Joan Chittister - The Liturgical Year: The Spiraling Adventure of the Spiritual Life - The Ancient Practices Series

PRAISE FOR THE LITURGICAL YEAR

Joan Chittisters latest book, The Liturgical Year, is a lyrical exposition of the feasts and seasons of the Christian year. While informed by contemporary scholarship, the book is devoid of the tedium of historical detail that often stalks discussion of the Christian calendar. This book offers a liturgical spirituality, an unfolding of the ebb and flow of the mysteries of Christ that in turn illuminate the ebb and flow of our own journey into God through the joys and sufferings, the gains and losses, the tedium and small triumphs that mark our lives. While other authors invite their readers to enter into the liturgical year, Chittister does just the opposite; she invites us to let the year enter into us, rumble around, shape our minds and hearts and, year after year, gradually transform us.

There are a few lines in the play A Thousand Clowns that Joan Chittisters book calls to mind. Murray, the lead character, tells us, Youve got to know what day it is. Youve got to own your days and name them or else the years go right by and none of them belongs to you. This lovely book, The Liturgical Year, gives us both wisdom and insight to name and claim our days.

Kathleen Hughes, RSCJ

This book deserves, and will delight, a wide readership of people interested in deepening their liturgical life and poking the holy haunts where God hangs out.

Leonard Sweet,
author of So Beautiful: Divine
Design for Life and the Church,
Drew University, George
Fox Evangelical Seminary

The versatile and inimitable Joan Chittister presents the church year as the spiritual adventure that it is, filled with dramatic events, dynamic characters, and vibrant emotions. She writes with passion and honesty about the sacredness of the liturgical seasons, the feast and fast days. Thanks to her insightful, creative, and inspiring perspective, you will see how the rhythms of the church year can teach your soul to dance once again.

Frederic and Mary Ann
Brussat, codirectors of
SpiritualityandPractice.com

Joan Chittister has turned a calendar into a retreat! Having been a monastic liturgist for over thirty-five years, I have long been convinced of the formative power of the liturgical year. In her creative, insightful, and pastoral explanation, Joan offers every Christian powerful access to the theology and spirituality of the passage of holy time, which makes up the Churchs year. Her ability to tell stories and incorporate global social awareness into the daily living of our days offers a fresh approach to our understanding of the ancient liturgical mysteries.

Cecilia Dwyer, OSB,
Saint Benedict Monastery,
Bristow, Virginia

The rich symbolic landscape of Christian traditions liturgical year is summarized here by one whose life gives witness to its liberating aspects and transformative power. Its seasonal rhythms remind us that the spirit of the living God in Jesus and in all creation is eternally present, rendering all life sacred, raising up saints among us, enkindling hope in these troublesome times.

Miriam Therese Winter
Medical Mission Sister,
author of Paradoxology:
Spirituality in a Quantum Universe; professor of liturgy,
worship, spirituality, and
feminist studies at Hartford
Seminary

THE LITURGICAL YEAR

joan chittister

2009 by Joan Chittister

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Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the NEW REVISED STANDARD VERSION of the Bible. 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. All rights reserved.

Scriptures marked NKJV are taken from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scriptures marked ESV are taken from THE ENGLISH STANDARD VERSION. 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers.

Scriptures marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.

Scriptures marked DRB are taken from the Douay-Rheims Bible. Public domain.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chittister, Joan.
The liturgical year / Joan Chittister.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-8499-0119-5 (hardcover) 1. Church year. I. Title.
BV30.C45 2009 263.9dc22

2009007912

Printed in the United States of America
09 10 11 12 13 WC 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to liturgists everywhere,
and in a special way
to my Benedictine Sisters
Marilyn Schauble and Charlotte Zalot,
whose commitment to liturgical education
and liturgical planning
both freshens an ancient faith
and deepens the soul of the church.

CONTENTS

IT IS NOT EASY TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE MULTIPLE consultations, discussions, models, and mentors that have been a lifetime in development in a subject like liturgical spirituality. After all, we grow from stage to stage, not in a straight line but in a circle, covering the same liturgical landscape over and over again as we go. The questions of who taught us what and when finally blur over time until eventually those concepts merge into one large, crazy quilt of ideas all within one border called the spiritual life.

On the other hand, nothing on earth can be simpler to remember and easier to signify than the people whose lives, over the years, were instrumental in bringing us to the point of understanding the central and significant issues of our own.

In my own case, a monastic life lived in the context of the liturgical year brings with it the memory of a plethora of mentors in the field, whole categories of people, whose insights live on in me. This book, my own spirituality of the liturgical year, the layers of values and understandings I bring to every feast and season of the year, have been marked by each of them.

There were early childhood teachers, of course, who mapped out devotions that, in the end, defined the the ological constructs of the year more clearly than any textbook ever could have done. They showed us manger scenes that taught us Christmas, for instance. They trained us in religious disciplines for Lent that taught us what it meant to develop self-control. They used Halloween to teach us the lives of the saints. They built holy days into the routine of our lives. They celebrated the great feasts of the church with special treats, colored vestments, and great displays of flowers and candles and incense that sweetened life with the sense of eternal mystery. Then, they lived the ordinariness of feria days with a stolidity of commitment that brooked no questions about the meaning of a life marked by both sorrow and joy. It was a parochial life lived under the daily influence of the church year, taught in the schools, followed in the home, expressed in the liturgies of the church.

Later, for those who went to a monastery as I did, formation directors deepened that work of a lifetime by simply making us aware of the daily ebb and flow of the seasons. We learned, as novices, to mark our breviaries, to read the daily liturgical calendar with precision. They schooled us to reflect on the readings of the day and the feasts of the time. Because of them we learned to breathe the spirit of the seasons.