Category Archives: Holy Days

Advent — December 1-24, 2023

Holy Days

Bible connection

For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good. — Titus 2:11-14

All about Advent

Advent begins the liturgical year, which got  full head of steam going after Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) basically took over the remnants of Roman Empire power and organized life around the church. It begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas. The word means “a coming,” specifically the coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. It looks to the prophets who saw the Messiah coming, to John the Baptist, the last of those heralds, who witnessed to his coming, to the witnesses of the birth of Jesus, and to the hope of the Lord’s return on the last day. It develops our hope and our capacity to wait. It also helps us see all the ways the Lord has come to us day by day and the transformation Jesus brings moment by moment.

Protestants have issues with empty rituals, like Advent has become for many. By the 1500’s a lot of Jesus followers were fed up with Catholic and Orthodox folks bickering about the right way to fold an altar cloth or some such nonsense. Actually, they objected to the “altar” itself, since it had become a replica of the Old Testament temple and Jesus fulfilled and transcended the Temple. The Lord’s presence makes the church, the people, the temple of the Holy Spirit, Paul says. So empty rituals are a problem. Many abandoned disciplines like Advent.

Nevertheless, a ritual season, like Advent has a lot of great things going for it. If those things become empty, coercive, or corrupted, then it is not so good. But during Advent, let’s not throw the baby Jesus out with the dirty bathwater of church history.

Rituals are not inherently wrong. Empty ritual is wrong, as is any ritual that replaces, obscures, or detracts from having a vibrant, Spirit to spirit relationship with Jesus. Are rituals commanded in the church? No, not really. Baptism and communion, certainly come close. But God is not looking to see if we have completed the right observances; God sees the heart. She seeks those who worship Him “in the Spirit and in truth” (John 4:24). Rituals can be beneficial, but externalized, intellectualized, rote rites should never replace inner devotion and receptive discernment.

Northern Hemisphere: the winter moving from darkness into light.

Sacred spaces created by ritual

All that being said, Advent has hundreds of years of history, prayer and practice that makes it a special time of the Christian year. It is one of those “sacred spaces” that are created by repetition.

Francis Weller writes:

“We are creatures of ritual. We have been using rituals for tens of thousands of years. Ancient burial sites include careful placement of artifacts with the dead, such as bones carved and covered with ochre, pieces of flint for the hunt in the next world, food, and ornamented beads. In fact, grief for the loss of a loved one may have elicited our first ritual actions. There is something about ritual that resonates deep in the bone. It is a ‘language older than word,’ relying not so much on speech as on gestures, rhythms, movements and emotion. In this sense, ritual addresses something far more primal than language.”

Rituals (like spiritual disciplines, worship events, and seasons of fasting or prayer) are acts done with emotion and intention which help an individual or group connect with the Spirit in the context of faith, hope and love for the purposes of healing and transformation. Ritual is a means for our personal and collective voices to express our longing and creatively explore the unseen dimensions of life. They lead us beyond our conscious, everyday experiences into the realms of spiritual awareness and connection with the image of God in each of us and in all creation. Rituals create “thin places” where heaven and earth kiss.

During Advent meetings and on Christmas Eve, we create sacred places where we are enabled to release our unspoken hope and unacknowledged sorrow. The whole season of waiting for the blessed hope with the prophets, with John the Baptist, with Mary and Joseph, with the shepherds and magi, and with everyone in the story is a safe place for our deeper selves to feel our sorrows, hope, and see ourselves being seen and loved by God-with-us.

Peter Shaffer, author of the 1973 play Equus, says, “Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship? … without worship you shrink, it’s as brutal as that.” 

Participating in an alive Advent might be one of the most alternative things we can do.

More

Resources from the Ignatians

A perky website that tells you everything: calendars, readings, family rituals, wreaths, you name it.

Why is everything red and green for the season? It is not because of the liturgical colors, but mainly because if you-know-who.

The Advent pilgrimage: Five things to try (by Rod).

These four movements will help you “let love in” during Advent (by Rod).

Instructions from the Lutherans:

Another Video about the origins and history of Advent.

Advent begins the liturgical year. Here are some guides to the schedule: 1) Roman Catholic, 2) Anglican 3) TextWeek is full of resources.

What do we do with this?

Today, in the absence of communal rituals that hold and sustain our psychic lives, we often unconsciously fall into ritualized behaviors (nightly TV, Friday night at the bar, Eagles/Phillies games, videogame obsessions, etc.). These patterns, however, do not carry what is required to make them soul-nourishing practices. In the end we will either participate in ritual deliberately, which binds us to soul, community, nature and what is sacred, or we will be reduced to repetitive patterns of addiction, compulsion, or routines lacking in artistry and renewal. 

Check to see if you have an Advent replacement going. The resistance you feel to the discipline season may be more about how locked up you are than about how stupid the season is.

Thanksgiving Day — November 28, 2024

Holy Days

15 Thank You Prayers to Give Thanks to God and the Lord Jesus Christ

Bible connection

O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,
    for his steadfast love endures forever.

Say also,

“Save us, O God of our salvation,
    and gather and rescue us from among the nations,
that we may give thanks to your holy name
    and glory in your praise. — 1 Chronicles 16:34-5

All about Thanksgiving Day

Without gratitude, we would not get very far along our spiritual journey, would we? It is one of the nicest things the U.S. government does for its citizens when it offers a federal holiday in the Fall to pause, give thanks, and celebrate what we have been given.

George Washington made the first proclamation of Thanksgiving Day in 1789. It was celebrated on various dates from state to state until Abraham Lincoln synced them in 1863. In 1942 Congress took the timing out of the president’s hands and permanently parked Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November.

Canada, as well as several other nations, have a holiday to give thanks around the traditional time of the harvest on different days. All around the world, people celebrate with the U.S. on America’s day, including Zimbabwe and Indonesia.

The United States’ version of the holiday includes a unique mythology providing the central imagery for the festivities which include parades and feasts of traditional foods, usually shared among relatives. The central narrative is a re-telling of a poorly-documented account from 1621 of a treaty between the Wampanoag tribe and the Pilgrims of Plymouth colony that included a feast of thanksgiving, friendship, and some food the Pilgrims needed.

The development of Black Friday (invented in Philadelphia!) and expansion of it to the whole weekend has also moved backward to encompass Thanksgiving. So now we are subjected to a four-day extravaganza of consumerism (and don’t forget football, its violent twin) rather than a day of thanks. Many churches observe buy-nothing day as a protest to the overshadowing.

So on Thanksgiving, we look back to a sordid history of relations between Europeans and the natives of New England and we can look forward to an onslaught of consumerism.  Plus we have a state-sanctioned, semi-religious holiday to ponder. Because of all this, the day becomes even more important. We must rest. We must be grateful. We must celebrate the many “feastworthy” things we have experienced this year. God is good. Let’s be grateful for the good that is given.

More

An article from Indian Country Today Media Network “What Really Happened at the First Thanksgiving? The Wampanoag Side of the Tale” [link]

U.S. Congress’ Thanksgiving legislative process [link]

A history of the movements surrounding the Puritans and Separatists [link]

Conservative talk show host Michael Medved tries to do some reconstruction of the myth:

What do we do with all this?

You can do it. See beyond the traditions, good and bad, and give thanks. Let whatever-distresses-you go for a few minutes and list the things for which you are grateful. Dwell on them as slowly as possible. Smile.

All Saints Day — October 31-November 2

Holy Days, ,

Bible Connection

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. — Hebrews 11-12:3

All about All Saints Day

All Saints Day is one of the major festivals of the Christian Year. November 1 is a feast  day when we remember and celebrate all the Jesus followers who have departed this time in faith. It is a celebration of the transhistorical body of Christ, who was and is and is to come.  It is a time to remember our place in eternity with Jesus.

When we say “saint” we mean it like the Bible writers meant it. A “holy one” in the New Testament designates anyone who is a faithful Jesus follower, living or dead.  In Revelation 2:10 Jesus says, “Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.” So the symbols of the crown of thorns and a crown of victory often mark the day and remind us of our own victory over death. As we enter the “dying” season of the year, we soberly set off on our own pilgrimage through death to life, which will come to full bloom next Easter.

Of all days, we are sure to assert with Paul on All Saints Day:

I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead. — Philippians 3:8-11

The triduum

“Triduum” is a Latin word the church still uses to denote a three-day observance. All Saints Day is central to what became a triduum that used to commonly be called “Hallowmas,” (the short form of All Hallows Mass). It is preceded by Hallowe’en (short for All Hallows Eve) and is followed by All Souls Day. The whole triduum is mainly a “memorial day” for remembering the people of faith who have died. Not only are we inspired by them to triumph over our own troubles, we use the day to encourage one another to keep faith in the face of death.

Commemorating the martyrs of the faith with a regular holy-day began as early as the 4th Century. All Hallows Day used to be celebrated in the spring. But in the eighth century it was transferred to November (in places connected to Rome), where it became the climax of the autumn season, a harvest festival celebrating everyone planted with faith and now gone to seed. The celebration was contrary to European traditions of communing with the dead and supplanted or incorporated those observances. As Christianity expanded from its original territories, the church confronted pagan rites that appeased the “gods” of death and evil spirits. They did not simply speak out; they asserted alternatives. All Saints Day was placed on November 1 in 835; All Souls Day on November 2 in 998.

Over the centuries this celebration has been overlaid with the church’s imagination about the “immortality of the soul” and how a person satisfies the requirements for “going to heaven.” It has also been overlaid with all sorts of pre-Christian and non-Christian observances of death and the afterlife. In the United States, there is, at present, a renewed interest in Hallowe’en and the Day of the Dead, which are the days of the three-day observance that are most prone to abuse. They have become major holidays filled with lights and parades. So the whole holiday is worth studying, so we don’t fall into nonsense (or just swallow it whole) and don’t allow the church to lose honor because it is tied to falsity we can’t explain.

Here are some of the problems:

  • All Saints Day (Nov. 1): Some people considered this celebration of all the saints, known and unknown, to be a very powerful day against the forces of evil, since all the intercession of the company of heroes could be called upon at once.

The concept of All Saints Day is connected to the doctrine of The Communion of Saints. This is the Catholic teaching that all of God’s people, on heaven, earth, and in the state of purification (Purgatory), are spiritually connected and united. They are just as alive as those on earth (their body dead, but their immortal souls alive), and are constantly interceding on our behalf.

Jesus has introduced his followers into an eternal now, but our full experience of that union awaits the final day when the dead are raised. We will always be embodied spirits, as we were created to be.

  • Hallowe’en (October 31): Many customs of Hallowe’en reflect the Christian belief that during the vigil before the feast of all saints we mock evil, because as Christians it has no real power over us. Various customs developed related to Hallowe’en in the Middle Ages. For instance, poor people in the community begged for “soul cakes,” and upon receiving these doughnuts, they would agree to pray for departed souls. Some say this is the root of our modern day “trick-or-treat.” The custom of masks and costumes developed to mock evil and perhaps confuse the evil spirits by dressing as one of their own.
Witch costumes 1910

In what became the “British Isles” (and Great Britain’s colonies) Hallowe’en incorporated some of the characteristics of the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (saa-win), since All Saints Day occurs at the same time of the year. The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season, and is sometimes regarded as the “Celtic New Year.” Traditionally, the festival was a time to take stock of supplies and to slaughter livestock for winter storage. People believed that on October 31, the boundary between the alive (summer) and the deceased (winter) was so thin it dissolved, and the dead became dangerous to the living by causing problems such as sickness or crop damage. The observance frequently involved bonfires, into which bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them.

For the Druid priests, October 31 was New Year’s Eve, a night of evil and terror when all hell broke loose. Goblins and ghosts were abroad that night, while witches celebrated their black rites as the spirits and souls of the dead roamed the earth — especially dead children and babies. To frighten the evil spirits and to bolster their own sagging spirits, people created a din with bells, horns, pots and pans (just as many still do at midnight on December 31st) and kept the bonfires burning to frighten the witches or perhaps burn them if they were caught. On the afternoon of October 31st, village boys would go from house to house collecting fuel for the midnight fires. Everyone was expected to contribute some peat or “coal pieces” to help burn the witches. Those who did not contribute received dire warnings of the evil consequences that might follow.

In 2 Corinthians 5:8 Paul says, “We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.” This at least implies that there is no interim place where disembodied souls are left waiting to enter heaven or hell. The Bible says many times that our death is like falling asleep and our resurrection is like waking up. The interim is is of no matter to our timeless God; it is like an instant, even if, according to our earthbound understanding, it is a thousand years.

  • All Souls Day (November 2): This day is also called the Day of the Dead, or Día de Muertos. Most people use it as a day to remember and offer prayers up on behalf of all of the faithful departed they have known, as in creating an “altar” with a picture of your sainted mother. People may go to the cemetery for a picnic or have a party featuring the favorite foods of the departed, placed as offerings on the altar. Mexico has an especially rich tradition for this day, so you may be familiar with pan deMy personal review of Pixar's newest movie: 'Coco'. — Karina Mora muerto (traditional pastries), and cempasuchitl (marigold flowers: used for the vibrant color that can guide the dead to the right place and for their traditional healing powers in Aztec medicine). Or you may be familiar with the Disney movie. Officially, this is a day to pray for the departed who haven’t made it to Paradise, who are awaiting their purification in purgatory, which, in itself, is a problem.

Unofficially, people think the Day of the Dead is the day when adult ghosts are loosened to roam the earth. People take to the streets to mock them. The fiesta is full of humor calling death la calaca (skeleton) or la flaca (skinny). Paintings and figurines depict skeletons in everyday life. Stories and cartoons show how humans have cheated or defeated death.

The Aztecs and other Meso-American civilizations kept skulls as trophies and brought them out during a month long ritual that became associated with November 2. The skulls were used to symbolize death and rebirth and to honor the dead, whom the Aztecs and other Meso-American civilizations believed came back to visit during this part of the year. Unlike the Spaniards, who viewed death as the end of life, the natives viewed it as the continuation of life. Instead of fearing death, they embraced it. To them, life was a dream and only in death did they become truly awake.

In the Bible we are warned not to go to spirits and soothsayers in Isaiah 8:19: “Should not a people inquire of their God? Why consult the dead on behalf of the living?” The Bible warns us not to consult with (or make inquiries of) the dead, as is often done on the Day of the Dead.

More

Share Faith sums it up with another description.

Eddie G explains the Day of the Dead.

Allan Parr gives a Bible study about celebrating Halloween for Christians.

Some Mennonites celebrate Eternity Sunday adjacent to All Saints Day. Try this pray with them. [link]

What do we do with this?

Ralph Vaughn Williams hymn For All the Saints is the classic hymn for All Saints Day. Spend a few minutes meditating with it and praising Jesus giving us life and courage to face death, especially death because of our faith.

We have a chance on All Saints Day, not only to remember those heroes of the faith (like in Hebrews 11), but to remember beloved saints we have lost personally. It is a good day to look back and show honor and respect as well as to mourn.

  • We remember all the saints who don’t have a specific feast day.
  • We remember the spiritual ancestors who inspire us on our journey.
  • We remember the partners in our church as well as members of our extended Christian family who have died.

What’s more, we can ponder our own deaths and what spiritual legacy we would like to leave. We are one of all the saints, too!

Many groups, especially Asian Americans, use All Saints Day as an opportunity to remember and respect family members who are elderly or who have lived in other generations. The day is a good time for tell stories about where our families came from and lived, what their lives were like, and what values they have passed on to us.

Pray this prayer with the UMC brothers and sisters: [link]