Why you should keep the post-Christmas feasts
Thoughts on the Ascetical Theology of the Liturgical Calendar
Three major feasts of both the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada fall right after Christmas: St. Stephen’s (12/26), St. John’s (12/27), and Holy Innocents (12/28). In both churches, these are quite high-ranking feasts indeed: not as important as the principal feasts of the church year, such as the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord (aka Christmas) we just celebrated, but important enough that the prayer books of both churches include specific readings and prayers (called propers) for the celebration of the day. And yet they are very rarely celebrated publicly. The spikiest Anglo-Catholic parishes, especially the ones that have a practice of daily mass, can generally be counted on to keep the feasts, and they are certainly kept in our monasteries, where morning and evening prayer are said daily and there is often a daily Holy Communion as well. And I thank God for them and for their prayers! But…that’s about it. Otherwise these feasts have disappeared from view.
I’ve been thinking about this the last day or so, and wanting to articulate to myself and to you all why precisely I think this is a problem. I think this is a problem not only in that it causes our faithful to lose an opportunity to reflect on these saints and the consequences of Christ’s birth, but also in that we lose a chance to practice humility and obedience in following the liturgical calendar. It’s the latter part of this that I want to focus on in this post, sketching out an ascetical theology of the liturgical calendar.
Often, when we talk about the liturgical calendar, we emphasize its catechetical or pedagogical function. The liturgical calendar, on this reading, is a way of immersing ourselves in the life of Christ, with the two great cycles of fast and feast oriented around his incarnation and passion, death, and resurrection. The great expanse of weeks after Pentecost or Trinity (depending on which numbering you use) are then broken up by celebrations of the saints, giving us an opportunity to see the salvation wrought by Christ in his birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension reflected in a multiplicity of holy human lives. This is a teaching tool, a way of constantly bringing to mind Christ’s mighty acts for us, by which we are saved. For the more mystically inclined, there might be recourse to the language of participation here: in the liturgy, bursting the bounds of time and space, we are somehow brought to participate again in those saving acts of God for us. And so, we might say, skipping the post-Christmas feasts means we lose an opportunity to focus again on the work of these particular saints, to bring to mind and praise God for the particular way they glorified him, to consider how we might imitate them in pursuing holiness.
This is all true as far as it goes, and very important. But I’d like to add something else to this analysis: I think that following the liturgical calendar can be a means of fostering obedience and humility, of dying to ourselves as our Lord commands - that is, following the calendar can be a means of our sanctification. In thinking this through, I’ve been thinking alongside St Benedict, who describes the monastic life as a “labor of obedience” and humility as the means to arrive at “that perfect love of God which casts out fear.” Fret not: I’m not trying to make the claim that the liturgical calendar is particularly ‘Benedictine’ in any sense, but rather that St Benedict’s reflection upon the centrality of obedience and humility to the Christian life might be helpful in thinking about the value of the liturgical calendar.
Now, for the view of the calendar I’m proposing, it is absolutely crucial to note that we don’t choose it. We don’t choose to celebrate a feast or observe a fast on a particular day. Rather this is something given to us by the church - by our particular church, exercising its legislative function to set out days of feast and fast, and insofar as most of our calendar is based on ancient, catholic practice, by the church universal. It is something given to us to order our lives around, to shape the ways that we spend our days, the foods that we eat, times of celebration and times of mourning.
And this means, it seems to me, that the calendar - in a gentle and undramatic way - gives us opportunities to practice obedience, to learn humility, to indeed die to ourselves. We may not feel particularly joyous on All Saints’ or Easter or Christmas (or indeed may not want to spend our public holidays in church), but the church bids us to join the people of God in public worship anyway. We may be exhausted by Christmas festivities and have no desire to get up to praise St. Stephen, St. John, and the Holy Innocents - but the church bids us to do so nonetheless! Or we might want to view Fridays as days of celebration - the end of the workweek, etc. - but the church bids us keep them as a fast day, a day devoted to particular devotion and repentance. In keeping the calendar, we humble ourselves, fit our desires and preferences into a pattern given us from outside. In keeping the calendar, we do not fit the story of Jesus and his saints to our life but rather fit our life into the story of Jesus and his saints. It is a way - not the only way, but a way - of offering ourselves, our souls and bodies, to God.
Now, having said this, it is important to make a few caveats. First of all, our particular feasts and fasts are not established by divine law. There is nothing preventing the church from ordering its cycle of feasts and fasts differently. While I think there are good reasons to keep the cycle of feasts and fasts that we Anglicans have inherited (with a few changes here and there) from the pre-Reformation Western Church, they are not set in stone, handed down at Sinai. If the church decided to keep the post-Christmas feast days at a later point in the year, I would grumble somewhat about a loss of theological coherence and a certain lack of nerve, but I would obey. Nor, for that matter, is it the case that those churches who reject the traditional church calendar in favor of simply marking Sundays are in so doing necessarily being unfaithful. I think there are good reasons for keeping the calendar we have, and I wish that all Christians kept a fuller one, but these are prudential determinations, not questions of divine command.
Secondly, keeping the calendar does not exclude observances of a more personal or local character, not does it demand emotional contortions. There is nothing wrong - and much good! - with choosing to fast to discern God’s will or repent for a particular sin or to tame a particular passion. There is nothing wrong with choosing to celebrate God’s work in your life or the lives of your friends or loved ones outside a church-appointed feast! And moreover, when the church bids you keep a feast, she does not command you ape a false joy. Sometimes the affect we desire to have simply will not be present on a great holy day of the church year. And this does not preclude praising God and rejoicing in God’s salvation; while the church’s cycle of feasts and fasts is designed to instill certain affects, to keep a feast is not primarily a matter of affect but of will and intellect. It is about thanking God for who he is and what he has done, which can be done in any number of affective states.
Thirdly, and most importantly, there is nothing salvific about keeping the calendar, whatever it may be. The sum total of our obedience to God is not obedience to ecclesiastical decrees about days and festivals — far from it! It is precisely because of confusion on this front that many of the Reformers were so keen to prune or even eliminate the church calendar: in their view the Roman Catholic Church had made obedience to its regulations about feasting seasons and fasting seasons, days of rest, saint’s day observances, and so on more important than obedience to the Decalogue! It is wrong for the church to promulgate its cycle of feasts and fasts in a manner that binds consciences, that makes one’s standing before God a matter of rightly keeping them. After all, we are justified by faith alone, through grace, that no man may boast. Those whose work schedules make attending public worship for weekday holy days impossible need not fret; those whose histories with food mean that fasting from food is not possible can feel free to adopt other modes of ascetic renunciation.
And yet! We still ought to obey the calendar, when we can. This is where Benedict is so helpful. Obedience (in his case, to the abbot) is important not because everything the abbot commands is a matter of salvation in itself, but because obedience to the abbot is a means of developing virtue, of attaining humility, of battling our stubborn self-will. Obedience in things adiaphoral (things not necessary to salvation) is in this way a sort of training for the Christian life. We might say - to borrow a phrase from Benedict - that keeping the liturgical calendar is a school of the Lord’s service. We have, I think, a calendar in which nothing is too harsh, nothing too burdensome. Indeed, I don’t mean to write as though I think keeping the calendar is tremendously difficult. It isn’t, in my experience anyway. Indeed, I find it a joy! It’s fun to learn about various traditions throughout the past associated with various holidays, meaningful to be connected with Christians through history celebrating the same feasts on the same days. Yet even among the joy, it is a way of obedience: of taking the time to learn the church’s instructions, of molding one’s life around a pattern of living that one did not select in accordance with one’s individual desires and predilections. And in this way, it can help train us in obeying, form us in humility for the moments in which humility is harder, obedience a greater strain. The keeping of the calendar cannot replace the Decalogue, but it may just (by God’s grace!) help us keep it a little bit better.
And so, my friends, let us keep the feasts and fasts as we are able! And for those of you in holy orders, I would entreat you (as I also entreat myself!) to explore ways to make public worship available for all the major feasts of the church, including the post-Christmas feasts. In doing so, we give ourselves and our people not only the reminder of these saints’ witnesses to Christ, but also the opportunity to practice obedience in small things so that we may obey also in large things.