The Liturgical Calendar

There are certain things that I don’t understand about church life, even though I worked at a church for a while. I mean, as an atheist I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the details. As such I know the gist of many things, but not much more than that. The Liturgical Calendar is one of those things. Before I worked at a church the only things I really knew were Christmas and Easter. I knew that Lent was a thing, but I wasn’t very clear on that at all. Most of my experiences with that were jokes related to giving things up for Lent. It was fascinating to me when I examined the Liturgical Calendar.

There are seasons in it too, but they vary in time a lot more than the four nature throws at us. The year starts with Advent, which is the four Sundays before Christmas. Advent always struck me as an odd time. It was all about preparing for the coming of Christ, both in the Christmas baby sense and the apocalyptic “second coming” sense. So there are some very joyful things and some pretty solemn things too. It always seemed a bit schizophrenic to me.

After Advent comes the Twelve Days of Christmas, which I thought was just an annoying song that gets sung that time of year, but it isn’t. It ends on Epiphany which is a big deal for some reason. Something about the naming of Jesus or some ceremony that I think is more of Christianity stealing from Judaism. Maybe. I could look it up, but I don’t want to. Then it’s business as usual until Ash Wednesday when Lent begins.

Lent is a solemn time, between Ash Wednesday and Holy Week. Forty days. Not including the six Sundays before Holy Week for some reason. So the actual span of time is forty-six days. People give things up for the “forty” days of Lent, which has always fascinated me. I’m not entirely sure why they do it; something about Jesus fasting in the desert I believe. People give up various things; chocolate, alcohol, complaining. It’s interesting the things that people choose. It’s like a religious version of the New Year’s Resolution, and ironically happens right around the time studies say those tend to go off the rails. I want to do a study, looking into how many people don’t make it through and how many gorge themselves on whatever they gave up on day 41. Lent then rolls right into Holy Week.

Everyone knows about Easter, but I don’t think everyone knows about what a spectacle the week before is; I certainly didn’t. The Sunday before is Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday or Palm Sunday of the Passion, depending on what church you attend, and how the Pastor is feeling that year. There’s a lot of ceremony there. The next days vary in importance between denominations. There’s Maundy Thursday, which in my experience with Lutherans starts out very peaceful, but gets a bit dark real quick. That rolls into Good Friday, which is kind of ironically named because it covers the crucifixion; the torture and the marching with the cross and such. Very little there can objectively be labeled good. The Saturday of Holy Week has always confused me. It’s a Vigil I guess but some churches make a bigger deal out of it than others.

Then of course comes Easter, which is really the Christian church’s big day. There’s something about it that is more exciting than Christmas as a congregation. Maybe it’s the fact that spring is usually in the air too, or that Easter hasn’t been as commercialized as Christmas. The thing that has always struck me about Easter is how very pagan it is. The fact that the date is determined by a lunar calendar, the connections to fertility, and so much else about it connects very strongly to many pagan rituals.

There are a few weeks of Easter season until Pentecost. Once that happens it goes back to a sort of business as usual there until the next Advent. Pentecost was usually when the season would end for my church choir. Red was the big color, and something that everyone was supposed to wear. I have no clue what determines the timing of Pentecost. I believe it’s based off the timing of Easter. There is a lot of talk on Pentecost about the Holy Spirit, the part of the Holy Trinity that has always confused me the most. My last summer as a church choir director was on Pentecost, and we did a piece that had no connection to the day really – it was simply a piece that I wanted to conduct.

The next several months are labeled “Time After Pentecost” and is the longest stretch of the year – lasting until the next Advent. It always struck me as odd that this large portion of the year didn’t have as much to do as the rest, but it made planning the services a lot easier so I guess I shouldn’t complain much there. Those several months were the ones that most resembled what I always thought church was when I was growing up – a bunch of very loosely connected Sundays with days spread between them.