The Christian Year

It doesn’t require great insight to see that our world has no framework for how to think well about time. We all experience time, but we lack an overarching way of understanding how its seasons fit together and what it means. That God gave time to us on purpose and teaches us something through time might sound strange to modern ears!

We do have a progression of school years, and within them, the progression of material learned. We also have a series of purchasing days tied to certain festivals—Halloween, Black Friday, Christmas. But we have lost the sense that each season is connected both to the preceding one and the one that follows, and that together, the collection of seasons mean something.

Perhaps this loss results from the movement away from an agricultural world, where land was left fallow for a season before it was sown, and sowing necessarily preceded growing, which resulted in harvest. It is impossible on a farm to divorce one season from another, and each season on the farm contributes its own gift and preparation to the next. But our inability to see the connection between seasons is also the result of trading the church calendar for the economic calendar, where every season is supposed to be “harvest,” and none is “planting.” Try telling your boss you need a “fallow” season because you can start “planting” your work again (to be harvested after it has grown for a season), and you will discover how far removed the economic calendar is from the agricultural or church calendars!

The church calendar is not a series of discrete seasons, yet our discipleship under the tyranny of the economic calendar makes it initially difficult to see this. As the 2019 Book of Common Prayer says, “the Christian Year consists of two cycles” (687). In other words, we don’t have Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. Instead, we have the Incarnation Cycle, which consists of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. And we don’t have Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. Instead, we have the Paschal Cycle, which consists of Lent, Easter, and Pentecost. In each of these cycles, the seasons are intricately connected to and dependent on one another, and in each, the pattern is the same—preparation, celebration, and growth.

The relationships between the seasons demonstrate something important, namely that mortification and repentance (preparation) must precede rejoicing (celebration), because they sow the seeds for it, and rejoicing is the foundation for discipleship and mission (growth), because we reap our harvest from the object of our rejoicing. We cannot divorce Lent from Easter, and we cannot divorce Easter from Pentecost. Each season prepares for the next, and trying to live the spiritual life in only one season is like trying to have only harvest without sowing. We need to be planted anew each year, and the Christian Year offers us the framework.

Steven+