Two Cycles, One Calendar
The church year runs on two tracks at once. The first follows the life of Christ and moves with the date of Easter: Advent and its waiting, Christmas and Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, the Great Fifty Days of Easter, Pentecost, and then the months of ordinary time. The second is fixed to the calendar and remembers particular people and events, from the apostles and evangelists to the witnesses of much later centuries. Every Sunday belongs to the first cycle, and the two are read together.
How the Calendar Was Built
The oldest layer is the weekly one. Christians kept the first day of the week as the day of resurrection long before there was an annual calendar at all. An annual Pascha, our Easter, followed in the second century, and the fifty days after it were treated as a single festal season. Lent grew out of the preparation of candidates for baptism at the Easter Vigil. Christmas and Epiphany were settled in the fourth century, and Advent developed afterward as their preparation. The commemoration of martyrs on the anniversary of their death is equally ancient, and it is the seed from which the calendar of saints grew.
The Seven Greatest Days
The Book of Common Prayer names seven principal feasts, which take precedence over any other observance: Easter Day, Ascension Day, the Day of Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, All Saints’ Day, Christmas Day, and the Epiphany. Below them the Prayer Book sets the other holy days, among them Ash Wednesday and the days of Holy Week, the feasts of our Lord, and the days of the apostles, evangelists, and other saints. Beyond that stands a longer list of commemorations, revised from time to time by the General Convention, which the church is free to keep on weekdays.
Reading the Season
The seasons are legible before a word is spoken. Purple or blue vests the church for Advent and purple for Lent. White and gold belong to Christmas, Easter, and the feasts of our Lord. Red marks Pentecost, Holy Week, and the days of martyrs. Green covers the ordinary weeks after Epiphany and after Pentecost. Music, ceremony, and even the language of the liturgy shift with the season: the Alleluia is set aside through Lent and returns at the Vigil, and the Gloria gives way to other texts in penitential seasons.
How We Keep These Days
The great days of the year are kept with the whole parish: Ash Wednesday, the liturgies of Holy Week from Palm Sunday through Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil, then Easter Day, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, the Epiphany, and All Saints. Smaller commemorations are kept quietly at the Tuesday service in St. Alban’s Chapel, where each week is given to a particular witness of the church. Recent Tuesdays have remembered Priscilla and Aquila, Argula von Grumbach, Maria Skobtsova, and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Times and Announcements
Most feasts fall on dates that move from year to year, so times are published rather than fixed. Service times for Holy Week, Easter, Christmas, and the other major days appear in the parish calendar, in The Evangel, and in the Sunday bulletin as each season approaches. Weekday commemorations are kept at 11:30 AM on Tuesdays in St. Alban’s Chapel. Everything takes place at St. Stephen’s, 212 N Tulane Ave in Oak Ridge, unless the announcement says otherwise.