History is in the making for this liturgical year

History is text, or so declared the graduate student who lived downstairs from me in the Campus Co-op house on Spadina Avenue. As an undergraduate, I admired graduate students just for being graduate students, and I regarded my neighbour as an oracle. It made sense to me that time, which slips inexorably by, might be captured in written records. After all, Christians, Jews and Muslims have long preserved the idea of a recording angel, the being who records all human deeds, good and bad.

Sadly, the oracle undercut his authority by asking me, when I praised his brilliant insight some years later at a party, if I had not noticed also the great clouds of marijuana smoke billowing out from under his door. And admittedly I have heard historians and archeologists argue that bones and artefacts are even better preservers of history than text. However, I cannot shake the notion that without a careful, textual preservation of everyday life, we are in danger of losing our history.

This is why I keep an annual record of the life of my Scottish parish community. I call it “The Liturgical Year.” This liturgical year has just ended, and its record is 223 pages long. I have a scholarly friend who is desperately examining 17th-century letters for details of Scottish Catholic life; she declares that I am a gift to future historians.

Texts are also important to younger Catholics curious about Catholic devotions before the 1970s. As so many churches have been renovated or built since then, it can be hard to read our history in their art or architecture. A better resource is an old missal. These can be found in abundance in used bookstores and over the Internet, if one can’t find the well-thumbed, once-loved missal of a grandparent in some drawer.

My missal was published in Montreal in 1958. It begins with a table of “moveable feasts” and with general notes about feasts and fasts throughout the year. It ends with a charming section called “Proper Feasts Celebrated in the Dioceses of Canada.” Here we see that on Dec. 3, the diocese of Chicoutimi thought it particularly important to honour St. Francis Xavier, “Titular of the Cathedral Church” and “Principal Patron of the Canadian Missionaries.”

Between these sections can be found everything a lay person might need for her devotions: the “most important” prayers, “an abridgement of Christian doctrine,” the Way of the Cross, the rosary, litanies, morning and evening prayers, a guide to confession, devotions for communion, vespers, Compline, the hymns and prayers for Benediction, an English-Latin guide to every Sunday and feast day of the Church year, an English-Latin Ordinary of the Mass, the Requiem Mass, the old marriage service, matins, lauds and psalms, hymns, sequences and canticles complete with musical notation. There is advice concerning many situations, including the emergency baptism of an infant in danger of death.

And there are two pages dedicated to explaining the Liturgical Year. “The Ecclesiastical or Liturgical Year,” they begin, “is a fixed annual cycle of holy seasons and feast days, which the Holy Catholic Church consecrates in a particular way to God’s service. The Liturgical Year contains two parts: the Proper of the Season, containing the feasts in honour of the Divine Saviour, and the Proper of the Saints, containing the feasts consecrated to our Lady and the saints.”

My generation and its children may be surprised to read that there were no Year A, B and C before the 1970s. Readings remained the same from one year to the next. The Opening Prayer, Epistle and Gospel of the last Sunday of the liturgical year were the same in 1959 as they were in 1958. Indeed, the immutability of the Opening Prayer of that Sunday, beginning “Stir up, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful,” led to that Sunday’s nickname “Stir Up Sunday,” as it is known by Anglicans today. (Anglicans have preserved or reinstated many ancient English Catholic traditions, including the calendar, over the centuries.)

Younger Catholics may also be surprised to know that once upon a time, there was no such thing as Ordinary Time. The traditional Proper of the Seasons — including all the Sundays — was composed of the Christmas Cycle, the Easter Cycle and Whitsuntide, Whitsunday being Pentecost. And so, traditionally speaking, the season of Pentecost has just ended, and now we are starting the Christmas Cycle with the First Sunday of Advent.

At 26 Sundays, Pentecost seemed unusually long this year, and I look forward to finishing my annual record. But first I will ponder the traditional homiletic themes for the last Sundays of the year: death, judgment, heaven and hell. These are called the Four Last Things, and it is good to contemplate them before our more light-hearted preparations for Christmas.