Sacred Seasons

The colors of the seasons in the Christian Year are purple, white, red and green.  This art work shows the order of the year.

Welcome to Sacred Seasons where a group of Episcopalians will heed Hooker’s advice relating to the value of celebrating the seasons of the Christian Year: “Well to celebrate these religious and sacred days is to spend the flower of our time happily.  They are the splendor and outward dignity of our religion, forcible witnesses of ancient truth, provocations to the exercise of all piety, shadows of our endless felicity in heaven, on earth everlasting records and memorials, wherein they who cannot be drawn to hearken to what we teach, may, only by looking on what we do, in a manner read whatsoever we believe.”  Ecc. Polity, V.1xx., pp. 518, 519, Keble’s ed. Heortology, the study of the history of Christian Festivals, is a word left behind by the Christian community at large.  Nonetheless year after year members of liturgical churches do celebrate the seasons and festivals of the Christian year in some measure, large or small.  At a bare minimum, we may notice that the linen on the altar has changed from green to purple, but how much richer might we be for learning the meaning of the seasons, meditating upon their concepts, growing spiritually and, yes, even experiencing shadows of our endless felicity in heaven?  Endless felicity in heaven is a bliss without end.  In felicity’s shadow we just may find the Kingdom of Heaven beginning now.