Church Seasons

The Church Year

The Church has traditionally used and structured the natural cycles of the world, to train the learner and to make sure the whole width of Christian spirituality, understanding and vision is covered. So each day was structured by the Hours; the month was structured by the Lord’s Days - the weeks being conventional phases of the moon; and the year was (eventually) structured by two (or three) interlocking cycles known as the ‘Proper of the Time’ and the ‘Proper of the Saints’ (with the ‘Proper of Mary’ sometimes separated out).

Nowadays the Church seems to have abandoned this. Now there are a few important feasts, and some short seasons associated with them, but otherwise the year has been dumped into ‘ordinary time’ - dozens of weeks with no structure or organisation at all. The consequences are obvious. Huge areas of Christian spirituality, understanding and life are being rapidly forgotten - or worse, rediscovered in other traditions and rejected as unchristian!

It has even got to the point where people are criticising the Church for not teaching about some particular topic, and inventing a new feast to represent - what the Church always has taught and has already represented in the original calendar. For example, the Church is criticised for not emphasising the importance of creation and the environment, and a feast called ‘creationmas’ or ‘environmentmas’ has been suggested - completely duplicating the traditional feast of Lammas that ‘ordinary time’ has suppressed.

So the day and the year have been central to Christian worship from the earliest times; the Office structured the day and the Calendar structured the year. Here, I wish to talk about the Calendar in the light of the ecological movement.

Of course, I should say "calendars", because there is no single agreed calendar; indeed, a few Christian denominations reject the calendar completely (for example the Christian Brethren). But in most denominations we see a calendar of some sort, ranging from the extremely simple to the extremely complex. And although they vary so much, there is still a sense of a family relationship between the calendars. For example, where topics or celebrations are shared, they are usually shared on the same date. So we can speak of one Church Calendar, as long as we remember that details vary widely.

We see four kinds of item in the Calendar.

First, there are the celebrations. Famous people, for instance, that the Church feels worth remembering: in the Anglican prayer book, every day of the year has at least one such 'saint', and very often more than one. Generally these reflect an important date in the saint’s life: usually their death, but occasionally their birth or conversion. Mot just people, though: in the same category are the more modern celebrations of ‘Special’ Sundays, Sundays that celebrate topics: such as Racial Justice Sunday. They are important in themselves, but they don’t help with training or preserving truth. We needn’t refer to them again.

Second, there are a small number of unusual feasts celebrating isolated doctrines or concepts: for example Trinity Sunday (Sunday after Whitsunday), Corpus Christi (Thursday after Trinity), Holy Cross (14 September).

Third, there is a cycle of feasts relating to the life (biblical or traditional) of Mary the mother of Jesus. This cycle is called the "Calendar of Mary". This extends throughout the year. Naturally it is more important and more extensive in those traditions which give high honour to Mary, such as the Roman Catholic or the Orthodox traditions, but a few have sometimes crept into even strongly Protestant usage: Epiphany and Candlemas (Feast of the Purification of Mary) for example, no doubt both because they are Biblical and because they can be regarded as relating to Jesus rather than to Mary (so that for example Candlemas becomes the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple).

Fourth, and far and away the most important, there is a cycle of feasts relating to the life of Christ, extending from the Feast of the Conception (Lady Day, on 25 March obviously) past Christmas on 25 December, through Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Ascension Day and finally Whitsunday (often nowadays wrongly called Pentecost) when the Church was sealed with the Holy Spirit as the Body of Christ.

It is the Cross that is central to Christian worship. It is the Cross that gives meaning and value to each individual, so that each individual is worth saving. It is the Cross gives meaning and value to our world, so that the world is worth saving. If, for example, the Cross ceases to be central and the world is put in its place, well, why bother? We are forced to agree with Groucho Marx: "Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?" Therefore however much or little of this cycle each denomination preserves, Christmas and Easter are the key points, the pivotal dates of the Christian year around which the year and the sections of the year swing.

So the Church has built the Calendar primarily around that fourth cycle, of the life of Christ. And not only individual feast days, but periods of the year as well: Advent, Christmastide, Lent, Eastertide.

Consequently, there is a basic structure to the Calendar which runs:

Differences of detail are common: Christmastide may finish at Candlemas, not Epiphany; Eastertide may run to Trinity Sunday instead of Whitsunday; Lent and Advent may begin on other days; but this broad structure is as constant as anything is in the Calendar.

This does not fill the year. This structure leaves one gap between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday and another between Whitsunday and Advent Sunday. The mediaeval Church used to refer to these gaps as the Prolongation Of Christmas and the Prolongation Of Easter – if you remember the old Anglican "Book Of Common Prayer" you will recognise the "Sundays After Epiphany" and the "Sundays After Trinity". Nowadays we usually adopt the modern Roman Catholic habit of referring to them collectively as "Ordinary Time". I hoped when I first saw the phrase that it made reference to the (Roman) Ordinal or had some other ecclesiastical meaning; alas, no. It just means ‘ordinary’ in its ordinary sense: unremarkable, unimportant, dull. To make the point clearer still, even the traditional distinction between Sundays "After Epiphany" and "After Trinity" has been thrown away: the "Ordinary Sundays" are numbered in a single anonymous sequence through the year.

And this is where the Calendar first conflicts with the ecological vision. Just as it is a basic tenet of Christianity, and a basic meaning of the Cross, that no human being is unimportant, so it is a basic insight of the Christian ecological movement, and a basic meaning of the Cross, that no part of Creation is unimportant. Therefore no part of the year is unimportant.

Bluntly, "Ordinary Time" is unacceptable.

There is a second issue, and one which would surprise our ancestors, who if they were reading this would by now be jumping up and down and demanding to know "what happened to Lammastide?" For it was Lammas – Loafmas – that celebrated Creation and our dependence on it; the day of the beginning of the new harvest and the bringing into the church of the very first loaf of the fresh grain on the first day of August. Yes, this particular feast may have roots elsewhere - the start of the harvest is an obvious time for a party - but the celebrating and giving thanks for the harvest is also well established in the Mosaic Law. Now, of course a Christian will not feel bound by that Law to follow its rituals; but equally a Christian will feel bound to understand that Law and its rituals, and to try to understand what God was trying to tell us within them. And that is what Lammas does.

"Oh, you mean the Harvest Festival! I believe we used to have them, but they dropped out years ago!" "We’re a city Church – harvest is irrelevant!" And what does that say about your Church’s commitment to eco-principles? But no, I don’t mean Harvest Festival. The Harvest Festival was invented in 1843, or so it is said; but was a re-invention and re-christianization not of Lammas, but of the Harvest Home, the celebration (in the sense of a booze-up) of the end of the harvest, not its beginning. The physical end, that is; in earlier times the Church celebrated the end of the harvest at Michaelmas, 29 September. Rightly so: Michaelmas celebrates the greatest harvest of all, when the whole of creation will be safely gathered in, free from sorrow, free from sin.

Thus Lammastide covered sixty days in which God was worshipped as creator and provider, and in which we celebrated our inextricable unity with the created natural world.

One other feast in this period is also significant. 15 August is the Feast of the Assumption of Mary, a key feast of the Calendar of Mary. In places where the oat harvest was rept in late July and early August, such as much of Scotland, August 15 became the celebration of the end of that harvest, and some modern Roman Catholic devotion reflects this. For example,

"Now at the end of the summer season, the Church celebrates the most glorious harvest festival in the Communion of Saints – Mary, the supremely blessed one among women, Mary, the most precious fruit which has ripened in the fields of God's kingdom, is today taken into heaven."

More importantly, it is the day on which the healing properties of herbs are celebrated. Once again we see the Church celebrating our dependence on the world around us.

All this evidence shows that the Church once had a strong ecological dimension to her worship, but it has indeed become diluted – almost forgotten – and this dilution is reflected in the Calendars commonly in use today.

Suppose, therefore, we restore Lammastide as a period of the Church year, from 1 August to 29 September. We see immediately that the problem of the "ordinary" Sundays has been much reduced! In fact, we now have three periods of "Ordinary Time": from Epiphany to Ash Wednesday, from Trinity Sunday to Lammas, and from Michaelmas to Advent Sunday. These contain between four and nine Sundays, between five and ten Sundays, and between nine and ten Sundays respectively, depending on the date of Easter, the date of the first Sunday of the year, and leap-year issues.

So we need to eliminate these remaining "Ordinary Sundays".

There is a very obvious possibility: we could revive the ancient calendar, and rename the period from Michaelmas to Advent Sunday as Michaelmastide, rename the period from Whitsunday to Lammas as Whitsuntide, and run Christmastide up to Lent, Whitsuntide to Lammas, Lammastide to Advent. It is in some ways the most traditional approach.

This has another advantage: traditionally the topics preached in these periods fill in very nicely the basic topics of Christianity: Ordinary Time has in too many respects suppressed the teaching aspect of preaching, or at least left it very incomplete - and the results can be seen in every pew, where too many church-goers are appallingly ignorant of some of the most basic facts about Christianity.

Which gives, I believe, a clearly structured year, grounded firmly in the Bible and in Church tradition, but fully able to preserve the essential truths of the Church, and to respond to particular concerns of the present: thus Lammas helps relate the insights of the ecological movement to Church doctrine; Lent helps bring doctrine down to the individual, not just the clergy.

And anyway, none of this is fundamental; none of it finally matters; everything here is just a means to an end, not an end in itself. But if the Church is to recover the vision that she has lost, it is not enough just to sit back and do nothing. A Church Calendar which looks both back to what has been lost and forward to what can be gained, surely that is one easy, Biblical way of recovering vision, growing in understanding, and allowing God to show us the true value of the world of which we are stewards, the true value of our neighbour before the Cross - and our true value, power and life in the Spirit.