All Christians from all traditions are familiar with the way in which the truths of the gospel must be transposed into the sequence under which we mortals live, namely, time.

The Resurrection for example, occurred once in history. We embrace this, and we live in the light of it, and Saint Paul teaches us that it is only insofar as this external event becomes a living, daily, inner principle for us that we can be said to have any new life at all. “I am crucified with Christ,” Paul wrote, “nevertheless I live; If ye then be risen with Christ. . .; walk in newness of life.”[28] All Christians are familiar with this teaching, and the theme formed the central motif of all evangelical teaching on the “deeper life” as I was growing up.

This truth, which is both a once-for-all event in history and a daily inner principle, also finds itself marked perpetually in the sequence of passing time. “The Lord’s Day” is the weekly feast of the Resurrection, in all of Christendom, even in those sectors that disavow all observance of days. This one exception must be made by these Christians, since the New Testament makes it clear that the day was thus kept.

There is a profound mystery at work here, touching on the threefold sense in which the gospel is true for Christian believers. Everything recorded in the Gospels happened once in actual history; but these events must be translated by the Holy Ghost into the Christian’s own life (Christ must be born in us; we must be circumcised in the inner man; we must be crucified with Him and raised with Him and ascend with Him); and, thirdly, we must perpetually keep coming back in our minds to these events, marking and remembering them, and meditating on them.

We mortals live by hours, days, and weeks, so this marking and remembering must take on some actual, temporal form for us, whether that means we put our minds to these topics whenever the whim takes us or when our routine Bible reading brings us across them, or according to some system which brings us around to them regularly. It is not enough to suppose that having assented once upon a time to a doctrine is sufficient. Every Christian knows that this lofty estimate of our own powers far overshoots the reality of actual life. We need to keep coming back around and putting our minds to the Nativity, the Resurrection, and so forth.

All Christian churches at least theoretically acknowledge that the “Sunday worship service” is a commemoration of the Resurrection, although the notion is somewhat blurred in evangelicalism where worship has taken on a generalized aspect. The liturgical churches, on the other hand, explicitly and avowedly celebrate the Resurrection weekly. Almost the whole Church, furthermore, carries this one step further and agrees that it is not a bad thing to remember two great gospel events, the Nativity and the Resurrection, in a special way once each year. No one knows much about the actual dates in the calendar year when Christ was born and when He rose, but few make an issue of it. The point for all Christians is that on such and such a day the Church marks and celebrates these great events of our salvation.

This is the principle underlying the so-called Christian year, or liturgical year. More than two events occurred in the gospel drama, says the ancient Church. There is a whole sequence of mysterious and marvelous events that the Lord passed through in His life here on earth, each one of which is most glorious in its significance and most salutary for us to think on.

Hence, the liturgical year is nothing more (and nothing less) than the Church’s “walking through” the gospel with the Lord. Since it is a plain feet of our humanness that we are rhythmic creatures who must keep coming back to things that are always true, it is especially good for us to do this in the Church. We do it in our natural lives: someone is born and is with us, day after day, year after year, but once a year we mark this ever-present fact. We marry and take up daily life with spouses year after year, but once a year we find that it is a good thing to mark this ever-present fact, not because it is less true on other days but because we are the sort of creature that is helped and filled with joy when the routines and ever-present facts are set apart, gilded, and held up for our contemplation and celebration.

Somehow the rhythmic, ceremonial return to the ever-present fact helps us. It enriches our apprehension of the thing; whereas, left to our own capacity to keep things alive in our minds, we might find that they have sunk into a kind of autumnal dimness. They need to be revivified, not because they dwindle in significance between times, but because we dwindle in our capacity to stay alive to them.

There would lie the natural principle behind the liturgical year. Saint Paul forbids two things, however. First, we are not allowed to quarrel with fellow-Christians about the topic, since consciences differ and to one man setting a day aside looks like paganism whereas to another it is a great help. Second, we must not be legalistic or superstitious about observance. The commemorated day itself is not magic. Keeping Easter is not going to raise us with Christ, and missing the day is not going to rob us of the fruits of His Resurrection. The whole calendar of gospel events was observed with the greatest amplitude and joy at The Church of St. Mary the Virgin. Feast after feast came and went during the course of a year, and one felt that one was walking very close to this great drama of Redemption. There was a perpetual sense of joy and anticipation, as though to say, “Now we are coming to Advent!” or “Now comes the Transfiguration!”

The liturgical year begins with the season of Advent, which comprises the four Sundays leading up to Christmas. The word advent means simply “a coming to,” and in the case of the Church year it refers to both of Christ’s comings to us, in His humility at His birth and in His glory at the end of time. Hence, it is a season of penitence and self-examination. This strikes newcomers as odd. Here we are approaching Christmas and this is a penitential season? How bleak.

A small pause will open to us something infinitely more profound than the tingle of joy we feel when we anticipate Christmas with all of its merrymaking. The Lord is coming! Who of us will not want to be granted some time to make his heart ready? Who of us will deny that this making ready will involve the most earnest self-examination? Raise the significance of the whole thing by including the final coming of Christ as judge at the trump of doom, and it becomes apparent why the Church has designated Advent as a season of self-examination and penitence.

To me as an evangelical the word penitence struck a false note at first. I visualized flagellantes and penitencios trudging through the streets of Madrid all hooded and chained and carrying crosses, in dread efforts to expiate their sins. I had always wanted to hail them with “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus!”[29] But that darkness and fear is not the note struck by the word penitence in this context. Rather, Christians are encouraged to give sober thought to their lives, probing heart and motives, words and actions, attitudes and habits, in the spirit of Saint Paul’s injunctions in Romans 13; 11-12: “. . . now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light.”

To a Christian unfamiliar with this sort of thing, the whole of Advent might look like a charade. The Lord is not coming on December 25, it might be objected, any more than He is coming one minute from now. Isn’t this merely play-acting?

Once more, the answer is to be found in the profoundest mysteries of our humanness. Of course the Lord is here. Of course one needs to keep moment-by-moment account of one’s heart, so to speak. But as we have seen in the case of birth, marriage, and death, somehow ceremonializing what is true does have the effect of assisting us. We are not seraphim, who, we are told, can gaze unblinkingly at reality all the time. We have to come at it by fits and starts. To enact something by an act of will does turn out to have its effect in our hearts. If the principle were false, then the early Christians would have been mistaken to have gathered on Sundays to mark the Resurrection. Somehow the weekly ceremony brought home to them what they believed hourly and daily.

The days of Advent are almost inexpressibly powerful. Some of the best hymns of the Christian year occur then. “Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” place us in imagination alongside all those who for so many centuries waited in the dimness for this great light. “On Jordan’s banks the Baptist’s cry / Announces that the Lord is nigh”—what thrill of anticipation fills this hymn. My own favorite, I believe, is “Hark, a thrilling voice is sounding, / Christ is nigh it seems to say.”

The intensity of joy borne in these hymns is unimaginable to one who has never moved through this season. One cannot omit “Lo, He Comes with Clouds Descending,” with its overwhelming evocation of “Those dear tokens of his passion / Still his dazzling body bears . . . Thousand, thousand saints attending / Swell the triumph of his train: / Alleluia!”

The Nativity makes all good Christian men rejoice. Here again, there is a hymnology that far exceeds the bounds of the half-dozen popular carols to which much American Christianity has confined itself, although the mystery of this birth is caught exquisitely, to be sure, in the familiar words of Adeste, Fideles, and “How silently, how silently, / The wondrous gift is given! / . . . No ear may hear His coming . . . O Come to us, abide with us, / Our Lord Emmanuel!” The ancient Nativity hymn “Of the Father’s Love Begotten” takes us all the way to the cavernous mysteries of heaven where the Trinity dwells surrounded by the celestial hosts.

The Feast of the Holy Innocents follows immediately, and ironically, on the heels of Christmas, on December 28. The Church is not delicate about these things, and insofar as this horror stemmed from the Nativity we had better put our minds to what it all might mean. Why should we recall this slaughter and the bloody Herod? Because, says the Church, here as at the cross, we find the point at which the joy of heaven and the evil of hell meet on our earth. Innocent babes killed by the score just when the Savior arrives? What sort of a drama is this? We are driven beyond the sentimentalism that wishes to hear nothing at all but the jingling of bells to the sense in which the flesh of this new infant will itself gather up all the suffering and evil ever perpetrated and will bear it all right on through to Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter, and the Ascension.

January 1 is not primarily New Year’s Day for the Church. Rather, it is the Feast of the Circumcision, or, as it is often called, of the Holy Name, since it was technically at circumcision that a Jewish child received his name. Certainly, at least two things present themselves for our contemplation on this feast. First, here is the first wound received by the pure flesh of the incarnate God in His identification with us under the Law. And second, here is the name of Jesus. It is the holy name. In it lies our salvation.

In my own evangelical tradition we were taught to love Jesus. We invited Jesus into our hearts. We had His name on our lips all the time. We pressed it on unbelievers, asking them to accept it. We knew Him, we said. We were fervently devoted to Jesus, and rightly so.

But never once in my life had I thought of “The Holy Name,” much less of any great feast day of the Church in which we might all ponder the mystery of that name. Now I encountered it in the rhythm of the Church year, as a discipline, and my vision was enlarged. A fifteenth-century Latin hymn, appropriate for this day, expresses what we might want to say:

     To the Name of our salvation
     Laud and honor let us pay,
     Which for many a generation
     Hid in God’s foreknowledge lay;
     But with holy exultation
     We may sing aloud today.
     Therefore we, in love adoring,
     This most blessed Name revere,
     Holy Jesus, Thee imploring
     So to write it in us here
     That hereafter, heavenward soaring,
     We may sing with angels there.[30]

The collect in the Roman Missal for this day puts the matter simply: “Lord, You have appointed Your only-begotten Son to be the Saviour of mankind and given Him the name of Jesus; grant in Your goodness that we who venerate His holy Name on earth may also enjoy the sight of Him in heaven.”[31]

The Holy Name is followed by the Epiphany on January 6, which recalls the visit of the magi. In the church of my childhood we had always put the camels and the kings right in the manger scene with the shepherds, although we knew that the two groups hadn’t arrived all at once. But the Epiphany carries great joy for all believers who are not Jews, and the Orthodox church celebrates this day with more festivity than it does Christmas, since the Epiphany represents the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.

All of Saint Paul’s preaching about our being “grafted” into the tree comes rushing in. The whole Old Testament suddenly opens up for us all. That which was hidden in the tiny tribe of Israel suddenly floods the world. This Jewish infant is manifest as the world’s salvation! A great hymn catches this joy:

     Songs of thankfulness and praise,
     Jesus, Lord, to Thee we raise,
     Manifested by the star
     To the sages from afar;
     Branch of royal David’s stem
     In Thy birth at Bethlehem;
     Anthems be to Thee addrest
     God in man made manifest.[32]

The Anglican collect for this day reads thus: “O God, who by the leading of a star didst manifest thy only-begotten Son to the Gentiles; Mercifully grant that we, who know thee now by faith, may after this life have the fruition of thy glorious Godhead.”

After the Epiphany comes the Presentation of Christ in the temple, on February 2. This feast day is sometimes called the Purification of the Blessed Virgin, and sometimes Candlemas. At this feast we are brought to ponder what it all might mean that the Son of God must tread through all the steps required by the Law. The feast is crowned with Simeon’s hymn, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.”

What is the nature of that purity of heart that was able to see salvation in this child; whereas, the Pharisees, looking at the same child presently, could see only threat and imposture? The candles lighted on this day represent the entrance of Christ, the true Light, into the temple.

The fifth collect in the Roman Missal for this day makes the following petition:

Lord Jesus Christ, who appeared this day among men in the substance of our flesh, presented in the temple by Your parents whom the venerable old man Simeon, enlightened by the rays of Your Spirit, recognized and received and blessed, mercifully grant that we, enlightened and taught by the grace of the same Holy Spirit, may truly acknowledge You and faithfully love You, who live and reign world without end.

Presently Lent arrives. This is the forty days leading up to Easter, which also recall the forty days of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. There is a telescoping of things here, since His temptation did not in actual fact immediately precede His Passion, but “liturgical time” is such that spiritual significance may override chronological exactness.

Lent, like Advent, is a time of penitence. Here we identify ourselves with the Lord’s fast and ordeal in the wilderness, which He bore for us.

This raises a point worth noting in passing. There are some varieties of Protestant theology and spirituality that so stress “the finished work of Christ” and the fact that He accomplished everything, that they leave no room at all for any participation on our part. Such participation, encouraged by the ancient Church, does not mean that we mortals claim any of the merit that attaches to Christ’s work, much less that we can by one thousandth particle add to His work. Nevertheless, the gospel teaches us that Christians are more than mere followers of Christ. We are His Body and are drawn, somehow, into His own sufferings. We are even “crucified” with Him.

My own tradition stressed this, but it was taught as a metaphor that meant only the putting to death of sin in our members. There was very little said about the sense in which Christ draws His Body into His very self-giving for the life of the world and makes them part of this mystery. Saint Paul uses extravagant language about his own filling up “that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ.”[33] We had succinct enough explanations as to what he might have meant here, but these explanations allowed no room for any notion of our participating in Christ’s offering. This was looked upon as heresy, violating the doctrine of grace in which all is done by God and nothing by us. We are recipients only. That the gracious donation of salvation by God could in any manner include His making us a part of it all, as He made the Virgin Mary an actual part of the process, and as Saint Paul seems to teach, was not the note struck.

The ancient Church, in its observance of Lent, once more asks us to move through the gospel with Christ Himself. The most obvious mark of Lent to a newcomer is the matter of fasting. I had known about this practice all my life. My Catholic playmates would give up chocolates or Coke or ice cream for Lent. I also knew that a few devout people in my own tradition of evangelicalism practiced fasting now and again for special purposes—a time of especially concentrated prayer, for example.

I myself thought of Lenten fasting and also of the old Catholic practice of refusing meat on Fridays as being legalistic, and perhaps even heretical, since it seemed to entail some notion of accruing merit. Since Christ had done all, why should we flagellate ourselves this way? Was it not a return to the weak and beggarly elements condemned by Saint Paul? Was it not to be guilty of the very thing that the apostle had assailed the Galatian Christians for?

I discovered that the ancient Church teaches just what the New Testament teaches on the point, namely, that fasting is a salutary thing for us to undertake. Jesus fasted and assumed that His followers would. “When ye fast,”[34] He said, not “if.” Saint Paul both practiced it and taught it. It seems to constitute a reminder to us that our appetites are not all and that man shall not live by bread alone. Furthermore, if we may believe the universal testimony of Christians who do practice it, it also clarifies our spiritual vision somehow. Lastly, it is a token of the Christian’s renunciation of the world. There is no thing that a Christian will insist he must have at all costs. Fasting supplies an elementary lesson here.

Lent asks us to ponder Christ’s self-denial for us in the wilderness. It draws us near to the mystery of Christ’s bearing temptation for us in His flesh, and of how in this Second Adam our flesh, which failed in Adam, now triumphs.

Lent also leads us slowly toward that most holy and dread of all events, the Passion of Christ. What Christian will want to arrive at Holy Week with his heart unexamined, full of foolishness, levity, and egoism? To those for whom any special observances hint of legalism or superstition one can only bear witness that the solemn sequence of Lent turns out to be something very different from one’s private attempts at meditating on the Passion. To move through the disciplines in company with millions and millions of other believers all over the world is a profoundly instructive thing.

Lent begins with Ash Wednesday. The first time ashes were imposed on my forehead, I found a cacophony of voices inside me: “Come! Now you have betrayed your background! This is straight back to the Dark Ages. Fancy Saint Paul’s doing this!”

I knew it was not so when the priest came along with the little pot of damp ashes and with his thumb smudged my forehead—my forehead, the very frontal and crown of my dignity as a human being!—and said, “Remember, O man, that dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.”

I knew it was true. I would return to dust, like all men, but never before had mortality come home to me in this way. Oh, I had believed it spiritually. But surely we need not dramatize it this way. . . .

Perhaps we should, says the Church. Perhaps it is good for our souls’ health to recall that our salvation, far from papering over the grave, leads us through it and raises our very mortality to glory. We, like all men, must die. I felt the strongest inclination to wave the priest past as he approached me in the line of people kneeling at the rail. Not me—not me—like Agag coming forth delicately, hoping that the bitterness of death was past. Yes, you. Remember, O man. . . .

I was beginning to learn that when we encounter some “spiritual” truth in our bodies, it is brought home to us. We can meditate on suffering all day long, for example, but let us have migraines, and we know something we could not have known through merely mulling over the doctrine of suffering. We can meditate on love all day long, but let us kiss the one we long for, and we know immediately something we could not have known if we had thought about love for a thousand years. Nay—our very salvation came to us in the body of the incarnate God. “O generous love! that He who smote / In Man for man the foe, / The double agony in Man / For man should undergo,” says Cardinal Newman’s hymn.[35] The ashes effected something in me more than a smudge on my forehead. I had felt, if only for a moment, the thing that I wished most earnestly to be exempted from: death.

Lent proceeds to Palm Sunday, which along with Christmas and Easter is observed in many churches that do not otherwise follow the liturgical year. Here we see the “enactment” principle at work quite vividly. Palms are given to the people as a sign that we wish to be included among those who welcome the Lord as He comes into the Holy City.

Holy Week takes us through the events of this last week of the Lord’s ministry. In many churches a service, which is not strictly liturgical, occurs on Wednesday night, and is called Tenebrae, darkness. It anticipates the darkness that is about to come down over the Lord and, indeed, over the whole earth in the events of the Passion, especially the Lord’s descent into Hades. Candles are extinguished one by one as the Scriptures are read, until finally Psalm 51 is recited in complete blackness.

On Thursday of Holy Week the Last Supper is commemorated. The word Maundy which is given to this day, is thought to be derived from the Anglo-Saxon corruption of the Latin word mandatum, commandment, since it was at this supper that Jesus gave His new commandment, “that ye love one another as I have loved you.”[36] This day actually marks the origin of the Eucharist, but since the day itself is so solemn, the Western Church eventually designated a day following Pentecost called Corpus Christi (the Body of Christ) on which thanks are offered for this gift.

At the liturgy on Maundy Thursday there occurs the washing of feet. In monasteries the abbot or prior himself kneels and washes the feet of the brothers. At the end of the liturgy the Sacrament is taken in procession from the high altar and deposited in a tabernacle on an “altar of repose” where vigil is kept. The whole rite brings home to us the disciples’ sadness at the Lord’s being taken away from them and what it is like for faith to attempt to remain true when apparently all is lost. Evangelicalism taught me to take these gospel events most seriously; the liturgical enactment of them brought them home to me. Centuries of Christian wisdom and practice were here to direct and give shape to my weak and helter-skelter resources of self-discipline and concentration.

On Good Friday no actual liturgy is celebrated. Various rites occur, including what is known as the “Mass of the Pre-sanctified,” in which bread is used that has been previously consecrated.

At St. Mary’s, as in many churches, the rite is somber to the point of being unbearable. At the beginning of the rite, the clergy enter, garbed only in white albs; no Eucharistic vestments are worn. As they reach the steps to the altar, they prostrate themselves at full length on the floor, face down. What other posture will answer to the mystery of this day?

During the solemnities a large wooden cross is brought to the steps of the altar and the people come, one by one, genuflecting three times en route to the cross, and then kiss its foot. It is very vivid and very physical. What is being enacted is what all believers cherish most earnestly, namely, that in this “sweetest wood and sweetest iron” lies our souls’ salvation and that no love we can show will suffice. “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and “Beneath the Cross of Jesus,” and “In the Cross of Christ I Glory,” I had sung all my life, but I had never before done anything other than try my best to think about the cross. Here I was obliged to carry these sentiments into actual physical gestures. The act not only expresses something real, it gives force and clarity to it.

On Holy Saturday in most churches no rites occur until the end of the day when the highest feast of the Christian year is celebrated. It is the ancient Paschal Vigil, leading up to the First Mass of Easter.

It is a rite that seems to go back to the earliest years of the Church, perhaps even to years when the apostles were still alive. Toward the end of the day (afternoon, evening, very late evening, or, in some churches, just before dawn on Easter morning itself) the Christians assemble in the darkened church. The procession of clergy, servers, and choir assembles at the rear of the church, in darkness. Then fire is struck, from which the Paschal Candle is lighted. This is an immense candle, sometimes as tall as a man and several inches in diameter. There are affixed to the side of this candle five grains of incense, representing the five wounds of Christ. Then the deacon moves into the dark aisle with this single, flickering light. The procession follows him. Presently he stops. “The light of Christ!” he sings, and all the people respond singing, “Thanks be to God!” Again he proceeds, and again he stops. “The light of Christ!” this time on a higher note. “Thanks be to God!” we sing. Yet a third time it happens, on a higher note still. Then, from that candle tapers are lighted, and the flame is passed to all the people, who have been given unlighted candles.

Here is the church, glimmering now with this light from candles that are themselves almost perfect symbols of what Christ is, since a candle’s light comes from its own self-giving.

Presently the deacon sings the Exsultet:

Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels,
and let your trumpets shout Salvation
for the victory of our mighty King.
Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth,
bright with a glorious splendor,
for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.
Rejoice and be glad now, Mother Church,
and let your holy courts, in radiant light,
resound with the praises of your people.
All you who stand near this marvelous and holy flame,
pray with me to God the Almighty
for the Grace to sing the worthy praise of this great light.

Scripture readings follow, tracing the history of Redemption: the Spirit of God moving on the face of the waters, Noah, the Red Sea, and other milestones leading to Christ.

Eventually comes the most blissful moment of all. Alone the priest sings, “Glory be to God on high!” Suddenly all the lights in the church blaze on, bells are jangled merrily by the servers, the organ thunders out its triumph, and Easter has begun! He is risen! He is risen! The First Mass of Easter!

The hymns for Easter are among the richest in the Church’s treasury. “At the Lamb’s high feast we sing / Praise to our victorious King. . . / Where the Paschal blood is poured, / Death’s dark angel sheathes his sword. . . / Mighty victim from the sky, / Hell’s fierce powers beneath thee lie. . .”[37] And Saint John Damascene’s hymn, which hails “the queen of seasons, bright / With
the day of splendor, / With the royal feast of feasts. . . ”[38]

I grew up in a household and a tradition that loved the Resurrection of the Lord. Evangelicals felt that they were almost alone in defending the doctrine against the modernists and unbelievers. But here was the Church, celebrating this event with an amplitude of joy that finally seemed not only to answer to what I had loved and believed all along, but unfurl it for me. If we could blow horns at New Year’s and wave flags on July 4 and have a picnic on Labor Day, why—oh why—were we denied celebration, ceremony, hilarity, and an extravagance of pageantry on this feast, next to which these mere national holidays were literally nothing—nothing at all? What religion was it that said to us, “No. Sit still. Or stand and sing, ‘Up from the grave He arose.’ But your main job is to think about the event and hear a sermon about it. Don’t do anything.”

I have often thought, in the years since those days at St. Mary’s, “Oh, my own crowd, the wonderful evangelicals, with their love for the gospel and their zeal for God—how they would leap for joy if ever they returned to the ancient Church and thronged in by their hundreds and thousands, singing, praising, and bursting with pure joy at the discovery of the liturgy!”

Forty days after Easter comes the Ascension, and then Pentecost, the birthday of the Church. The Sunday after Pentecost is one of the rare Sundays in the year when a doctrine as opposed to an event is celebrated. It is the Feast of the Holy Trinity. Then comes the very long “season of Pentecost” with as many as twenty-four weeks passing before Advent arrives again and the Christian year starts over.

There are other feasts of the Christian year, of course. In one sense the first should be the Annunciation, on March 25 (nine months before the Nativity), since this is where the earthly part of our Lord’s life really started. This is a great feast. There is the Transfiguration on August 6. There is a number of feasts of the Virgin, since her life is the human life most intimately bound up in the mystery of Redemption.

Then there are the saints’ days. When I first came upon this practice, I thought perhaps it was a bad thing, since honor would be somewhat deflected from God alone if we set aside days to remember mere mortals like Paul, Peter, John, and Luke. But in the roster of saints we glimpse the court of heaven.

The title “saint” applies to all believers, of course, but in ancient usage it came to be applied to those who by virtue of being apostles, or martyrs, or very great teachers, or who by exhibiting some notable holiness of life were thought to be worthy of emulation and honor, just as in the secular calendar we honor men like Martin Luther King or Simon Bolivar.

On the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels, the Church gives thanks for these great heavenly protectors whose ministry in our behalf we know so little about but who do seem, if we may believe the Bible, to be standing between us and infernal powers. At the Feast of All Saints, the Church remembers and gives thanks for all the faithful who have gone before us. One must remember that the saints are never worshiped. They are honored, and in some traditions their prayers are sought, not because Christ’s intercessions in our behalf are not sufficient, but because He has made His whole Church one with His intercessory ministry, so that, just as we ask one another here below for prayers, so we call upon those who have gone ahead of us and who are more than ever part of this priestly Body of Christ.

Thus, as the letter to the Hebrews reminds us, we are surrounded with a great and awesome cloud of witnesses, men and women of whom the world was not worthy. Why, why will we most gladly set days aside to honor the fathers of our nation—Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson—but draw back in dismay from giving honor to the Fathers of our Faith? Believing what they taught is fine, but let us press on to the fullness of faith and give honor to whom honor is due. Let us once again build time around that which is eternal, Christ and His kingdom, and not merely around that which is passing away.