IB World Religions 3.2.4. Festivals and Holy Days: the Liturgical Year Notes

3.2.4. Festivals and Holy Days: The Liturgical Year

The shape of the year

1. The liturgical year is the annual cycle of seasons and feasts through which many churches retell the life of Christ. It begins not in January but on the first Sunday of Advent.
2. Two cycles run at once. The temporal cycle follows the life of Christ and moves with the date of Easter, while the sanctoral cycle fixes saints' days to calendar dates.
3. Colours mark the seasons in Western churches. Purple serves Advent and Lent, white or gold Christmas and Easter, red Pentecost and the martyrs, and green the long weeks between.
4. Each season carries its own readings, set out in a lectionary. Many denominations now share one, so Catholics, Anglicans and Lutherans often hear the same passages on the same Sunday.
5. Denominations differ sharply over how much of this they keep. Reformed, Baptist and many Pentecostal churches keep Christmas and Easter but treat the rest as human invention, and Quakers keep no holy days at all, holding every day equally sacred.
6. The oldest festival is not annual. Sunday, kept from the first century as the day of resurrection, is the weekly feast on which the whole calendar is built.

Advent, Christmas and Epiphany

1. Advent takes its name from the Latin for coming and opens the Western year four Sundays before Christmas. It prepares for the birth of Christ and for the return Christians expect.
2. The season is kept at home as well as in church. An Advent wreath carries four candles lit one by one, calendars count the days, and Catholic and Anglican churches use purple and restrain the music.
3. Orthodox churches keep a longer Nativity Fast of forty days from mid November, abstaining from meat, dairy and fish on most days of it.
4. Christmas celebrates the Incarnation on 25 December. Churches following the older Julian calendar, among them the Russian and Serbian Orthodox, keep that same feast thirteen days later, on what civil calendars call 7 January.
5. Epiphany on 6 January closes the season. Western churches remember the magi visiting the infant Christ, while Eastern churches keep the day as Theophany, the baptism of Christ, and bless rivers and seas, sometimes throwing a cross into the water for swimmers to recover.
6. Candlemas on 2 February, forty days after Christmas, marks the presentation of Christ in the Temple. Many congregations bless the year's candles at it, and the crib is finally put away.

Lent, Holy Week and Easter

1. Lent is the forty day preparation for Easter. In the West it opens on Ash Wednesday, when worshippers receive a cross of ash on the forehead and are told they are dust and to dust will return.
2. Its disciplines are fasting, prayer and almsgiving. Many Christians give something up, and many now take something on instead, such as daily charitable giving through a Lent appeal.
3. Orthodox Great Lent begins two days earlier on Clean Monday and fasts more strictly, setting aside meat, dairy, fish, oil and wine on most days.
4. Holy Week runs from Palm Sunday, with its processions and palm crosses, through Maundy Thursday, when the Last Supper is recalled and feet are washed, to Good Friday.
5. Good Friday practice varies. Catholics venerate the cross and receive bread consecrated the day before, Orthodox carry an epitaphios in a burial procession, and many Protestant churches hold three hours of readings and hymns.
6. Easter, called Pascha in the East, is the greatest feast of the year. The Vigil begins in darkness with new fire and the Paschal candle, and Orthodox worshippers greet one another with the words Christ is risen.
7. The date moves because the Council of Nicaea in 325 tied it to the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. Julian and Gregorian reckoning usually disagree, so Eastern and Western Easter often fall weeks apart.

Ascension and Pentecost

1. Ascension falls on the Thursday forty days after Easter and marks the belief that the risen Christ was taken up into heaven. Catholics keep it as a holy day of obligation, though many dioceses now transfer it to the following Sunday.
2. The ten days that follow are kept as a time of waiting. The ecumenical initiative Thy Kingdom Come has recently filled them with prayer for others in Anglican and many Protestant parishes.
3. Pentecost falls fifty days after Easter and takes its name from the Greek for fiftieth. It celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles described in Acts 2.
4. Christians often call it the birthday of the Church, because Acts places the first public preaching and the first mass baptism on that day. Red vestments recall the tongues of fire.
5. In Britain the feast has long been called Whitsun, from the white robes of the newly baptised, and it once carried town processions and holiday fairs.
6. Pentecostal churches take their name from the feast. They read Acts 2 as a pattern for the present, so gifts such as tongues and prophecy are expected rather than only remembered.

Ordinary Time and Sunday

1. Ordinary Time covers the weeks outside the festal seasons, about thirty-four of them in the Roman calendar. The name comes from the ordinal numbering of the weeks rather than from dullness.
2. It falls in two blocks: a short stretch between Epiphany and Lent, and a long one from Pentecost to Advent. Green vestments run through both.
3. The readings change character in these weeks. Rather than following an event, they work steadily through one gospel across a year.
4. Feasts still stand inside it. Trinity Sunday follows Pentecost, Corpus Christi honours the Eucharist with street processions in Catholic countries, and Anglicans keep the last weeks before Advent as the Kingdom season.
5. Every Sunday is itself a small feast of the resurrection. That is why Sundays are not counted among the forty days of Lent.
6. Catholics speak of a Sunday obligation to attend Mass, while most Protestant churches urge attendance without framing it as a duty. Attendance has fallen across Western Europe in both cases.

Saints' days and calendars

1. The sanctoral cycle attaches saints to fixed dates, and Catholic and Orthodox calendars name a saint for almost every day of the year.
2. All Saints on 1 November honours the whole company of the saints, and All Souls the next day prays for the dead. Most Protestant churches reject the second as implying purgatory.
3. Marian feasts are the most prominent. Catholics keep the Assumption on 15 August and the Orthodox the Dormition on the same date, while the Immaculate Conception on 8 December is Catholic alone.
4. Patron saints anchor local identity. Parishes keep a patronal festival, nations keep days such as Saint Patrick or Saint George, and Orthodox Christians keep a name day in place of a birthday.
5. Protestant churches pruned the calendar rather than abolishing it. The Book of Common Prayer keeps a reduced list of biblical saints, Lutherans mark the Reformation on 31 October, and Puritan England banned Christmas outright from 1647 to 1660.
6. New observances keep appearing. Harvest festivals, Remembrance Sunday, and the Watch Night services kept by Methodist and Black majority churches on New Year's Eve all show a calendar still being written.