Feasts & Festivals

The Liturgical Year

At Holy Trinity we follow the Church’s Year, which includes the three greatest feasts of Christmas, Easter and Pentecost.  We start the year with Advent, a time of preparation and expectation to celebrate Christmas, our Lord’s coming to earth to dwell among us in the flesh.  Then we move through Epiphany season, where we see Jesus revealed for who he is and to all people.  During Lent we follow Jesus up to Jerusalem to the Cross and His Resurrection on Easter.  We celebrate His Ascension forty days later and together with the disciples celebrate the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the birth of the Church.  In the final half of the Church year, Trinity Season, we focus on our sanctification by Christ as we learn to live by faith in the new life to which we are called.  For the readings on Sundays we follow the Western Eucharistic lectionary.

Holy Days and Saints’ Days

At Holy Trinity we also celebrate the Holy days, special days related to events in our Lord’s life, and Saints’ days.

Throughout the Church year, the calendar has special days set apart as holy.  The purpose of Holy Days, according to St Augustine, is to “dedicate and sanctify to God the memory of his benefits, lest unthankfulness and forgetfulness thereof should creep upon us in the course of time.” [1]  Whereas the Sunday readings through the Church year are about the faith that justifies and the life of sanctification, the Holy days lectionary has been seen as relating to our glorification in Christ.

The rest of the days and times [holy days not directly related to our Lord] which we celebrate have relation all unto one head…. Forasmuch as we know that Christ hath not only been manifested great in himself, but great in other his Saints also,…there are annual selected times to meditate on Christ glorified in them. [2]

In observing Holy days and Saints’ Days we grow in thankfulness as we reflect on and are encouraged and inspired by particular events in the life of Jesus and the examples of his followers who have embodied his grace in unique ways.  As Benedict XVI has described it:

In addition to the sun, which is the image of Christ, there is the moon, which has no light of its own but shines with a brightness that comes from the sun.  This is a sign to us that we are in constant need of “little” light, whose hidden light helps us to know and love the light of the Creator, God one and triune.  That is why the feast of the saints from earliest times have formed part of the Christian year…  One might say that the saints are, so to speak, new Christian constellations, in which the richness of God’s goodness is reflected.  Their light, coming from God, enables us to know better the interior richness of God’s great light, which we cannot comprehend in the refulgence of its glory.[3]

The location of some of the Holy Days in the Church year are related to high feast days such as Christmas and Easter. The location of the rest of the Saints days throughout the year needs further reflection, but one is often led to the conclusion that they are appointed to draw out and magnify the teaching presented in the Sunday Eucharistic lections that are close by in the Church year.

We normally celebrate the Holy Days and Saints’ Days at Holy Trinity Church at 8pm unless they happen on a Sunday (9am and 10:30am) or Wednesday (7pm).  Check our calendar for precise dates and times.

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[1] Augustine quoted by Richard Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity and other works by and about Mr Richard Hooker as collected by Mr. John Keble and revised by the Very Reverend R. W. Church and the Right Reverend F. Paget, (facsimile reprint by Via Media Inc., Elliot City, Maryland, 1994) Book V, chapter LXX, p. 388.
[2] Ibid, p. 384.
[3] Benedict XVI, The Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 69.

 

For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus
and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you,
remembering you in my prayers,
 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation
in the knowledge of him,
 having the eyes of your hearts enlightened,
that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you,
what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints,

and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power
toward us who believe.
Ephesians 1:15-19