate the graves of loved ones. Some even keep vigil all night on the grave to receive the souls of the loved ones. Finally, on November 2nd itself, families go to the graves to spend most of the day, to picnic and decorate the tombs with flowers (usually golden marigolds zempasuchtli—the Aztec flower of the dead). Mass is often celebrated in the cemetery itself or families go to church sometime that day. Yet while the accent is placed on the family’s remembrance of loved ones who have died, it is also very much a celebration of the continuity of life in the face of death. In this, El Dia de los Muertos has retained a very pre-Columbian spirituality now creatively linked to the core of Christian faith—the Paschal Mystery.
Advent
Hispanics and specifically Mexican-Americans celebrate the four-week preparation for Christmas with different accents and emphases. While the official Roman liturgy describes the “twofold character” of this season as one that is focused on the first and second coming of Christ, Hispanic Advent “personalizes” this preparation through the celebrations of two nine-day celebrations or novenarios that in many ways are more deeply rooted in their cultural celebration of the faith. The first is the nine days beginning on December 3 in preparation for the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12. The second is the custom of Las Posadas that begins on December 16 and runs to Christmas eve that reenacts the search of Mary and Joseph for lodging in Bethlehem prior to the birth of Jesus.
At first glance, some may find it hard
Francis:
The
Hispanic Liturgical Year
135
to reconcile the focus of the early part of Advent on a Marian feast with the rest of the liturgical season. In the eyes of many who are not Hispanic, Guadalupe seems to usurp the place of European devotions more in keeping with the nature of the season, such as the Advent wreath. The seeming conflict becomes very pronounced when the feast falls on one of the Advent Sundays. This conflict, though, is often more in the minds of non-Hispanics than in the more holistic way Hispanics celebrate the liturgical year.20 Being able to “read the image” is necessary in order to appreciate the points of contact between Guadalupe and Advent and to understand the profound emotional attachment many Hispanics have toward Mary under this title. The image appeared on the tilma or cloak of Blessed Juan Diego after he used it to gather roses out of season as a miraculous sign of Mary’s appearance on the hill of Tepeyac outside of Mexico City. This event took place during the first brutal years of Spanish rule in Mexico, when the world of the native peoples seemed to be coming to an end. Mary appears on the tilma as a young mestiza (a woman of Amerindian and European heritage)—for that reason she is affectionately called ‘Ία Morenita” the “little brown one.” She is pregnant, for she wears the blue band traditionally worn by Aztec women with child, and on her womb appears a flower, the Aztec symbol for new life and a new era. Space prevents a more detailed discussion of the image, but this brief description points to some of the reasons why Guadalupe is so important for Hispanic peoples and is an appropriate icon for Advent. Because she appears as a mestiza, Guadalupe presents God’s yes to the native people of the Americas. She represents an image of holiness and dignity with which the native and mestizo peoples of the Americas identify.21 Like the church during Advent, she is also
- On this contrast see Alejandro Garcia-Rivera’s provocative “A Matter of Presence” Journal of Hispanic/Latino Theology 5:2 (1997): 22-53.
- For a comprehensive and readable overview of the significance of the Guadalupe event see Virgilio Elizondo, Gualdalupe: Mother of the New Creation (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis, 1997).
waiting for the birth of Christ who will usher in a new era of peace and justice for those long oppressed by the arbitrary power of the strong.
The second of the novenas is called
With its emphasis on
proclaiming the Gospel
through dramatic catechesis
and raising up human life
and relationships as
the primary point
of reference for
discerning the sacred
in all events of existence,
the Hispanic liturgical
year points the
whole Church to
more profound ways
of living the
Paschal Mystery.
Las Posadas (the lodgings). This communal devotion, begun as a catechetical device by the Augustinian missionaries of the sixteenth century,22 dramatically reenacts Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging in Bethlehem and takes place in the homes of parishioners. Accompanying a couple dressed as Mary and Joseph (or bearing their statues), the community visits three to five homes each evening of the novena where a ritual dialogue takes place denying the holy couple posada (lodging). Finally, they come to the house chosen to offer hospitality, often indicated by the paths leading to the door flanked by luminaria or lighted candles set inside paper bags. The ritual dialogue and song take place and finally all are invited in for a warm drink, and treats are given to the children. For many Hispanics in the U.S., the posada celebration is not only a commemoration of Mary and Joseph’s search for lodging in
- On the origins of these celebrations see Fernández, La Navidad en México, 17-24
Bethlehem, but is also reflective of their own lives as people coming as strangers to a country where hospitality has not always been offered freely.
Both of these celebrations, dear to the ancestral traditions of many Hispanics, offer a way of bridging the gap that is often perceived between Church and the rest of life. They bring prayer and the community closer to the home with the Hispanic gift of emphasizing the heart as well as the head—and both novenas appropriately help every heart prepare room for the Messiah. They succeed to “humanize,” and thereby make accessible, the mystery of the incarnation that is the celebration of Christmas.
Conclusion
Is there a Hispanic liturgical year? The answer to the question really depends on the perspective one is using to view the liturgy. From the point of view of the people who live in its embrace, the “Hispanic” liturgical year is simply how they pray as a Christian people. The popular customs and observances celebrated by Hispanic people have interpreted the general calendar of the Roman Rite for centuries—both its Tridentine and Vatican II forms. Acknowledging and respecting the legitimacy of the popular interpretation of the liturgical year is the necessary starting point for an ongoing and successful adaptation of the Roman liturgy in the Hispanic world. With its emphasis on proclaiming the Gospel through dramatic catechesis and raising up human life and relationships as the primary point of reference for discerning the sacred in all events of existence, the Hispanic liturgical year points the whole Church to more profound ways of living the Paschal Mystery. While particular aspects or customs of the people’s year may require critique, it is indisputable that the traditio expressed in its observances opens us all to a heightened appreciation of the working of God’s Spirit even in the midst of oppression and pain. The Hispanic liturgical year is one of the best examples of the dialogue of incul-turation—and serves as a model for the whole Church in its ongoing dialogue of faith and culture.
^s
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SCHOLARLY UPDATE
Sunday, Assembly, Sky: How Does Liturgical Time Locate Us?1
Gordon W. Lathrop
It used to be that both time-keeping and space-making in Christian liturgy were closely related to the sky. To be in the liturgical event, at the liturgical place, was in some sense to see the sky. Should that still be so for us? And, if so, are there resources in this liturgical observance of time and space for a cosmology that includes the sky?
At first the assertion that liturgical time and space are sky-connected seems simply and irredeemably archaic. Christian buildings were oriented, with the apse—or, on rare occasion, the entryway—directed toward the rising sun, sometimes with yet more movements of the sun through the year marked by the walls, windows, or floors of the building. What is more, liturgical movement inside or outside of the building was classically supposed to be sun-wise, with circular motions around an altar, ambo, or font or an exterior procession around the building inscribing what we would call a clockwise pattern. “Widdershins” movement could then be regarded as particularly unfortunate.
Gordon W. Lathrop is Charles A. Schieren Professor of Liturgy at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Author of several book, he was the tenth president of the North American Academy of Liturgy.
Ceilings not uncommonly imitated the sky, with stars painted there, for example, as if the enacted liturgy were directly under and related to the heavens. Furthermore, the Christian liturgy took up and re-enforced the old Babylonian planetary week. Sunday, the day named after the sun, has been the principal feast day of Christians, the day of their assembly. As well, the cardinal positions of the sun have determined the Christian hours of prayer through the day. The springtime sun and the springtime full moon— “the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox,” is the old formulation— have determined the great festal cycle of pascha or Easter, just as the winter solstice determined the Christmas cycle, pascha in winter.
All of those arrangements may seem utterly out of touch with what is known of astronomy today as well as irrelevant to ordinary daily life. There are more planets than are numbered in the planetary week, and the idea of relating days of the week to them, in any case, seems bizarre. Northern hemisphere equinoxes and solstices hardly work to establish festal themes (“renewal” and “light in the darkness,” for example) for the whole globe. Sunrise or sunset are at very different times in far north and far south, “night” or “day” lasting even for months in places within the arctic and antarctic circles, places now no longer out of reach to human imagination as well as increased human settlement. Sunrise itself is a very local, very anthropocentric experience, telling us rather little about the actual planetary system in which we take part, around that local average star of ours, and deceiving us about what is actually rising. And all that concern with sun-wise movement, which is only clockwise in the northern hemisphere anyway, seems like pure superstition. How does this liturgical system give us anything to relate to contemporary astronomy or physics?
Living by the Sky
But the sky-connections of classic Christian liturgy should not be so quickly dismissed. They can give us important information about our location in the midst of things. If we grant that these old constructions do not describe an alternate, fairy tale universe where the sun and the stars still go around the earth and God is above the sky, then we may see their new importance, precisely as our constructions. Sun and moon, planets and stars are seen by us, here. Their perceived patterns reflect our engagement, from here, with the whole massive universe. At their best, the sky-connections of the Christian liturgy are observations that make clear the actual place of our assembly and, what comes down to be the same thing since we measure time and live in it by the perceived movements of sky bodies, the experienced time in this place.
This system of sky-connections was indeed open to other cosmologies in other times. But it did not finally canonize those systems. Given the liturgical importance of gathering before God in the midst of the reality of the world, the liturgy of Christians can be open to the astronomy of our time as well. With only the slightest astronomical knowledge to help us, what we call the rising and setting of the sun can remind us of our turning globe and of the place on its surface where we are located. The length of the day and, thus, the season of the year in which we find ourselves are of course measurements at this place, not universal conditions. But they are measurements that matter to our actual symbiosis with earth and sea, sun and moon. Night and day, high tide and low, summer and winter, wet and dry, give to many of us here, wherever our “here” is, seasons of work and rest, growth and harvest—or, among hunter-gatherers, seasons of migration and then of the absence of other species, seasons of hunting and of resting or starving—and they thus give most of us real, archetypal impetus for images of death and life, loss and hope.
We probably fool ourselves to imagine that we can do without knowing where the sun and moon are in relationship to our place on the earth, as if we were absolute beings, floating outside of such connections. While we may gladly grant that electricity and central heating have freed many of us from the worst ravages of the seasons or from some of the dangers of the nightly dark, we still need the connections that are made by a knowledge of our location. We need to know how our psyche (and sometimes our biochemical makeup, as in seasonal affective disorder) responds to dark and winter, even when there is electric light. We need to know that there are poorer people for whom those daily and seasonal dangers have not been held at bay. We need to understand, in spite of what is available in our supermarkets, perhaps especially because of what is available in our supermarkets, that strawberries do not grow here year round. They grow elsewhere, our inexpensive consumption in air-conditioned rooms being dependent upon badly paid agricultural workers who are frequently nowhere near as protected from their environments, from that blazing sun and that freezing night, as are the consumers of their produce. We need to see the great sky from our location exactly as a way to relativize our frequent preoccupation with the self as the center of reality.
The orientation of the church building, the keeping of Sunday and the week, the observance of morning and evening prayer, the marking of springtime and of the winter solstice—these all enable us to know where we are in the universe. They are not pretense, make-believe. In fact, their honesty about what time it is may be more basic, more connected to the deep experience of the human psyche, than many a secular calendar with its weeks that start on Monday, workdays that never end, and holidays that keep both genuine sorrow and genuine hope at bay. The rich festival calendar that can be found in the local cultures of some temperate zone countries, interwoven as it is with the rhythms of the local earth, demonstrates the ecological uses of such archaic Christian time-keeping.2 It may even be that sun-wise ritual movement is a good idea, if the liturgical ministers think about the value of the ritual construction involved in mirroring the perceived movement of the sun in this place and let go of ritual anxiety and superstition.
However, the sky connections of the liturgy have been used for make-believe rather than acute observation. When Christians in the southern hemisphere import northern customs, as if these are the only proper way to keep the festivals, they are remembering a location and a time that they no longer occupy. Or when late-medieval clerics began to anticipate festivals or times of prayer, enacting them well ahead of their appointed times—the great vigil of Easter, for example, held on Holy Saturday morning, or the whole of one day’s “office” recited privately the day before—perhaps out of ritual anxiety that the whole action be accomplished on time in order for the divine to be placated and time to move forward— then knowing the actual time had yielded to time-based legalism. When local folk cultures insisted on a certain way of making the midsummer fire or a particular order in hundreds of other ritual actions, then observation of actual place and time, on God’s good earth, yielded to living by the sky, the implacable sky.
Indeed, living by the sky—in the sense of seeing the order of the sky as divine demand, seeing the dependence on the sky for sun and rain and time itself as grounds for sacrificial offering—has always been a distinct possibility and an important theme in human religion.3 The planetary week may have originally been intended as a way of walking with the presumed power and avoiding the presumed danger of the seven visible sky-wanderers. Solstice festivity may have intended to encourage the return of the sun,4 just as dances in Shinto shrines are understood as originating in the mythic dance that lured Amaterasu, the sun-kami, to come back out of the cave in which she had hidden.5 Not far away from these religious motives there has lurked the power of the astrological observers, of the ritual specialists or of the social elite, a power associated with the sky and re-enforced by festival observance and ritual sacrifice. The political or religious hierarchy could stand for and even become the supposed heavenly hierarchy. Roman emperors, beginning at least in the third century, identified themselves with the sun and sometimes required its cult. Japanese emperors have been understood as descended from that very Amaterasu. Mayan kings were also identified with the sky, with the sky-tree, with figures known in myth and seen in the sky.6 Sacrifices at Teotihuacan and then among the Aztecs fed blood to the sun. Recent excavations of sites related to the Chaco Canyon civilization of the tenth to the twelfth centuries CE. in the American southwest suggest that this extensive archaic Pueblo culture, marked by meticulous astronomical observation and the astronomical alignment of its great buildings, came to be dominated by an elite that required not only agricultural support but also human sacrifice.8 One ought not be romantic about religion and the sky. And all of this “living by the sky” continues among us, albeit weakly, in the daily horoscopes of our newspapers.
The sky-connections of the liturgy are not even beginning attempts at astronomy. They ought to he understood simply as basic, honest waysof saying what time it is and where we are as we keep assembly.
Sky-connections of Liturgy
But the sky-connections of Christian liturgy must not be read as astrology, anxious adjustments to the sky-powers, anxious yieldings to the sky-fates. The sky-connections of the liturgy are not even beginning attempts at astronomy. They ought to be understood simply as basic, honest ways of saying what time it is and where we are as we keep assembly. In order to do this, of course, their timekeeping does need to be honest, not make-believe and not superstitious.
Powerful symbolic significances do come along with genuine time-and-place-marking. Human beings live in psychic and communal symbiosis with their surroundings, finding their personal dreams and their common poetry reflecting their readings of the cosmos.9 If we know what time it is here, then not far away may be longings for home and also for away-from-home, hope for rest and also for new beginning, the need for hard work in the daylight and the search for the communal hearth in the dusk, delight in green-growth and yet the need to hide in deep darkness, the many meanings of night and day, winter and summer, and even the sense that our celebrations of these times might affect our relationship to these things. In Christian assembly these significances should be both honestly welcomed—even treasured— and, at the same time, broken to the service of the gospel.10 The triune God is our home in the midst of the earth and our connection with away-from-here. The crucified and risen Christ is our sun that does not go down, our light, our green tree. We need no emperor or king who pretends to possess the power of the Milky Way or the sun. The risen Christ holds the stars in his hand and shines beyond the sun’s light. The Spirit’s overshadowing wings and this present assembly in the Spirit are our dark night and our place of refuge. Yet, all of these meanings can be celebrated exactly as the community is invited to know where we are and what time it is. Home and away, the green tree and the bare one, morning and evening, summer and winter are all themselves important, precious, dear. But they are not God. They are characteristics of our time and place, as we are before God.
The Christian assembly’s sky-connections have the capability to open its participants toward the reality that we are here at this time. We are in this place on this earth, near that moon and circling that sun, joining those planets, in one arm of our galaxy, in this universe, perhaps in this massive chaos, perhaps even in one of many universes that may be folded into the hyper-dimensions of the “super-strings,” according to some current theories. The Christian assembly’s knowledge ought then be quite open toward yet further research into all the astonishing and relativizing things that “here,” “now,” and “this universe” might mean. However, the assembly does not gather before the sun—or before the galaxy or before the universe itself, or before the ideas of time and place. The assembly does not look in any of those places for mercy or life or even order. Compassion and recognition are not to be found there; such a search misuses the universe. Rather, if the assembly gathers before God, the God known in word and sacrament, the God known in mercy under that hole in the perfect sphere, then it is also invited to know the God who holds all spheres and orbits and systems and even accidents and chaos itself. The liturgy, too, like the best of the current astrophysicists, should keep silence before the silence of God, not being able to fill up the silence with our explanations, knowing rather only the words we are given: for example, “this is my beloved one” and “I have heard their cries” and “put off your shoes …” Liturgical silence resonates with these and other words, being filli of the presence and mystery of the God of these words. Christians are then invited to proclaim the faith that all things—all the grounds, everywhere, in any dimension—are held together by Christ’s cross and embraced into mercy. Christians are invited to trust that assertion, to discover what it means continually, here and now, leaving what it means in every other place and dimension to God’s great silence.
The time and the location of the Christian assembly can be seen as openings toward astronomical cosmology. So can the assembly’s silence. We human beings, too, are part of what astronomers rightly study. And our liturgy has no alternative scientific explanations. Only if that astronomical cosmology leads us away from the earth itself and from responsibility for its care, then the assembly must say that we are here, now. This real place, this wounded blue planet, is our connection to cosmos. We are indeed in the sky, part of the sky, but we see that sky from this sky-earth. Even more, if some of those cosmol-ogists—or, more likely, a theologian or two in the guise of scientific cosmologists—present any one of the putative theories of everything as the full sphere of the truth, the total system, the new spirituality, then we will need gently to remind them that they are saying more than any of us can say, gently to invite them to that mercy that floods the cosmos through all the holes in our systems.
So the Christian assembly lives by the sky—and does not. That is, the sky-connections of Christian liturgy open toward astronomy and yet refuse the idea of the implacable sky, instead breaking both the archaic and the contemporary human sky-symbols to speak of the mercy of God in Christ. Liturgical cosmology, however, is not astronomy any more than it is astrology. Liturgical cosmology is reflection on that encounter with God in public worship in which even the galaxies, even the vibrating super-strings, are seen to be holy ground.
It might seem, at first, that these sky-connections of Christian liturgy have been arranged into a celebration of sacred time. Some people have come to regard the liturgical year, for example, as a kind of comprehensive temporal meta-narrative that competes with ordinary experiences of time and draws us into a salvific time-beyond-time. The seasonal round has become histori-cized and the history has then transcended the natural cycle from which it was born. By this reading the liturgical year is only incidentally associated with the flow of the seasons. The real significance is supposed to be found in our enacting of salvation history, stretched from Israel’s expectation through the life of Christ, the gift of the Spirit, and the birth of the Church to eschatology. In the most common popularization of this idea the succession of feasts is supposed to take us chronologically through the events in the biography of Jesus. Such an understanding can take several forms. Call one “memory”: the task of the preacher and of the worshiper alike, in this form, is to imagine what it was like in Jesus’ or in Israel’s day as well as in the disciples’ experience, believing that such a point of view would be saving for us.11 Call another “mystery”: our celebrations insert us in ilio tempora, in some other sacred and mythic time away from now, beyond time but saving all time.12 Call another “fantasy”: our liturgies are an elaborate imaginative game where we envision the world and the human being as other by imagining “once upon a time.”
We ought not question that such reflections have provided enormous depth to some considerations of liturgical meaning. The “memory” idea seems to have found a particular home in Protestant circles. “Mystery” will be familiar to some Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians, and “fantasy” or “play” was at home with several mid-twentieth century reformers of all these traditions. But the ideas themselves seem to start in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Classic Christian liturgy is held here and now, inviting us to know where we are and what time it is, as we are gathered before God on the holy ground. Just so, at our best, we keep learning to pray in vernacular languages, constantly attentive to the ongoing tasks of translation, not in a fixed sacred language from another time. Such translation has, at least, been at the heart of the ongoing reform and ongoing contextualiza-tion of all of our liturgical traditions. Furthermore, the Eucharist is not primarily Jesus’ Last Supper remembered and repeated, but our present communal meal, made to be the surprising presence of the crucified-risen one now. Baptisms are not journeys to the Jordan but our present initiatory practices turned inside-out for the sake of identification with the presence of Christ in the world today.
Certainly, memory and mystery and even fantasy have a role. But biblical/liturgical memory—άνάμνησις— involves the proclamation of ancient presences into the present assembly, not our reaching back as if we could construct the past. Liturgical mystery involves the presence of the Mysterious One, not our transport to a place away as if we might thereby escape the current conditions. And fantasy in Christian liturgical use ought always be the lifting of current false strictures,13 not make-believe. Liturgy ought never be “as if.”14
Of course, we do use ritual means to release our imagination and worldview from rigid present status-structures. The clothing of our leaders or of the newly baptized, if it follows the practice of traditional liturgical vesture, may seem like clothes from another time. But such a practice will actually be using current but alternative clothing, albs and chasubles as current metaphors, borrowing from the tradition a radically other, more
flowing and gracious, more interestingly unisex way for the human-being-in-community to be imaged and understood. Our large shared loaf or shared cup may seem like food from another time. But this is real food, eaten and drunk in an alternative way, with the idea of sharing heightened. These practices are not journeys away from here, to a sacred other-time, other-place. These are not costume dramas, with our leaders putting on Bible-clothes. These ways of clothing our leaders and sharing our food are at their best when they are seen as this present place and time and our present manner of social interaction re-imagined, re-oriented.
Liturgical cosmology is a reflection on that encounter with God in public worship in which even the galaxies, even the vibrating super-strings are seen to be holy ground.
The Way of Metaphor
The most important tool for this liturgical reorientation of time and place is the way of metaphor, not the way of memory, mystery, or fantasy. When we call the assembly itself “Jerusalem” or “temple,” we are intentionally calling it by the wrong name in order to say a present truth with power. If, for example, we sing “Simeon’s Song” after we have received Communion, taking into our own mouths those words attributed in Luke to the old man who saw the Child brought into the Jerusalem Temple and took him into his own hands (Luke 2:29-32), it is not because we are acting as if we were traveling away from here and now to another time and place. Rather, the liturgy asserts that the very Light of which the song speaks fills this place, in our own hands, mouths, and lives. The very possibility of being dismissed according to the promise, of going into witnessing life or peaceful death, fills this moment. We are, to use the exact metaphor and therefore the wrong but revelatory name, Simeon. Such metaphors are woven throughout the liturgy. They frequently intend radically to re-characterize and so to reveal the truth about both God and the present assembly.16 In so doing they also give us the possibility of a newly surprising worldview, re-orienting our understanding of the current time and place. This hour is the time of salvation, sanctified by Christ having shared our hours. This place is the holy ground, sanctified by the story of the torn heavens.
If Christian liturgy seems to make use of the convention of sacred time—using narratives that seem like stories from a time-out-of-time, using social conventions and communal time-practices that seem archaic—then this complex of symbols will need to be one more construction that is broken to the purposes of the gospel. In fact, the narratives themselves are mostly a skein of metaphors applied to real life-and-death matters that have occurred on our ground. The important point about the exodus is not that it occurred historically—it very likely did not—but that images of liberation, crossing the sea, sustenance in the wilderness, being made a royal priesthood could surround and characterize a little people newly constituted by faith in the one merciful God who made heaven and earth. All of those metaphors are now made available to characterize our Sunday assembly. In exactly this way the stories about Jesus were made by Mark’s gospel to be the means for the encounter with the risen one in the assembly, a long resurrection-appearance story in the wrong words. Christian faith trusts that this assembly, in this time, on this ground, gathers before the same God to whom these various metaphor-laden texts bear witness. We do not travel to another time. Nor do we need to construct the stories into systematic, consequent, sacred histories in order to know that this is the place and time to put off our shoes. The presence of the triune God in the Eucharist of the assembly resists any conception of sacred time as our achievement and our transportation out of here. And liturgical time, at its best, is our time as the time of assembly.
Suggestions for Christian Assembly Time-keeping
What might these reflections mean for actual practice? Here are a variety of suggestions about time-keeping in the Christian assembly. They focus primarily upon our re-appropriating liturgical time as re-oriented present time, as one important way of our seeing the sky from our own place on this beloved yet fragile sky-earth.
- Keep Sunday as the primary festival-day of the Christian faith, the day of the resurrection and of the Trinity, the day of assembly and of weekly Eucharist. Understand Sunday as the first day of our week and therefore as a day in our time. Yet teach, at the same time, that the first-day assembly itself becomes the “eighth day,” the day that our cycles of time can never deliver to us. This gift of the “Lord’s Day” is not to be seen as a day out of time but the very presence of the resurrection and of grace within the limits of our time, transfiguring our time, re-orienting our time.
- Treasure the week. Help the congregation to know that the week is indeed a human construction, but that it is a construction based upon observing the sky from our place on the earth. It is not the only such construction there has ever been. But it is a currently nearly universal one, and it bears honest and historical connection to the human observation of the sky from here. So seven days correspond to the seven wanderers in the sky that can be seen with the unaided eye, even in light-polluted skies. Four sets of these seven days correspond more or less to the length of a lunar month, the period of time the moon takes to pass in our sight from new to waxing to full to waning to new again. The week, then, can really stand for our life on this earth, in relationship to that moon, those planets, that sun. Then the witness of the Sunday assembly, of the “eighth day,” can be seen to be a witness like that of the burning bush. This place, this ground, this actual time is holy. Our social constructs in relationship to our environment have become a locus for the revelation of God’s mercy, welcoming those constructs but freeing us from their compulsive restraints. For the whole Judeo-Christian tradition, “week” is an important and good construction, if it is not made the basis for anxiety and constraint but functions rather to support a flowing rhythm in work and rest. For Christians, Sunday-meeting is a magnificent, time-transfiguring gift of God.
- Encourage daily prayer. Consider restoring daily morning and evening prayer in the congregation as assembly events. Welcome whoever is able to gather, in the name of the full assembly, to mark the sunrise and the sunset each day with psalms and hymns, biblical reading and meditation, and corporate intercessions. Let these gatherings bring to expression a communal honesty about the time of day, about the primal joys and fears that do really attend these daily changes in the light. But let the gathering also mark these rhythms with reference to the gospel—using, say, the Lukan canticles to interpret the time of day18—and with reference to the nearest Sunday—using readings, for example, that echo the Sunday readings.19 It may be that we will not be able to adopt this practice fiilly, for both morning and evening, throughout the year. But we may consider adopting it for one of these times of day in a given season. In any case, we may be able to encourage all the members of the assembly to mark sunrise and sunset with a personal use of “the office,” or simply with the regular use of the old fixed psalms—141 for the evening and 63 for the morning—or with some simple gesture of praise or prayer.20 Knowing what time it is and where we are on this turning blue planet, every day, and knowing this before God: these are exercises of remembering the holy ground.
- Then, besides Sunday and the cardinal hours of each day, keep the other feasts also as feasts in our time. Let Sunday, a day of meeting, a day in our time, be the model for them all.
- Celebrate the resurrection in our time. Easter or pascha is the occasion for the proclamation of the gospel to our springtime world. The feast has rightly been determined with reference both to the sun and to the moon. Its celebration is filled with overlaid cosmic symbolism:21 a festival of springtime renewal of the earth and of the flocks became the occasion for the remembrance of the central “new creation” story of Israel. Then the resultant passover feast became the occasion for the remembrance of the central new-creation story of the Church. Pascha is not a re-doing of the events of our salvation, a return to another time, nor even an acting out of the story. It is meant as a Sunday to the year, an annual Sunday to our time, all the stories of creation and redemption giving us breath again. So pascha rightly became a fifty-day long feast. It rightly drew to itself the practice of Christian baptism, so that those who were coming to join the assembly of this witness to the world would be bathed in all these stories. Lent, then, is not a time to kill Jesus again but a time, now, for our baptismal preparations and remembrances, for our turning back to the font. In the southern hemisphere this overlay continue witness of the Sunday assembly, of the “eighth day” can he seen to he a witness like that of the burning bush.
This place, this ground. this actual time is holy. Now at the first Sunday after the first full moon after the autumnal equinox, the resurrection gospel offers all the biblical promise to fallow, resting earth, and to the coming darkness of winter. In the southern hemisphere, the gospel will not be re-enforced and illustrated by the blossoming trees (but, then, the blossoms were never themselves the gospel anyway!), but the promise must still be understood as for this earth. The time that is kept is our time, here, in this solar system. So, keep Lent as baptismal time in our time. Keep the paschal vigil and the great fifty days as a Sunday to our year, proclaiming the resurrection to that year whose number is inscribed on the paschal candle.
- Celebrate the presence of God in our time. Keep Christmas as a Christian welcome and critique of human festivity at the solstice. So, treasure the celebrations. But tell the truth about the inevitable sadness that comes.
These feasts are there not as constraints, not as offerings to the implacable sky, but as gifts to reconfigure our experience of time now with trying to keep the perfect light-and-fullness-festival, and help people negotiate that sadness. Most important, invite the assembly to the most gracious light, the deepest gift, present in word and sacrament. Christmas, too, is the gospel proclaimed to our time, a Sunday to the winter. The Christmas feast, together with its twelve days and its echoing Epiphany feast is a way of preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ in the midst of the winter solstice of the northern hemisphere. It is not the time that Jesus was born, constantly revisited as if we could thereby encounter an eternal, unearthly, mythic birth. The infancy narratives are told because the feast celebrates the presence of God among us in the very barren and needy time of northern hemisphere winter. The feast celebrates the incarnation, finding its central text in the hymn of John 1. The infancy texts may also be told simply because ancient Christians were part of societies that began their year at the winter solstice, and with the new year may have come the Christian custom of starting once again to read one of the gospel-books from its beginning.
- Keep Advent, uncompromised. Advent may have been yet another ancient Christian reaction to general human solstice festivity, a reaction in abstention, fasting, waiting, prayer, all as honest ways to express the need of the world and to resist the compulsion and anxiety of religious practice meant to force the sun to return. In any case, the modern Advent/Christmas cycle is a remarkable blending of the fierce honesty of abstention with the graciousness of transformed winter festivity. But Advent, too, is our time. It is not a time to pretend as if we are Israel waiting or as if Jesus were not yet born. Rather, the Christian assembly tells the truth about a world still full of waiting and want. Yet, the assembly also tells about Christ who already now identifies with the hidden and waiting ones. Each Advent Sunday, after all, is also still a Sunday.
- But, then, precisely in order to underscore what time it is and where the assembly gathers, resist the ways in which this time-keeping can he malformed. Let Sunday be the primary feast and resist the theme-Sundays, special-group-Sundays, sales-based Sundays. If we pray the office communally or personally, do not anticipate the hours, just to get them done. Pray at morning and evening—perhaps at noon and night—and if we cannot, do not fear some retribution from the unsatisfied sky or a discontented god. The community prays for all. The hours come anyway, by God’s gift. Keep Lent for baptismal preparation and remembrance, and Easter for all the stories of deliverance, centered in the resurrection and proclaimed to our time, to our year. Resist the ways in which various commentaries or liturgical resources want to urge us to make the feast into either “memory” or “mystery,” away from here. As we tell parts of the story, tell them as facets that always introduce the assembly to the whole gospel, as on Sunday. On Palm Sunday tell of the passion as well as the victorious, resurrection-anticipating entry. On Good Friday tell of the all-embracing resurrection as well as the death; tell the Johannine passion with its paradoxes: the one called “I am” is arrested; the very source of the Spirit is killed. And know all the time, all through Lent and Holy Week, that Jesus is already risen, now. Keep a real Advent, all the way to Christmas, as a way of telling the truth about the world’s need. Be gracious to the frenzied quest to find a perfect gift, but resist the use of the church-assembly as another place to support or lengthen the shopping season and avoid the truth-telling rhythm of genuine festivity. And keep the Christmas feast for twelve full days. Consider holding Christmas concerts and Christmas programs then.
- If we fail in any of these things, he at peace. These feasts are there, not as constraints, not as offerings to the implacable sky, but as gifts to reconfigure our experience of time now.
- Furthermore, if the assembly meets in the southern hemisphere, in the tropics, or within either the arctic or the antarctic circle, consider how the trajectory of this proclamation of the gospel to our time and place may need to continue. If Christmas is kept in the southern hemisphere with an explicit intention to relate it to the experience of the summer solstice, remarkable gifts in poetry, liturgy, and proclamation may be given to us all. But if Christmas is kept only in nostalgia for the north, its connection to honest time and place will be lost. It may well be even more important that other real-time festivals—sun-return and sun-loss in the arctic; the coming of the rains in the tropics; the winter-solstice itself in the southern hemisphere; and yet other locally observed changes—become themselves the occasion of new liturgical creativity: the insertion of place-specific, time-specific assembly eucharists within the general Christian calendar.
If we can recover the practice of time-keeping as knowing what time it is here, we may find ourselves invited to see the sky from our place on the earth. Then, if the celebration itself accords with the ecumenical liturgical renewal, it will juxtapose the grace of the triune God, known in word and sacrament, to our place and time on the earth. As a result, the assembly will simply and faithfully be proclaiming that God holds our sky-earth, that we are gathered here on holy ground, and that fidelity to this God includes care for this planet.
- This article is drawn from the sixth chapter of the forthcoming book Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003).
- See, for example, Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
- For North America, see Ray A. Williamson, Living the Sky: The Cosmos of the American Indian (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1984).
- See Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy People: A Liturgical Cosmology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1999) 216-18.
- John K. Nelson, A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine (Seattle: University of Washington, 1996) 52.
- David Friedel, Linda Scheie, and Joy Parker, Maya Cosmos (New York: William Morrow, 1993) 128,135 and passim.
- Although Inga Clendinnen thinks this action was more subtle in meaning, not intended to influence the fate of the world, but as “a gratuitous action made by men to remind the gods of their dependence, their need and their devotion,” Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 238.
- See Stephen H. Lekson, The Chaco Meridian: Centers of Political Power in the Ancient Southwest (Walnut Creek: Alta Mira, 1999), especially 140-50 and 157-61 and Christy G. Turner II and Jacqueline A. Turner, Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the Prehistoric American Southwest (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1999) 459,484.
- Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967) 10-14.
- On time and the Christian liturgical use of the broken symbol see Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) 36-43,68-80.
- The contrast of “memory” and “metaphor” has been especially illuminated in the work of Gail Ramshaw.
- Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1959) 70-72.
- Robert Hovda, for example, would speak of liturgy as “kingdom play,” but would mean by that expression that “liturgical celebration is … humanly necessary to relax the tight grip of the status quo, so that people can move and breathe and envision alternatives” (Robert W. Hovda, Strong, Loving and Wise: Presiding in Liturgy [Washington, D.C.: Liturgical Conference, 1976] 20).
- C. W. Mónnich, Antiliturgica: Enige aantekeningen bij de viering van de kerkelijke feesten (Amsterdam: Ten Have, 1966) 23.
- On clothing for the liturgy see also Lathrop, Holy Things, 96 and 202. On bread, see Holy Things, 91-92.
- See Gail Ramshaw, Reviving Sacred Speech: The Meaning of Liturgical Language (Akron: OSL Publications, 2000) 66-81,131-45.
- Ramshaw, Reviving Sacred Speech, 82-113.
- Classically, the Song of Zechariah (Benedictus) was sung at lauds (at dawn), the Song of Mary (Magnificat) was sung at vespers (at sunset), and the Song of Simeon (Nunc Dimittis) was sung at compline (at the onset of deep night). These canticles reinterpret every day as a day for the encounter with the hope-giving, justice-making, rest-giving Light of God in Christ.
- One such lectionary is Between Sundays: Daily Bible Readings Based on the Revised Common Lectionary (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997).
- Many fine “breviaries” exist for corporate and personal use, but one splendid resource is Book of Common Worship: Daily Prayer (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993).
- See Anscar J. Chupungco, Shaping the Easter Feast (Washington, D.C.: Pastoral Press, 1992), a revised edition of his The Cosmic Elements of Christian Passover (Rome: Studia Anselmiana, 1977). For one account of the history of this overlaid symbolism, see also Lathrop, Holy Things, 68-79.
- Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year (New York: Pueblo, ” 1986) 129-34.
Lathrop: Sunday, Assembly, Sky: How Does Liturgical Time Locate Us?
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