Marking time
Finding Home in Anglicanism (Part 7)
This morning, at our beloved church, near the beginning of the service, the Family and Children’s Minister called all the children to the front and greeted them with “Happy new year!” The children gave each other confused looks, and then she explained that church year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, and since that’s next Sunday, this week we can wish each other a happy new year. Their little minds were blown!
The church/liturgical year is one of the things I’ve been studying this year with all my reading (a couple weeks ago I met my 100 books a year challenge for 2025!), and I have so enjoyed learning about it. The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year by K. C. Ireton was excellent, but Sacred Seasons: A Family Guide to Center Your Year Around Jesus by Danielle Hitchen is my favorite as a church year newbie who is trying to learn about the history and significance while simultaneously figuring out how to celebrate and remember with her family.
Growing up in non-denominational evangelicalism with a mom who had been raised as a strict Catholic, and left in her twenties, meant that I had a good amount of secondary wariness of anything remotely “high church”, and that included the church calendar. Anything outside of celebrating Easter and Christmas seemed questionable to me for a long time, and eight or so years ago, when I broached the idea to Aaron of celebrating the four Sundays of Advent (using “Slow + Sacred Advent”, put together by a fellow homeschool mama), I felt like I was pushing the boundaries quite a bit.
Aaron was raised very conservatively, and for most of his years at home, his family didn’t celebrate Christmas because it was considered to be too worldly and culturally co-opted and based in consumerism. That ended up significantly delaying the formation of our own family’s Christmas traditions, but they slowly came together as the years went by. In the last several years, I felt a longing to make more of Advent and all it means, and last year, in 2024, was the first time I pursued that for myself. Thanks to some lovely recommendations from Sarah Clarkson, I walked through that Advent accompanied by poetry, with Haphazard by Starlight by Janet Morley and Waiting on the Word by Malcolm Guite. In retrospect, I probably should have just chosen one so I could focus more on that particular daily poem (Aaron and I will be reading Haphazard by Starlight together this year), but they still added so much beauty to those days and underscored the tender waiting.
Attending my first Ash Wednesday service, joining the Anglican church during Lent, and celebrating our first Holy Week, were hugely pivotal and spiritually formative for me. Continuing to observe the liturgical year at church has been an incredible way of regularly staying immersed in the story of Jesus, and ending this church year by singing “King of Kings” today for Christ the King Sunday was so jubilant! Yes, I’m late to the party because it’s been around for well over a millennium, but now I’m completely sold on the liturgical year, and I’m so excited for Advent.
For much of November, I’ve been planning what we’ll be doing for Advent and Christmastide (both as a family, and for myself individually), and I’m so looking forward to see how it shapes the season for us. Yet again, Sarah Clarkson’s recommendations have been an incredible resource, especially this recent post on her favorite Advent and Christmastide books. This coming church year, I’m also excited to work my way through Esau McCaulley’s Fullness of Time series, and the Advent: the Season of Hope book in that series has been so incredibly good!
May these coming weeks of waiting help us to remember what an indescribable gift that Incarnation was and continues to be.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
“Finding Home in Anglicanism” series
Part Four: “O God, make speed to save us”