I. Time and the Origin of the Christian Year.
II. The Story of the Church Year.
III. Recovering the Liturgy of the Christian Year.
IV. Some Implications for Church and Family.
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. Many 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 prehensions 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.
The concern of this paper is not to bolster a lost
cause or retreat to a past age, but rather to recover the basic
symbols out of which humans consciously and unconsciously
exist. Ritual is a part of every life, and all ritual
is finally religious. 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 150,000
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, 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 to 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.
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. m e many laws
were contrived 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.
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.... much
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.
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". 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.
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. 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
macrocosmically by the cultural time and space in which the rite
is found, and macrocosmically 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. 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 times. 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 Ecclesial Era is a
fascinating one. For the purposes of this, 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 Mediterrenean
countries. The birthing of the sun was a natural time to celebrate
the birth of the Son of Righteousness. 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 ~dict of Toleration that the first and second Easters
(the season of haster 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.
An exercise in constructing the interior screen
by which comprehensiveness in thinking realized decision making.
I. INCLUSIVE CONCERNS
1. Movement a historic entity
2. Global operation of Guild
3. PostModern Religious Order
4. Our historical relations
5. Practicalities of NSV
6. Futuric NRM
II. INTELLECTUAL REFLECTIONS
1. Eschatology
2. Meaning of "the World"
3. Sociological form of Local Church
4. Ethics Law and Gospel
5. Consciousness of Consciousness
6. Historical necessity of Guild
III. CONCRETE PLANNING
1. Spring Guardian Meeting
2. Summer Research Assembly
3. March Prior Convocation
4. Global Elders Trip
5 September Centrum Post
6. Guardian Committees
IV. INTRUDING ISSUES
1. RS1 recruitment
2. Rise in Order Morale
3. Future Religious Houses
4. Additional property
5. Trained troops
6. Principles for comprehensiveness
V. SPECIAL EMPHASIS
1. 26 Week Project
2. Uptown 5
3 5th City
4. Majuro
5. Aboriginal Experiment
6. India Possibilities
VI. SPECIFIC ATTENTIONS
1. Organizing 20 Programs
2. Blending LOCHEX to EPEX
3. Centrum commissions
4. Global War Board
5. Kemper Walls
6. Refining LENS Course
VII WATCHFUL INTERESTS
1. Management Centrum
2. Base Collegiums
3. Major Funding Post
4. Team construct
5. Week II PSU and T/F
6. Order sophistication
VIII LOWKEY PONDERINGS
1. Other religions
2. Heads of State
3. Chicago Push
4. Operating globally
5. Practical form of religious order
6. Transparent Christianity
IX UNDERLYING RUMINATIONS
1. Comprehensive global leadership
2. Ongoing practical visioning
3. "No Meeting" meeting concept
4. Immediate problems to system
5. Symbolic extension
6. Concept of Global Panchayat
X INTERNAL BROODINGS
1. Developing the Holy Life
2. Actualizing Sanctification
3. Working through Ignatius
4. Solitary Office
5. Gestalting our Spirit Exercises
6. Marketing the course
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 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 leek 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. 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 deptuagesima. 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 feast 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." And then Easters 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".
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 God 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 itself1 and closed off from the ever new freedom of divine love.
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 anarnnesis 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. This has been an ongoing struggle; Dix claims it was the intent of the radical turn of the liturgy in the fourth century.l9 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 th4Christian 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, 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 rubrics). Indeed,
Panikkar spells out most helpfully how worship is in fact created
in his discussion of the "new rubrics." 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.
In any real, popular and living religious worship.
. . the rubrics have such a splendour 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 14iddle Last or Buddhist celebration in the Far best 24 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 miscommunication. 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.
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 with 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.
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 cultur~1 phenomena of all
times, i.e. worship. 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 Lord is a cosmic Lord; further
discoveries in any form of learning only disclose the riches and
majesty of the Good News we have to share. The Christian Year
remains a practical and numinous liturgy whereby time may be redeemed
for all society.
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.) TQ 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 earl
church. Later, probably tying in with natural instincts in society
timed by the sun, vespers and lauds, the evenin6 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 where 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.