Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vicki K. Black is a writer, editor, and book designer. She is the author of Welcome to the Bible, Welcome to the Book of Common Prayer, and Welcome to the Church Year, three popular church titles all published by Morehouse. She and her family live in Maine.

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Welcome to the Church Year

Church Publishing Incorporated

Contents

Chapter One

When our son Benjamin was about four years old, he was given a Spirograph set at a birthday party. I was delighted to know they still made Spirographs after all these years. I still remember the hours I spent as a child, pen clutched tightly in hand, tracing the swirls and ellipses and spirals made with the various sets of plastic wheels turning around and around inside other wheels. Now Benjamin, too, is watching the amazing patterns that emerge as he circles the wheels over and over on the paper. The key is the number of repetitions: the more times he goes round the wheel, the more intricate and three-dimensional the picture he creates.

The same is true of the church year. Every year we cycle through the seasons from Advent through the Season after Pentecost, and with every repetition their meaning becomes more textured—richer, deeper, more subtle and complex. Sometimes a particular season will stand out for us in a given year and its message will take on fresh significance, while we will speed through another almost without noticing its passing. The repetition is the key to their gift of grace in our lives. Like the Spirograph's layers of single ellipses combining to form intricate spirals, the cycle of the repeating and overlapping cycles of the feasts and fasts of the church year create patterns of meaning in our lives, giving shape and direction to the events that mark our days.

Repeating the cycle of the seasons makes us aware of the passing of time. Most of us have had this experience with family holidays, or occasions such as high school or college reunions. As we decorate the Christmas tree or open gifts, we notice how our children have grown; as we gather around the Thanksgiving table, we are aware that our aging parents or grandparents—and we ourselves—have changed during the previous year.

We are also reminded of who we are, as we gather with family and friends and mark traditions that are part of our identity within the larger community. If the year has had difficult moments, we are perhaps a bit wiser and more sober than the year before, and also more aware of our dependence on God's merciful grace. If the year has been filled with joyful occasions and gifts of new life, we may find gratitude welling up as we sing familiar songs or tell a family story. For Christians, keeping the church year likewise becomes a means of grace in our lives: the repetition of the cycle of feasts and fasts teaches us who we are as followers of Christ and beloved children of God.

What Is the Church Year?

While I was writing this book, whenever I told someone it was about the church year, the most common response would be a polite look of confusion and the embarrassed question, "Now, umm, what exactly is the church year?" The church year goes by any number of names—the Christian calendar, the liturgical year, the church's feasts and fasts, the seasons of the church—but it is essentially the cycle of days and seasons that mark occasions of special devotion in the Christian faith. The Book of Common Prayer officially calls this cycle of feasts and fasts "The Calendar of the Church Year." You can find a brief description and a list of the days in that section of the prayer book.

Every culture, every religious tradition has its cycle of seasons, holy days (or holidays), and occasions of special commemoration. We know the earth's seasons of winter, spring, summer, and fall. In the United States, for example, people celebrate national holidays such as Independence Day and Memorial Day. The calendar of the Christian year marks the occasions that have to do with the life of Jesus: his conception, birth, baptism, teaching, ministry, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension. Someone has said that the church year "is the life of Christ lived out again in liturgical time—in the time and in the memory of his Church." Other days in the church year focus on the church community, such as the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost or the communion of believers throughout all time at All Saints' Day.

There are significant variations in the liturgical calendars of different traditions within the wider church, especially the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran, though the broad outline of seasons is quite similar because all the calendars share common roots in the early church. The Orthodox dates for Christmas and Easter differ from those in the western churches, for example, because we have long followed different calendars. In this book, however, we will be focusing on the liturgical year as practiced in the Episcopal Church.

Time in the Church Year

Fundamental to the Christian year is the concept of time. Time can be measured in any number of ways: we order our days by using a common standard for minutes, hours, days, months, and years. Historians speak of time in terms of eras, geologists in terms of epochs or ages. We speak of meeting someone at noon or four P.M., and we also speak more generally of "a time" in our lives when we were students or newlyweds or first-time parents or recently retired. In the church year we likewise have two different approaches to time, and as we move through the seasons, we tend to blend them in our worship, prayer, and reflection.

The most straightforward approach to time in the church year is the historical approach, which the liturgical professor Marianne Micks once called a "tourist's view of time." It became more prevalent during the fourth century, as churches in the Holy Land developed liturgies to mark the days of Holy Week and Easter at the various sites at which Jesus suffered, died, and rose again. Pilgrims began to travel to Jerusalem to participate in these liturgies, and they brought them back to other countries as they returned. We have the diary of one such pilgrim, Egeria, who visited Jerusalem in the year 385. She describes in great detail how the Jerusalem church marked the days of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter with a series of liturgies that recalled the historical events at the end of Jesus' ministry.

In the historical approach to the church year we, too, like the pilgrims in Jerusalem, follow the life of Jesus step by step, from his conception and birth through his baptism and years of ministry and teaching to his suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension. As Micks puts it, "The historical approach offers a chance to relive in microcosm every twelve months what Jesus himself experienced in his thirty-some years. By walking in his footsteps one imitates his rhythms."

The second approach to time in the church year is one that actually predates the historical perspective, and might be described with words like mystical, theological, or eschatological (meaning the end of all time, or outside time as we know it). It is a way to understand and participate in the eternal and mysterious meaning of the holy days of the calendar, beyond all time and human history. In Micks's words, what she calls the "mystery" approach

offers Christians a chance instead to experience the full mystery of God's plan for mankind, not only in each Eucharist but also in each full cycle of Christian holidays. The stress in this interpretation is on times and seasons wherein Christian worshipers encounter the power of the Holy Spirit to make...