practicing pilgrimage at home and abroad
With Advent nearly upon us and Christmas festivities around us in full swing, Jenn Giles Kemper of Sacred Ordinary Days shares with us how we can infuse spirituality and intention into this season and the seasons to come through following the Liturgical Year.
Be sure to listen all the way to the end—we’re giving away a new Sacred Ordinary Days Liturgical Day Planner to a lucky winner!
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Lasting fifty days, the season of Easter, also known as Eastertide, is a time for celebrating new life. After journeying with discipline and devotion through our own desert-places during Lent and walking alongside Christ through the realms of darkness, uncertainty, and betrayal evoked during Holy Week and the Triduum, the light of Easter morning brings the assurance of resurrection and redemption.
As the earth bursts with new life around us and the day grows longer than the night, we are reminded of the significance of the process of metamorphosis to the spiritual journey. We must surrender what is old so that we might be made new. Without it, there would be no transformation. It is this truth that we savor and celebrate during the fifty days of Easter.
While Easter is the oldest and most significant feast in the Christian church, however, it begins not with the sounds of celebration, but in the quiet corners between longing and liberation. Christ’s resurrection isn’t a triumphant event proclaimed with fanfare so that all might know of his return, but rather a mystical visitation to those who remained faithful and had eyes to see.
Because we, too, know of the redemption that awaits, we are not fully disheartened by the darkness faced during Holy Week because it is death that gives resurrection its meaning. Instead, we inhabit the hours leading up to Easter with patience, awareness, and anticipation, keeping vigil as we wait for the appearance of the risen Christ. In the final leg of our communal journey along the path of the passion of Christ that began during Holy week, we recount the stories that led to the coming of Christ and progress toward the moment in which we can finally declare, “He is Risen!”
This is the proclamation of Easter and the manifesto of the season to come. Just as we were invited during Holy Week to enter into darkness and contemplate how we have in our own ways crucified Christ, we now are invited to live in the resurrection as we celebrate the risen Christ and honor the things that bring us new life, both big and small.
For fifty days we are called to view all of life through the lens of a Sunday feast, dwelling in the abundance of the kingdom of God as we name and celebrate our places of resurrection. These places of life serve as guideposts for the journey, for they are where we continue to encounter Christ—the way, the truth, and the life, and the pathway to the Divine—on our journey of awakening.
The invitation of Eastertide, then, is to look for these guideposts in everyday life and lean into them as we seek to live out and celebrate the kingdom of God and the renewal that it brings.
This is an excerpt from the Sacred Seasons perpetual liturgical wall calendar. Let it guide you through the fifty days of Eastertide and the rest of the liturgical seasons year after year! Available in the Journey Shop »
PS: 25 ways to celebrate Life this Easter Season plus more posts on Easter.
Have you been praying with us? Each week during Lent we’re exploring a different type of contemplative prayer together as a community. It’s called 40 Days to Pray , and every Wednesday on the blog I’m sharing background information on a type of contemplative prayer as well as steps to practice and resources to go further. Some of these prayers are new and others are ancient, but one thing is certain: they’ll bring you closer to the heart of God.
Last week we welcomed in the season and all that comes with it with Welcoming Prayer, and I shared some of my experience on Instagram. Welcoming Prayer offers a great entry point to other types of prayer, “clearing the space” so to speak and inviting us into the present moment so we can encounter God. It’s also a practice of the pilgrim, teaching us to welcome the stranger or “other” in the world by first cultivating a practice of welcoming the stranger within.
The 40 days of Lent mirror the 40 days of Jesus’ fasting in the wilderness, and I can imagine Jesus practicing a form of Welcoming Prayer during that trying season—welcoming the hunger, discomfort, and resistance into the presence of God and allowing them to become teachers. Can you, too? In this way, it’s not simply a prayer practice to engage in once a day, but rather a tool at the ready when we need it most and a reminder that all is welcome in the presence of God.
This week we turn to Centering Prayer—another practice with roots in the Contemplative Outreach community and one that has been near and dear to me for many years now. (Read about my own practice here.) Will you join me this week in the silence?
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This post on the feast of Epiphany and the Magi it commemorates is an excerpt from the Sacred Seasons Perpetual Liturgical Wall Calendar. Let it guide you on this feast day, season, and beyond when you purchase a calendar of your own in the Journey Shop. Learn more about Epiphany in the Epiphany episode of the Sacred Ordinary Days Podcast »
Like the bright star in the night that it commemorates, it offers guidance for the seasons to come. While many Christian traditions simply mark Epiphany on its feast day of January 6 and return to Ordinary Time until the season of Lent, some traditions are now celebrating it as an entire season lasting from the feast of Epiphany until Ash Wednesday.
Rooted in the Greek word epiphaneia, epiphany means “a manifestation of a divine or supernatural being” or “a moment of sudden revelation or insight.” In the Christian Church, Epiphany marks the manifestation of Christ to the world, particularly through the visitation of the Magi to the Christ child—a journey made by scholars of astronomy and Seekers of the Sacred who followed a radiant star in the heavens in search of Truth.
Because I didn’t grow up in a liturgical church, my only exposure to the twelve days of Christmas was the popular Christmas Carol, and while I knew all of the words by heart (my chamber choir performed it multiple times each year—complete with actions), I never quite knew when the twelve days of Christmas actually were. (The twelve days before Christmas? Whenever Ellen Degeneres does her Twelve Days of Giveaways?)
Whenever I discovered the liturgical calendar and learned about Advent and the Christmas season that followed, I finally found my answer. (The true Christmas season is twelve days after all—who would have thought?) And while I finally knew the exact date for when to expect to receive ten lords a-leaping, I wasn’t quite sure how to mark each day. Because I had embraced the invitation of waiting and keeping vigil that Advent brings, I wanted my celebration of Christmas to be as filled with intention as the season that had passed. And so I dug a bit further, uncovering multiple feast days and invitations already imbedded in the season, and filled in the blanks with invitations and traditions that seem equally fitting to mark the light that the season brings.
Want to join me in this full-on celebration? Here are twelve ideas for marking the twelve days of Christmas (way cheaper than the song, I promise):