The Liturgical Calendar
“The repetitious pattern of the liturgical year – staring with Advent and the Christmas Season through the Forty Days of Lent, the Three Days, and the Fifty Days of the Easter Season; and over the Sundays in the two spans of Ordinary Time – brings the life of God, the risen Christ, and the holy Spirt to believers in the church today. Yet the manifestation of God’s gift of life and grace do not depend on anything new being taught or learned in the liturgy’s annual cycle. The communal and sensory experience of people at worship always reveals God’s love for creation and humanity, and how this love is mediated in the present experience of the rite and also in life apart from the church.” Martin Connell, Eternity Today: On the Liturgical Year, 2006.
To keep the days and seasons of the liturgical year – the year of grace – is to enter into and experience a different way of keeping time: one that reveals the presence of God’s Reign of love and forgiveness, justice and peace in this world. In contrast to the often brutal competition of the market, the cultural tendency to separate people into “winners” and “losers,” and the idolatrous worship of being “forever young,” the days and seasons of the Christian year announce the presence of the Triune God in every season of life and the practices that mark Christian living: the rejection of evil forces that diminish God’s creatures; the desire to serve Christ in one’s neighbors, especially one’s most vulnerable neighbors; the aspiration to respect the God-given dignity of all human beings; the work for justice that leads to peace; and the pressing need to cherish and restore the earth wounded by human folly.
Rather than mere commemorations of past events, the keeping of feast and fast days, of saints’ days, and the seasons of the year rooted in earth’s natural cycles “reveal God’s love for creation and humanity” and ask us how we are living into and sharing this love in the world today.