It has only been in recent years that I’ve started to live more liturgically. Discovering the Church calendar has been a little bit magical for me. Like uncovering some hidden treasure in an old, familiar house. There is a time for mourning and repentance, feasting and rejoicing - a tempo to our lives that is honored by the Church. I have also enjoyed finding out about centuries old traditions like Martinmas, Michaelmas, even St. Nicholas Day.
Oh Megan, this is *so* poetic and lovely - I feel the same way. When I found the Church calendar, it felt like some sort of remarkable secret that had been in plain sight all along. There's a wisdom in the way it communicates the work of Christ to us - as you so beautifully put it, a "tempo to our lives that is honored by the Church."
You've named three of my favorite feast days! Michaelmas has come to really feel like the beginning of fall for me.
I have always been fascinated by the change of seasons and stories about them. I didn’t realize there was a point to the liturgical year leading us into preparing for each season physically as well as spiritually.
The secular world wants everything left as is. No wonder there is so much conflict, and completely different outcomes between the sacred and secular observances.
Beautifully-said. The liturgical year bears with it so much wisdom about both our nature and God's nature - we really are creatures that need to prepare both physically and spiritually, and the calendar honors that!
I am a bit behind in reading your posts, but I suppose I’m just trying to get a better understanding of the liturgical calendar so I can find an approachable way to start working it into our home life. I am happy that this will be my first year observing advent!
Oh my goodness, I'm so excited for you as you dip into Advent this year!
Finding approachable, doable ways to fold liturgical living into our home life can definitely be a trial-and-error process. Fortunately, there are so many avenues to make that happen. We've just recently launched a new liturgical living Substack called Signs + Seasons, with the goal of sharing articles by a variety of authors...the idea being that there's no single approach to living the calendar! So, even if my lens in living the calendar is very historical/agricultural, that won't resonate with a lot of folks - but other approaches will, and we aim to help foster that variety. :)
Awesome! I am sure it will be something we will have to figure out over time. I did subscribe over there already as I do enjoy learning as much as I can.
Welcome, Lauryn! The calendar really does offer such a beautiful, meaningful rhythm. Our kids have even come to anticipate holidays - after Christmas, they start asking when we'll be having Epiphany cake, since they've made that connection in their memories.
When I first discovered it, I felt like I had stumbled upon a box of treasures! Please always feel free to reach out with any thoughts or questions. :)
I was educated by nuns in the 1960’s and ALL of the feasts of the liturgical calendar were either talked about and/or celebrated (or, we got the day off to go to Mass, All Saints’ Day was one of those). One of the days I clearly remember was the celebration of St. Blaise on February 3rd, when we’d go to the chapel on school grounds and kiss a relic (not sure what it was ) to protect us from illness (a bunch of kids kissing the same thing during cold and flu season 😂 hmmm...) I think of St. Blaise as the patron Saint of ENT problems. The story was he saved a boy from choking on a fish bone. Ah, the things we remember! ✨
Oh my goodness, what an immersion in the liturgical year you had growing up! When you celebrated St. Blaise, did you receive the candle blessing as well? (Haha yes, quite the season for spreading colds and flus!!)
I feel like those tangible celebrations are really how we best remember the stories of the faith! Thanks so much for sharing, Jolene.
The unmatched drama from Good Friday to Easter Sunday - SO well-said! Holy Saturday has become one of my favorite days of the whole year. I feel like the Paschal Triduum - and Lent/Holy Week leading to it - are such great examples of how the wisdom communicated through the calendar gets truncated if we just take bits and pieces here and there.
This book is high on my to-read list! Thank you for highlighting it! You know I love the liturgical year, Kristin, and it feels unfair for me to enter the giveaway, so I'll leave the winning to others -- and I think I'll go over to my public library's website and enter a "please purchase" request for this book!
Well shucks Dixie, that's a very gracious comment! Let me know when you do manage to get a copy of the book from your library - I'd love to hear what you think.
I actually heard this book recommended by Sarah Clarkson and it's been on my list! I have always loved Christmas, but I think Eastertide is my favorite. It was sort of my "real" intro to the liturgical calendar (besides advent candles). I actually really hated Easter time for a bunch of upbringing reasons, and so celebrating Eastertide was a way of kind of "redeeming" that season as one of joy, not dread.
I *love* that you've found redemptive beauty in Eastertide! It's amazing how the liturgical calendar can help re-orient our vision of even the "greatest hits" holidays that seems so familiar. (When you have time someday, and if you're inclined to share, I'd love to hear about how you first found your way into the calendar via Eastertide!)
I think Sarah recommended it in her pateron book club!
It was a lot of things for me and Eastertide. But I guess the specific moment was reading NT Wrights "Surprised by Hope" and his great paragraphs about the embodied joy Easter should bring, and we should be known as a people who pull out all the stops & have champagne for breakfast with many alleluia. And I was like...hmm. champagne for breakfast? I can get behind that 😄
As a daughter of cross cultural missionaries, Easter was just the dread of long religious services mixed with the guilt that I "should" be happy. This was the first time I realized that there were whole other streams of tradition I could tap into , and perhaps it was my duty to seek them out if it would help me discover that proper joy that comes from really contemplating Christ's story
I've been wanting to read Parker's book for about a year now, so of course I'm leaving a comment! :) What do I love about the church year? Oh, let me count the ways... I love that it tells a story and invites us into that story. I love that it teaches us to connect our lives with a larger story and to see our lives in the light of that story. I love that it hallows time and reminds us that God is present right here, right now. I love that it continually draws our eyes up to Heaven through the things of earth and invites us to see the world sacramentally. I could go on, but I'll stop there. :)
Oh Kimberlee, you always have the most poetic and wise ways of approaching the calendar - I just love how you draw out the threads of beauty from it into our lives!
I really want to embrace more of the liturgical calendar because I feel the disconnect between the world's seasons and my own, particularly in the busy-ness of life.
I want to curl up and rest, but the world has 6 more weeks of activity it says are essential. The church probably has a better answer with liturgical instruction.
So beautifully-said! The church's seasons feel more compassionate somehow...whereas the modern secular world's approach to seasons tends to feel more artificial, in part because it doesn't account for the ups and downs of life and the need to rest and change!
My hardest struggle with the liturgical year is integrating traditions around our ill-timed birthdays. I have kids with Halloween and November 4 birthdays that makes Hallowmas a crazy time, and my husband has a Christmas Eve birthday! It’s much easier to squeeze in celebrations of my spring and summer babes and various baptism anniversaries!
Oooo Katherine, such a great point - and so, so true! Your family sure has a lot of birthday/feast day crossover to balance. I also have a Halloween baby, which has made Hallowtide so maxed-out and exhausting at times.
When it comes to the calendar, I always feel like it's better to not bang my head against the wall with it - so I've had years where our Halloween was definitely not the vision I had in my head (these are good, humbling moments of reality for me, haha). If the best I can do is light a candle or just fall into exhaustion and read a semi-related book to my kids, that's ok...I have a tendency to set myself up for impossible expectations, so in a funny way, the calendar is helping to check that in me, day by day. ;) This is where I also remind myself that we have the cloud of witnesses...so whatever I'm missing due to overwhelm or exhaustion, I can feel a tiny bit like I'm somehow still celebrating alongside folks who are covering that base elsewhere!
Sorry for the ramble...this is something I think about a lot!
For me, as a Roman Catholic, I find that the Latin Mass republishing of the Missal of 1962 after Pope Benedict removed restrictions on this rite to be a treasure trove of knowledge about the Liturgical year.
So much of the liturgical calendar retreated to the background in the post Vatican 2 Missal.
Such a beautiful reminder and resource, Jo! The loss of so many feasts/vigils/octaves in 1955 left a lot of other feasts feeling more disconnected, in my mind anyway.
This book sounds absolutely lovely. I'm becoming very interested in the beauty of the liturgical calendar and the concept of living liturgically.
Choosing a favorite feast seems nearly impossible, but one I'm particularly passionate about is St. John's Eve. There's something incredibly meaningful in having a summertime counterpart to Christmas. Soli Deo Gloria!
Yes!! St. John's is also one of my favorite feasts! When I first saw it across the year from Christmas, so much clicked for me. I realized that there were countless dots that I hadn't been connecting until starting to fold these other feasts into our year.
It has only been in recent years that I’ve started to live more liturgically. Discovering the Church calendar has been a little bit magical for me. Like uncovering some hidden treasure in an old, familiar house. There is a time for mourning and repentance, feasting and rejoicing - a tempo to our lives that is honored by the Church. I have also enjoyed finding out about centuries old traditions like Martinmas, Michaelmas, even St. Nicholas Day.
Oh Megan, this is *so* poetic and lovely - I feel the same way. When I found the Church calendar, it felt like some sort of remarkable secret that had been in plain sight all along. There's a wisdom in the way it communicates the work of Christ to us - as you so beautifully put it, a "tempo to our lives that is honored by the Church."
You've named three of my favorite feast days! Michaelmas has come to really feel like the beginning of fall for me.
I have always been fascinated by the change of seasons and stories about them. I didn’t realize there was a point to the liturgical year leading us into preparing for each season physically as well as spiritually.
The secular world wants everything left as is. No wonder there is so much conflict, and completely different outcomes between the sacred and secular observances.
Beautifully-said. The liturgical year bears with it so much wisdom about both our nature and God's nature - we really are creatures that need to prepare both physically and spiritually, and the calendar honors that!
Learning how so much tradition, liturgy and way of life are interwoven is fascinating. And it's tragic how much we've lost sight of.
So well-said! The calendar fostered integration of spiritual and daily life in such tangible ways.
I am a bit behind in reading your posts, but I suppose I’m just trying to get a better understanding of the liturgical calendar so I can find an approachable way to start working it into our home life. I am happy that this will be my first year observing advent!
Oh my goodness, I'm so excited for you as you dip into Advent this year!
Finding approachable, doable ways to fold liturgical living into our home life can definitely be a trial-and-error process. Fortunately, there are so many avenues to make that happen. We've just recently launched a new liturgical living Substack called Signs + Seasons, with the goal of sharing articles by a variety of authors...the idea being that there's no single approach to living the calendar! So, even if my lens in living the calendar is very historical/agricultural, that won't resonate with a lot of folks - but other approaches will, and we aim to help foster that variety. :)
https://signsandseasons.substack.com/
Awesome! I am sure it will be something we will have to figure out over time. I did subscribe over there already as I do enjoy learning as much as I can.
I’m a liturgical calendar newbie and trying to learn as much as I can. It seems like a beautiful rhythm of life.
Welcome, Lauryn! The calendar really does offer such a beautiful, meaningful rhythm. Our kids have even come to anticipate holidays - after Christmas, they start asking when we'll be having Epiphany cake, since they've made that connection in their memories.
When I first discovered it, I felt like I had stumbled upon a box of treasures! Please always feel free to reach out with any thoughts or questions. :)
I was educated by nuns in the 1960’s and ALL of the feasts of the liturgical calendar were either talked about and/or celebrated (or, we got the day off to go to Mass, All Saints’ Day was one of those). One of the days I clearly remember was the celebration of St. Blaise on February 3rd, when we’d go to the chapel on school grounds and kiss a relic (not sure what it was ) to protect us from illness (a bunch of kids kissing the same thing during cold and flu season 😂 hmmm...) I think of St. Blaise as the patron Saint of ENT problems. The story was he saved a boy from choking on a fish bone. Ah, the things we remember! ✨
Oh my goodness, what an immersion in the liturgical year you had growing up! When you celebrated St. Blaise, did you receive the candle blessing as well? (Haha yes, quite the season for spreading colds and flus!!)
I feel like those tangible celebrations are really how we best remember the stories of the faith! Thanks so much for sharing, Jolene.
Wow! Kristin! You just jogged my memory! YES! the double candle that was put around the throat. Thank you for this!
Oh how lovely!
I love the rhythm of the liturgical calendar! It’s aligns so well with the seasons and our need for cyclical living!
SO true! It's such a helpful, emblematic reminder as we go through all our own seasons!
I’m familiar with the Liturgical Calendar from a Catholic standpoint, but would love to dive deeper!
I love celebrating the Easter Triduum - the drama of going from Good Friday to Easter Sunday is unmatched 😊
And Risking Enchantment is my absolute favorite podcast!!
It's a new to me resource and I can't wait to dive in!
Let me know what you think!! It's a phenomenal podcast with so many thoughtful episodes!
Same!! Rachel is such a gem!
The unmatched drama from Good Friday to Easter Sunday - SO well-said! Holy Saturday has become one of my favorite days of the whole year. I feel like the Paschal Triduum - and Lent/Holy Week leading to it - are such great examples of how the wisdom communicated through the calendar gets truncated if we just take bits and pieces here and there.
This book is high on my to-read list! Thank you for highlighting it! You know I love the liturgical year, Kristin, and it feels unfair for me to enter the giveaway, so I'll leave the winning to others -- and I think I'll go over to my public library's website and enter a "please purchase" request for this book!
Well shucks Dixie, that's a very gracious comment! Let me know when you do manage to get a copy of the book from your library - I'd love to hear what you think.
I actually heard this book recommended by Sarah Clarkson and it's been on my list! I have always loved Christmas, but I think Eastertide is my favorite. It was sort of my "real" intro to the liturgical calendar (besides advent candles). I actually really hated Easter time for a bunch of upbringing reasons, and so celebrating Eastertide was a way of kind of "redeeming" that season as one of joy, not dread.
I *love* that you've found redemptive beauty in Eastertide! It's amazing how the liturgical calendar can help re-orient our vision of even the "greatest hits" holidays that seems so familiar. (When you have time someday, and if you're inclined to share, I'd love to hear about how you first found your way into the calendar via Eastertide!)
Oooo where did Sarah chat about the book?
I think Sarah recommended it in her pateron book club!
It was a lot of things for me and Eastertide. But I guess the specific moment was reading NT Wrights "Surprised by Hope" and his great paragraphs about the embodied joy Easter should bring, and we should be known as a people who pull out all the stops & have champagne for breakfast with many alleluia. And I was like...hmm. champagne for breakfast? I can get behind that 😄
As a daughter of cross cultural missionaries, Easter was just the dread of long religious services mixed with the guilt that I "should" be happy. This was the first time I realized that there were whole other streams of tradition I could tap into , and perhaps it was my duty to seek them out if it would help me discover that proper joy that comes from really contemplating Christ's story
I've been wanting to read Parker's book for about a year now, so of course I'm leaving a comment! :) What do I love about the church year? Oh, let me count the ways... I love that it tells a story and invites us into that story. I love that it teaches us to connect our lives with a larger story and to see our lives in the light of that story. I love that it hallows time and reminds us that God is present right here, right now. I love that it continually draws our eyes up to Heaven through the things of earth and invites us to see the world sacramentally. I could go on, but I'll stop there. :)
Oh Kimberlee, you always have the most poetic and wise ways of approaching the calendar - I just love how you draw out the threads of beauty from it into our lives!
I really want to embrace more of the liturgical calendar because I feel the disconnect between the world's seasons and my own, particularly in the busy-ness of life.
I want to curl up and rest, but the world has 6 more weeks of activity it says are essential. The church probably has a better answer with liturgical instruction.
So beautifully-said! The church's seasons feel more compassionate somehow...whereas the modern secular world's approach to seasons tends to feel more artificial, in part because it doesn't account for the ups and downs of life and the need to rest and change!
My hardest struggle with the liturgical year is integrating traditions around our ill-timed birthdays. I have kids with Halloween and November 4 birthdays that makes Hallowmas a crazy time, and my husband has a Christmas Eve birthday! It’s much easier to squeeze in celebrations of my spring and summer babes and various baptism anniversaries!
Oooo Katherine, such a great point - and so, so true! Your family sure has a lot of birthday/feast day crossover to balance. I also have a Halloween baby, which has made Hallowtide so maxed-out and exhausting at times.
When it comes to the calendar, I always feel like it's better to not bang my head against the wall with it - so I've had years where our Halloween was definitely not the vision I had in my head (these are good, humbling moments of reality for me, haha). If the best I can do is light a candle or just fall into exhaustion and read a semi-related book to my kids, that's ok...I have a tendency to set myself up for impossible expectations, so in a funny way, the calendar is helping to check that in me, day by day. ;) This is where I also remind myself that we have the cloud of witnesses...so whatever I'm missing due to overwhelm or exhaustion, I can feel a tiny bit like I'm somehow still celebrating alongside folks who are covering that base elsewhere!
Sorry for the ramble...this is something I think about a lot!
For me, as a Roman Catholic, I find that the Latin Mass republishing of the Missal of 1962 after Pope Benedict removed restrictions on this rite to be a treasure trove of knowledge about the Liturgical year.
So much of the liturgical calendar retreated to the background in the post Vatican 2 Missal.
Such a beautiful reminder and resource, Jo! The loss of so many feasts/vigils/octaves in 1955 left a lot of other feasts feeling more disconnected, in my mind anyway.
I find the Santa Lucia celebrations fascinating - not only in Sweden but also in Italy and Spain.
Santa Lucia celebrations are so, so beautiful - and with so much regional variety, as you said!
This book sounds absolutely lovely. I'm becoming very interested in the beauty of the liturgical calendar and the concept of living liturgically.
Choosing a favorite feast seems nearly impossible, but one I'm particularly passionate about is St. John's Eve. There's something incredibly meaningful in having a summertime counterpart to Christmas. Soli Deo Gloria!
Yes!! St. John's is also one of my favorite feasts! When I first saw it across the year from Christmas, so much clicked for me. I realized that there were countless dots that I hadn't been connecting until starting to fold these other feasts into our year.