Living the Liturgical Year: the Three P’s

Update: This is an excerpt from my speech I did at the Kansas City homeschool Conference in June.

Summary:

Three P’s: Purpose, Priorities, and a Simple Plan

Purpose: Keep focused on the reason to live the liturgical year: which is to unite with Church’s liturgy and deepen each family member’s spiritual life.

Priorities: Visualize the Church’s plan for the liturgical year. Don’t try to “do” every feast the same, but focus on the central point of the Liturgical year: the Paschal Mystery.

Plan: With Church and family calendars make an initial plan for the year.

The Three P’s

A second focus in living the liturgical year in your family would be applying the three p’s: Purpose, Priority and Plan. We need to understand the Purpose for living the liturgical year, establish Priorities, and Make a Simple Plan.

Maybe it’s just my family, but when I present something new for us to do, my husband’s first question is why? What is the purpose? (I think in a similar way, so we must be made for each other.) Keeping my eyes on the goals helps me keep a streamlined focus, especially when I am doing too much.

So why do we want to live the liturgical year?

1) Ultimate purpose is eternal salvation. We are working for sanctity for ourselves, our spouses and our children.

2) To enter more deeply into the Liturgy of the Church, having our domestic church united and praying together with Mother Church.

In contemplating the Liturgical Year, you have to go to the heart, and that is the Liturgy, which consists of the Mass, the Sacraments and the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours. From the Constitution on the Liturgy we read that “The liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; it is also the fount from which all her power flows.” (SC, 10)

The last purpose of living the liturgical year is that it

3) Aids each member of the family to develop and deepen his or her prayer life and relationship with Christ.

We need to help our children begin in their spiritual life, so that they can personally grow in faith and become saints. As Monsignor Hellriegel emphasized

“there is no surer and more secure path to a fuller life in Christ and the Church than the way of the Church’s year.

The next “P” is establishing priorities. I don’t mean only identifying personal priorities, but also understanding the Church’s priorities for the liturgical calendar and making it part of our own.

When viewing the liturgical year cycle, keep in mind it’s not flat like a pancake with every day on equal footing, but has it has peaks and valleys, a hierarchy of feasts.

The focal point of the Liturgical Year is the Paschal Mystery, or the redemptive work of Christ, including the Passion, Death and Resurrection. This Paschal Mystery is commemorated every Sunday. The Liturgical Year grew up around this weekly commemoration. We can say it’s a little Easter, but it’s not only recalling the resurrected Christ. Within each Sunday is a little Triduum. Vatican II reiterates “The Lord’s Day is the original feast day…a day of joy and of freedom from work…Sunday…is the foundation and kernel of the whole liturgical year.” (SC, no. 106).

The Church year is composed of two cycles. The cycle that takes precedence is the Temporal cycle or the “Proper of Time”, which celebrates the mystery of the Redemption. Examples would be the Advent season, Christmas, Epiphany, Baptism of Our Lord, Lent season, the Triduum, including Easter, Ordinary Time, etc. During the same time the Sanctoral cycle progresses. These are the fixed dates commemorating feasts of our Lord and Our Lady unrelated to the Temporal Cycle (like the feasts of Sacred Heart, Holy Trinity, Corpus Christi, Our Lady of Mount Carmel) and then all the saints’ days.

Because of the latest motu proprio, Summorum Pontificum, from Pope Benedict, some people follow the 1962 Calendar, sometimes known as the Traditional Calendar. The new calendar was reformed in 1969 to give more consistency and provide more focus on the Paschal Mystery. Whether you follow the new or traditional calendar or both, the precedence of the Temporal Cycle and the focus on Sundays and the Paschal Mystery applies to both calendars.

I follow the current calendar, so that is what I’m using for this speech. I want to again stress that I do NOT celebrate every feast day, nor do I celebrate each day in a similar manner. There is a hierarchy of feasts, first Easter and Sundays, then Solemnities, Feasts, Memorials and Optional Memorials. See “Table of Liturgical Days” (see Table of Liturgical Days) which shows the order of precedence for feasts and seasons in the calendar. For further understanding, I recommend reading the entire document “General Norms of the Liturgical Calendar. It is short and easy to read.

In celebrating the Liturgical Year in the home there is a temptation to celebrate every single feast day on the calendar, or the majority of them. I want to show how limiting your family’s celebrations there are still remain many days for feasting. (PowerPoint slides to illustrate the year not included here.)

1) If you were to look at all the feasts of the year, the calendar is quite covered. But if we apply the order of precedence,

2) The liturgical seasons: Advent, Christmas, Ordinary Time, and Easter. The Red is the Triduum and this red is Pentecost.

3) Next we highlight Sundays with the Seasons.

4) Calendar with the Liturgical seasons and solemnities. Some Solemnities are automatically on Sunday. There are only 17 Solemnities, 9 Temporal, 8 Sanctoral

5) Next add the 26 feasts of the year. This year had quite a few that fell on Sunday, so some feasts were “bumped” because Sunday has precedence. 26 Feasts in total; Temporal feasts have 4 Life of the Lord, 3 Marian (2 overlap): Sanctoral Feasts: 11 apostles, 2 evangelists, 3 First Martyrs (Laurence, Holy Innocents, Stephen), 2 Feasts of Our Lord that are non-temporal, Archangels; All Souls; St. John Lateran

6) Then the memorials and optional Memorials – this doesn’t even include the ones that aren’t on the General Roman Calendar – particular calendars and Roman Martyrology.

Visually looking at the different feasts made me realize that even choosing to focus on the liturgical seasons, the Sundays, the Solemnities, most of the feasts – that will keep our family quite busy. Streamlining will help shift the focus on Christ’s life and will make our home reflect more the Church’s focus of her liturgical year.

Keeping in mind the purpose and priorities of the Church year, make an initial Plan for the year. This is a general overview or plan, you won’t need all the details. It’s mainly to put on your radar what you want to cover in the upcoming year. When you do this is up to you – perhaps when you are planning your school year, or the beginning of the Church Year in Advent or even before the beginning of the calendar year.

1) Enter family dates: (birthdays, anniversaries, death, sacraments)

2) Circle feast days that are important to your family: solemnities, feasts, personal favorites (St. Joseph and St. Therese the Little Flower are patrons of our family); namedays (like St. Gregory the Great, St. Nicholas, Maria Goretti is my confirmation saint), patron saints (my husband is CPA, so we honor St. Matthew as his patron.), favorite saints (in our house, we like the soldier saints – so the days for St. George, St. Martin, St. Michael these are special days for my boys.)

3) Interests or focal points for upcoming year: (First Communion preparation; ending the year of St. Paul next year is the Year of the Priest, concentrate on the apostles one year, maybe a Marian year, teaching virtues, using different saints to illustrate, maybe all red-headed saints. Saints of the New Testament; founders of religious orders )

4) What areas you want to learn or do?

• Some Gregorian chant
• Mary Garden/biblical plants/nature study with Liturgical year
• Art study through the liturgical year (something I want to do)
• Memorization of biblical passages; Bible history
• Focus on certain foods breads from around the world related to feast days
• Certain countries or historical periods, medieval area,

5) How do you want to Celebrate?

• Since Mass is the highest form of Liturgy, the source and summit of all graces, going to Mass would be the highest form of celebrating a feast day. We try to go to mass for all the solemnities of the year (17), then we pray for family and friends and godchildren by going to Mass for any birthdays, namedays, wedding and death anniversaries. I have a large family, so that alone keeps us pretty busy. You should never have the attitude of “We didn’t do anything for the feast day. We only went to Mass.” On the contrary, you did the best way possible of celebrating!! And for my family right now, it is very difficult to get to Mass during the week. So in that sense, it’s a big deal to go to Mass for these feast and family days.
• Show levels of feast days within family celebrations:

  1) Seasons—tablecloths and display, calendar countdowns in Advent and Lent, candles at dinner, fireplace Mantle displays.

  2) Sundays—special dinner, day of rest, family time,

  Have some visual statements that remind people this day is set aside – we wear Sunday Mass clothes, perhaps staying in Mass clothes the whole day (which isn’t practical for an active 5 year old boy). Some other families use the good china for Sunday dinners.

  3) Solemnity—Mass, special meal, dessert, craft, no schoolwork, fun outing with other families, say extra prayers (rosary).

  4) Feast—depends on the feast day, do a little less than solemnity, usually still a school day.

  5) Memorials and Optional Memorials—depending on saint, we check the liturgical calendar wheel and the saint book for the saint of the day. If my son is interested in learning more about the saint, we discuss or find further reading. Regardless, we always add the saint of the day to night prayers. Today is Saint Norbert, so we add an invocation to him: St. Norbert, pray for us. Sometimes we chant it. If it is a nameday or patron saint, we all wish that person a happy feast day, and they might have a little dessert or a special treat.

We have 5 solemnities in the month of June, 3 that do not fall on Sunday: the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Birth of John the Baptist, and Saints Peter and Paul. In my family, we try to attend Mass on every solemnity, even the ones that are not holydays of obligation. Afterwards go out to breakfast. I am blessed to have my parents and many siblings live nearby, so many times we go out to celebrate feast days, either breakfast or dinner, sometimes both for big days. Another friend of mine celebrates the higher feast days and Sundays by Mass and then Dunkin Donuts coffee for her and doughnuts for the boys.