When people in the street or in the church today
say that they have no time, they are literally telling the truth.
We have no time in our age. Factors such as mobility, mass opiation
through television, loss of identity and sense of personal or
communal history, and many other factors have caused us to lose
a sense of historic belongingness or chronos. Superficial bedazzlement
with an urban, secular world has cut us off from the experience
of cosmic time. Popular "isms" combined with fear of
being old-fashioned or trapped in ritual has led to the relativizing
of eschatological time. Contemporary people live in the NOW without
either the past or future apprehensions which make the now eternal.
If it were possible, it would not be desirable to retreat to some
past time, but the church is faced with a question similar to
one faced many times in the past: what does it mean to redeem
time for this contemporary society. But if the question is not
new, our age is and so must be the answer.
Langdon Gilkey has put the issue well:
The change in the social role of traditional religion
has had two major results...: 1) the religious has begun to appear
in other modes and guises and 2) traditional religious communities
have been forced to rethink, reinterpret and revise their structures,
their roles, their beliefs their most basic selfunderstanding.
Others concur. Leonel Mitchell speaks of the phenomena
as two contradictory tendencies: a movement away from ritualism
which seeks to substitute a private internalizing of religious
experience for external ritual actions, and at the same time,
increasing interest in and sensitivity to symbols, especially,
for instance, body language and other nonverbal communication.
2 Anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists join theologians
in concern for what this means for human life today and in the
future. 3
The concern of this paper is not to bolster a lost
cause or retreat to a past age, but rather to recover the basic
symbologies out of which humans consciously and unconsciously
exist. Ritual is a part of every life, and all ritual
is finally religious. 4 In what way can the church's
wisdom and experience in ritualizing time serve now in a world
of new concepts and many new patterns of time? This paper will
review the depth understanding of time and times which were brought
to the calendar of the Christian Year, the forms of the liturgy
of the Christian Year in the past, and some contemporary discoveries
and rediscoveries. It will conclude with some implications for
the consideration of both the church and Christian families.
I. Time and the origin of the Christian Year.
The earliest remnants of rituals observed by human
beings are found in caves in the Alps and date back to about 100,000
BC. 5 The animal skulls, laid in careful patterns,
suggest some form of hunt ritual, perhaps related to the much
later cave paintings. These rituals likely had to do with survival,
with gaining power over the animal prey and with the conscious
struggles of birth, living and dying.
It was probably not until tribes became somewhat
agriculturally oriented or more restricted in their wanderings,
that the seasonal cycle of rituals developed. The story, Ancient
of Days,6 puts forth a fascinating thesis that
the building of Stonehenge was a liturgy, a work of the people
on behalf of all tribes, to "mark the light". By indicating
where the shadows would fall on the shortest and longest days
of the year, the monument stood as a symbol and proof for countless
generations that the days would indeed stop getting shorter and
one need not live in the terror that summer might not return.
It seems that every grouping of people came to celebrate
in some way, and amazingly similar ways, the return of spring,
the harvesting of crops, and the passing of the shortest day.
That is to say, all people living sufficiently far north or south
of the equator experience contingency in relation to the seasons.
In Britain and much of northern Europe spring (Lenten) was celebrated
by very cautious eating patterns and sometimes religious fasts.
The reason was the reduced stock piles of food and the fear that
immediacy would lead to the eating of the laying hens and the
seed grains. Harvests have been celebrated with thanksgiving festivals
involving wild partying and often sacrifice to the giver of harvests.
Not enough is known in detail of the rituals in the southern hemisphere,
but it would appear that the shortest night has usually been marked
with some sort of festival of lights, worship of the sun or fire.
Later, the rhythm of the day and the week were to
be noted, (although the week is much more an invention than a
discovery) and lengths of weeks have had a great deal of variety
even long after the Gregorian Calendar was accepted. The month's
rhythm, on the other hand, was early noted and was seen to effect
human life more intimately, if not more completely, than the sun's
rhythm. For this reason the waxing and waning of the moon have
been celebrated universally. The 'month's mind' is a living tradition
in many countries even today.7
The Jewish nation, like other nations around it, celebrated the rotation of the sun and moon, the day and night, and laid down a seven day week which we still follow. It was not until after the Exile that a different sense of time was structured into their consciousness. From this time, the seasonal celebrations were given an overlay of historic significance. The Exodus story was associated with the spring solstice; the Day of Atonement with the autumn solstice and later, Hanukkah with the winter solstice. With the development of liturgy and ritual around these events, the task of the people was seen to be the children of Israel again in such a way that the Kingdom might come. The many laws were contrived not to be a burden, but to aid the people to know how to behave so that the end time they longed for might arrive. The early church preserved two of these festivals ( Passover and
Pentecost), and
If the Church preserved these two festivals of the
Old Israel, even when the idea of their consummation in Christ
saturated the whole of her life, then this was because she preserved
that theology of time of which they were an expression. 8
The church, in fact, from the beginning celebrated
the seasons and the history of the action of God in history, both
in Jesus Christ and in the Jewish people, and related both of
these to the eschatological events which were part of her belief
in the future. Explicit connections and symbolic connections were
made from a very early period between the natural cycles and the
noncyclical events of the Resurrection and the coming of
the spirit at Pentecost. In so doing, the church created a sense
of time for western civilization. Bouyer has well stated the situation:
Our created nature is so bound up with this created
time in which all living beings live that our being cannot be
taken up into the divine unless the time that is conatural
to us is also in some way taken up. And we might add, the natural
rhythms of time, the days and months and years in which life develops,
are not merely some external frame for time, but are of its very
essence. And our lives, which have begun with this kind of "death"
are made up of days which all begin with the "birth"
of waking and end with the "death'' of sleep.... each of
us must go through the periods of childhood, youth, maturity and
in each of them in some way be born anew, develop the potentialities
of that period to the full, and in some way "die" to
the perfection achieved in one period in order to begin afresh
to work for the perfection of the next period.9
With the Edict of Toleration in 313 a new sense of
time was born for the church. Dom Gregory Dix speaks of the early
period of the church as a time when it was necessary to teach
people to die well for their faith. This, plus the eschatological
hope of the imminent return of Jesus, led to an emphasis on the
translation of the temporal into the eternal, that is, to become
here and now in Christ. When the church was no longer underground,
the emphasis came to be on living for the faith rather than dying
for it. Therefore, the concern was to translate the eternal into
the temporal, into history and time. The liturgy remained the
teaching tool, but the liturgy itself had to change. As the church
came to "feel at home in the world she became reconciled
to time".10 The eschatological emphasis did not
disappear, kairotic time remained a part of active experience,
but the Church extended her understanding of lineal history in
both directions. Where the life, death and resurrection of Jesus
were once seen to be at the end of time, it came to be understood
to be at the center of time, the event which redeemed and sanctified
all time. The task of the liturgy was to see that the redeeming
act was imbedded in every moment of life. This was done through
the structuring and honoring of time by associating it with the
acts of redemption. The lived moments of the early church, the
history of Israel, the cycles of the days and years, all were
molded in time into the great drama of redemption.
In our day, with the gifts of phenomenology and existentialism,
we have become aware that the events, motifs, mysteries and moods
of the liturgical year reflect the life and the states of being
of every human. Part of this is explained by the commonplace projection
of meaning and personal experience. The life of faith involves
the very dynamics which came to be revealed in the observances
of the Christian year. Every mature person knows what it means
to keep vigil, to wait with longing; to experience events which
fulfill and overwhelm expectation; to be gifted in strange and
surprising ways; to feel guilt and unease about the future; to
experience dread, horror, inadequacy; to know life born again,
and to sense a calling to destiny which cannot be denied. Every
mature Christian knows the long march of faith: the endless, it
seems, periods when nothing seems to happen. Try as you will,
no great success; stumble as you may, no overwhelming failure
meets you. These are life phenomena which can be related to the
Christian Year. Ed Hobbes once preached a sermon on how it is
that we never want to be in the season we find ourselves in, we
want to skip ahead. It is interesting, as we shall see, that this
is especially true in Advent, of course, for children, but more
seriously for adults in Epiphany. The church has always had a
struggle to keep folk from pushing into Lent and guilt and repentance
too soon. But the point is that the Christian Year reflects internal
as well as external time and as such is a phenomenal spirit tool,
and centers all on the Easter reality.
Brenneman would take it even further and declare
that our relativistic, holistic understanding of life gives us
another sense of time by which the Christian year must be measured
in our time. This is the whole Einsteinian timespace relationship.
Its (ritual's) world is a world of symbols which
contain themselves within the horizons of ritual time and space.
These timespace boundaries are determined macro-cosmically
by the cultural time and space in which the rite is found, and
micro-cosmically by the attitude of consciousness of the ritual
participant. Space and time, then, determine the quality, functions
and content of a given ritual or of ritual itself. They establish
the ritual world. l1
The Christian Year, then, has become an overlay of
many kinds of time, internal and external, kairotic and chronological,
historic and phenomenological. The work of the liturgy is to redeem
them all, or perhaps more aptly, to declare Good News in the midst
of all time. But it is also the liturgy of the church to center
time, to give focus and significance to the times of all people,
to provide a reference point in the midst of a relative universe,
by which all times can be measured. The Christian Year is not
an eternal model to be reintroduced into the consciousness of
the faithful. It is, rather, a service of transparentizing seasons,
events, history and life itself so that all people may see the
way life really is and the Good News that means for everyone.
II. The Church Year
The story of the development of the Christian Year
through the first six hundred years of the Christian era is a
fascinating one. The chart on the following page will serve to
hold the developmental story along with the picture of the year
as it has come to us. It will be enough to say that the Christian
yearly celebrations at first were simply Easter and Pentecost,
then the days in between them. As martyrs were added to the rolls
of the Church, the anniversaries of their deaths were celebrated
locally, and in time some came to be worldwide celebrations.
There is no clear picture when Lent was first marked. We do know
that it became a time of preparation for baptism somewhere around
the turn of the first century and at the same time a period of
public penance for those who had denied the faith. Easter and
then Pentecost became the great festivals of baptism and of reinstatement
in the body of believers. It may have been as late as the fourth
or fifth century before it became a time of repentance for all
believers. Epiphany was celebrated as early as the beginning of
the second century in order to lay claim to the winter solstice
and the wild celebrations of the birth of Aeon in Mediterranean
countries. The birthing of the sun was a natural time to celebrate
the birth of the Son of Righteousness.l2 It is interesting
that the events of Holy Week, a scandal indeed, were not celebrated
with Easter until well into the second century. Indeed, it was
after the Edict of Toleration that the first and second Easters
(the season of Easter through Pentecost and the season of Epiphany)
were separated into event and postcelebration. The latest
addition to the calendar was the season of Trinity, sometimes
called Pentecost, which was formalized in the fourteenth century.
It is clear that the Christian Year was first defined
by the great shared events which changed the lives of the early
Christians: Easter and Pentecost. Later reflection added more
celebrations for both pedagogical and cultural purposes, and the
celebrations based on doctrines were the last added. This is important
for the presuppositions to be made later in this paper. It is
events not theories that change lives, and it is events not theories
that will redeem time for contemporary society.
As the chart on page (five) eight indicates, the
Christian Year has two main portions: the Year of the Lord and
the Year of the Church. The Year of our Lord is now considered
the first part of the year, though originally the year, birthed
at Pentecost, was differently conceived. This, however, is a good
place to begin. The Year of our Lord is also divided into two
parts: the Christmas sequence of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany,
and the Easter sequence of Lent, Holy Week and Easter. Each has
a period of preparation, a humiliating central event, and a great
period of rejoicing at the victory which marks the entire life
of Jesus the Christ. The Year of the Church begins with the week
of Pentecost and is followed, virtually unbroken for Protestant
churches, by Trinity. The feasts of all souls and all saints,
sometimes marked more by Halloween than any other event, has not
strongly maintained the Christian transposition from pagan festivals,
but potentially marks a third dimension of the Year of the Church.
In passing, it is of significance to note that although Christmas
and Epiphany have their roots in the same event, the Incarnation,
The differentiation was made in such a way that on
Christmas the fact of the birth of Christ is considered mainly
from the standpoint of His weakness and the poverty of his human
nature, while on Epiphany it is viewed from the standpoint of
the divine majesty shining through the human nature of Christ
and illuminating the world. 13
The first six months of the Church Year, from Advent
through Easter, rehearse not only the earthly life of Jesus but
also the life of profound humanness and faith. As the Church brings
the events again to light and to life by recreating the eschatological
time, church members experience their own anticipations and dread
at the coming of the promised one, the sense of judgment which
it brings. The Christ event itself is a time of magic, of unbelievable
delight and effulgence. Here is the time of abject poverty and
humility yet in it is the fullness of life itself. The church
has experienced this constantly, but only too often in retrospect
rather than at the moment. Christmas gives the opportunity to
recall that the meanest circumstances are for that very reason
filled with possibility and hidden wonder. The season of Epiphany,
the time of gifting by the Magi, is the time when we followers
of Christ become ourselves the incarnation, the manifestation,
and immediately shy away from the implications of the immense
love of God for us. It is amazing how, throughout history, the
church has foreshortened Epiphany, whether by the 'little lent'
of northern Europe or the moving back from Quadregesima even to
Septuagesima. Then, having realized we have failed to 'walk on
water' as the audacious children of God, we, the church, have
thrown ourselves into the celebration of Mardi Gras as a final
fling before legitimately marking ourselves with ashes and turning
to repentance for our unfaith. Even then, we don't actually repent
in Lent; we do penance and seek to discipline ourselves as though
works really were required for salvation.
The sequence of Easter begins, then, with a look
forward to the death of Jesus and to our death as His body on
earth. There is a warranted mourning over the tremendous cost
of redemption. But even Lent is not unremitting gloom. Sundays
and the little feasts14 remind us that we are postEaster
penitents. Holy Week has us rehearsing all the fickle roles our
lives are prone to and experiencing again the call to be the totally
committed, crying out at the cost yet surrendering to fate and
thereby creating "meaningful destiny''.l5 And
then Easter, not just Jesus' resurrection but the commemoration
of the many times our lives and spirits have been raised from
the dead and given new power. This is the story of our Lord, and
we rehearse it because we so easily forget how the immediate moods
and events of life flow into the story of mankind and of redemption.
The Year of the Church begins with Pentecost, the
sudden release of insight, power, decision and collegiality. It
is no coincidence that this day falls on the Feast of First Fruits.
The white robes of the catechurnens gave the name of Whitsuntide
or Whitsunday in the western world. Pentecost has been a seven
day festival, and has been marked with amazing "dropping
games": everything from birds to fireballs to rose petals
have been dropped from church steeples to mark the coming of the
Spirit. It is a day of vocation needing to be reclaimed in our
time.
Then follows Trinity which relates "the profound
implications of our Lord's incarnation: life, death and resurrection,
to the life in time of the Christian and of the Christian community".16
From the perspective of 1982, the question is rightly
raised as to what happens in the celebration of the Christian
Year. "Is it to be understood merely as a kind of high evangelical
pedagogy"' asks Bouyer.
In particular, how can we understand this revival
of the Passion, which, far from needing to happen again and again
in a cyclical recurrence of death and rebirth as did the dromenon
of the pagan mysteries was endured by our Lord
precisely to free us from slavery to... the elements of this world
as it now is, shut up in itself, and closed off from the ever
new freedom of divine love.17
If this question could have a simple answer, we would
no longer be dealing in the realm of symbol. The Christian Year
is a pedagogical device; it is an anamnestic event which
reconstitutes the experience; it is a mirror which allows us to
see more clearly what is happening in our own lives; it is the
reenactment of a type of creation myth which unites all of time
and significates the great and little victories and defeats of
our lives. The depth of these times makes the celebration unendingly
valid.
III. Recovering the Liturgy of the Christian Year
1. Content. The content of the Christian Year is
primarily the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as the Christ.
It includes both the anamnesis and the significance which the
church has attached to the story through the ages. To celebrate
without telling the story would be to float off into naturalism
or pantheism again. But just to celebrate the story without tying
it in to the whole experience of creation and particularly the
life experience of the present day would neither do justice to
the whole story nor accomplish the task of redeeming time. Timeliness
and timelessness meet in the effective liturgy of the church.
An important part of the content, therefore, is the whole sociocultural
context of the people, in fact all that forms the consciousness
of the gathered congregation. But it also contains the private
lives and concerns of the people gathered for they are a significant
part of any liturgy.
The difference between "corporate" and
"private" worship must be discarded. The purpose of
worship is to constitute the Church, precisely to bring what is
private into the new life, to transform it into what belongs to
the church.l8
This has been an ongoing struggle; Dix claims it
was the intent of the radical turn of the liturgy in the fourth
century.19 The struggle of our time is to keep the
balance between the objective and the subjective dimensions of
the story, the context and the participants. It is only when this
is done, however, that the prolepsis, the remembering forward
can be meaningful. This is the prophetic element of proclaiming
faith. It is not just the vision but the vision proclaimed that
is required if the people are not to perish.
These, then, are the four basic contents of the liturgy of the Christian Year: the horizons and broadest contexts of time and space in which we live, the specific remembering of the acts of the life, death and resurrection
of Jesus and of the church in its historical setting,
the promises and hopes of the future, and the human situation
of the gathered people with all the states of being of all the
ages present.
2. Rubrics. In his fascinating book, Spirals: A Study in Symbol, Myth and
Ritual,20 Brenneman
states
The space of ritual is the body and the time of ritual
is gesture. Body is infused or filled with gesture, and in the
corresponding manner, space is filled with time and a world is
born. Gesture is body coming into consciousness; it is the temporal
dimension of body, i.e. lived time.
This is suggestive both as to the external actions (rubrics) and the internal intentions and conscious efforts ( which Panikkar calls the nigrics). Indeed, Panikkar spells out most helpfully how worship is in fact created in his discussion of the "new rubrics."21 He names six rubrics:
1. spontaneity, by which he means the use of symbols already latent or active in the Community. Rituals and symbols can not be imposed from out of the blue.
2. universality symbols and rituals meaningful for all. Panikkar points to nature symbols and such activities as eating, singing, friendship and, more particularly in our time, technology, liberation and food.
3. concreteness. Unless the liturgy or ritual is grounded in life experiences it may become invested with old,
unhelpful or even demonic overtones.
4. truthfulness or authentic meaningfulness.
5. continuity with past tradition and experience.
6. "orthopraxis"
When rubrics translate nigrics into living symbol
such as self-confidence, dancing or particular service to our
neighbor... people can share in Christian worship by participating
in the expression of the Christian neighbours.22
These rubrics are very similar to those laid out
by Snyder in Contemporary Celebration. But Panikkar pushes
further in his concern for global commonality:
In any real, popular and living religious worship.
. . the rubrics have such a splendor and power of their own that
the participants are never simply the exclusive group of the orthodox.
For instance, in any pilgrimage or popular feast no matter where,
Christians, Hindus and Muslims join together and in fact nobody
can stop them. The same is true of any Christian feast in the
Middle Last or Buddhist celebration in the Far East.23
If the content, as we have maintained through the
years, is applicable to every human being, the rubrics themselves
are media for depth humanness.
3. Ritual Process. Victor Turner makes it clear in
his book by this name that it is virtually impossible to understand
one ritual in a culture without knowing the entire ritual system
into which it fits. Similarly, it is virtually impossible to create
liturgy without grasping the total pattern into which it fits.
Historically, this has been acted out in the celebration of the
Christian Year by the intentional inclusion of the whole story
whether by the creed or other means
in every liturgical events.
Another aspect of the ritual process, however, is
the manner in which it allows detachment and reentry, accountability
and absolution, liminality and the sealing of a transition. It
is here that the makeup of a specific community must be taken
into consideration in refining the liturgy or ritual.
Ritual process also has to do with the outward forms,
signifiers such as setting, decor, objects and artifacts, gestures,
actions, movements, sounds, words and spatial arrangements. Each
of these is infused with meaning and is what Turner calls a "storage
unit" packed with information regarding values, norms, beliefs,
sentiments, social roles and relationships honored by the culture.
To deal with ritua1 as though it were only a matter of words would
be to risk mis-communication.
The ritual process itself deals with time. According
to Turner it does not so much combine times as it abolishes all
time but the sacred time of myth. This is an image close to that
of anamnesis. For a few moments or a few days even, other concerns
are removed and all attention is focused in one transmundane act,
which in itself contains all meaning and all of life.
Whoever refuses assent to reality as a whole, no
matter how well off s/he may be, is by that fact incapacitated
for either joy or festivity. Festivity is impossible to the naysayer.
The more money s/he has, and above all the more leisure, the more
desperate is this impossibility to him/ her. 25
Liturgy of the Christian Year will not be empowered
until it becomes ritual again, until the depth dimensions of content,
rubrics and ritual process are selfconsciously molded into
a lifegiving and lifesaving experience. When this
happens, the worshippers will experience a detachment from their
specific involvements but also a deep and refreshing return to
the world's time, God's time and their own life time. Time itself
will vibrate with meaning.26 All of this may seem to
make the liturgy of the Christian Year so complex that one dare
not touch it, but the contrary is more true: one dare not evade
it. The life dynamics or phenomenology behind and within the rhythm
of the Church Year is simply the way life is. Not to deal witin
it in the church is to allow it to be misdealt with by Madison
Avenue or the soap operas.
IV. Some Implications for Church and Family.
1. A new liturgical theology. A first implication is that liturgy, both in the home and the church, and ritual in both places, be looked at seriously in the light of the radical changes in the concept of time and life in our
century. The content of the anamnesis will not change,
but the prolepsis, the rubrics and the ritual process, that is
the total hermeneutics of the Christian Year must be updated.
We will need to find a symbol as powerful as the great cathedral
bells of the middle ages to constantly call people to stand present
to the wonder of their lives and the activity of God in history.
One wonders how the idea of bells got started; was it the sound
of sheep bells reminding a shepherd turned pastor? We need to
think of the sounds and sights and activities of utter common
mundanity: perhaps the sight of the city (as in Coventry Cathedral),
or the sound of traffic, or the view of the earth from the moon,
or the coffee rites in offices, and we need to relate them to
the times and rhythms of the Christian faith. As Hoon points out:
The Christian life in its totality is also understood
as a liturgical life: the cultic action of the congregation and
their apostolic action in the world are the same action performed
under different modes.27
We will need, most specifically, to articulate the
meaning of the life of Jesus and of every life in the newly understood
microcosms and macrocosms of timespace.
2. Ritualization of liturgy. Though there is always a need for flexibility and creativity in liturgy in order that it may speak directly to the gathered group, in our time it is the opposite to this which is the greater need. For
the nurture of individuals and groups there is a
need for consistency to the point where some elements of the message
become part of the conscious memory and therefore at the service
of people through recall. Total spontaneity eliminates the depth
ritual values. It may be that the consistent use of songs, collects
or objects throughout a season of the year and for a period of
years in a row needs to be rethought and perhaps experimented
with again. Certainly the use of an advent wreath will not have
the impact on a family in one year that its continued use would
have over time.
3. Secularization. Once again, Panikkar:
Only worship can prevent secularization from becoming inhuman, and only secularization can save worship from being meaningless. If worship is something with a universal value and not merely tied to a particular form of culture or religion... then it must have some meaning in a secular society and this meaning has to be rediscovered or, if needs be reforged.
If secularization... exists as a historical ...situation
for at least an important sector of mankind, it has to come to
grips with one of the most widespread cultura1 phenomena of all
times, i.e. worship.26
The word "worship" might be replaced with
"the Christian Year" or with "sacred time"
and our point would be made. We are at a point of radical change
in the thinking, the paradigm, of society. We must avoid either
ignoring the reality of this on the one hand or selling out to
faddism on the other. The Christian Word is a cosmic Word; further
discoveries in any form of learning only disclose the riches and
majesty of the Good News we have to bear. The Christian Year remains
a practical and numinous liturgy whereby time may be redeemed
for all society.
4. Computing Time. The Calendar Wheel on the front
of the back cover a serious joke. It shows only a small part of
the multivalent nature of time to be celebrated, but if we take
seriously the phenomenological states of the hours, the days,
the seasons and the liturgical season, as well as of the age phases,
we may come at a "scientific" way of grasping some of
the predictable elements of the "lived moments" of those
for whom liturgy is designed.29
The outer ring of the circle stands for the four
seasons of the year. It has been a matter of fascination to me
that countries of the southern hemisphere, for instance Australia,
continue to use snow seasons on Christmas cards and spring flowers
on Easter cards, even though Christmas comes in hottest summer
and Easter in the autumn. The colors here are suggested by studies
that link moods to seasons. (In the northern hemisphere, for instance,
there are more suicides and depressions in early Lent.) To be
relevant in the southern hemisphere would be to turn the celebrational
dial to account for the mood the season brings.
The second ring is of the Christian Year and shows
the traditional or one traditional set
of colors. Because of the interweaving of the total Gospel into
each part of the year, it is applicable north or south, but needs
to be selfconsciously related.
The days of the week have also been related to the
salvation story. Every Sunday is a little Easter, every Friday
a Good Friday. I have not found a convincing reason for Wednesday
also being a fast day but evidence shows it has been one since
very early days. It may be that midweek one needs to gird their
loins, especially when the work week was six (or more) full days.
When the week day overlays with Christmas or saints days, it becomes
a consideration.
The hours of the day were finally ordered by the
Benedictines but were of much older tradition. At least the offices
of vespers, matins and lauds go back to Easter vigil in the early
church. Later, probably tying in with natural instincts in society
timed by the sun, vespers and lauds, the evening petition and
the morning praise, became daily events. Every sunrise is a dawning
of salvation. Every noon marks the crucifixion again. The burst
of the spirit comes, as did Pentecost, when morning is fully broken.
In far northern countries ``here the sun set very early in winter,
the office of compline was added as a bedtime prayer and
the nature of vespers made a slight shift.
Finally, the inner circle follows the suggestion
of Erikson and others, including the great Hindu schema. The age
of youth, roughly one to twenty, is the time of preparation and
anticipation. Young adults share the fire of the spirit and the
willingness to risk. Mature adults make the maximum contribution
to society as their vocational skills and physical strength peak,
and elders, over sixty, contribute the effulgence of their wisdom
and experience.
To match up the season, the Christian calendar, the
day, the hour and the age of those for whom liturgy is being prepared
would give a rough objective picture of where the mood and needs
of the group might be. Specifics, of course, need to be added,
and then the task of the liturgist is to assess in faith what
the address of the Word needs to be to bring the appropriate wholeness
and healing.