Divine reality is like a fugue. All [God's] acts are different, but they all rhyme or echo to one another … . Fix your mind on any one story or any one doctrine and it becomes at once a magnet to which truth and glory come rushing from all levels of being.—C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock
It's not just divine reality that's like a fugue. As Philip Pfatteicher portrays it, the church year is a fugue, too, with all the truth and glory of divine reality rushing toward any one season—or even a single image from that season. In his beautiful book, Journey into the Heart of God: Living the Liturgical Year, he explicates the church year the way the best literary scholars explicate poems, which makes sense because he's (among other things) an English professor. As he would with a great poem, Pfatteicher seeks and finds the many and varied internal resonances among the church seasons and brings them to light for his readers—and it is a beautiful light, one that made me fall more deeply in love with the rich texture of the Christian year.
This is not a book directed primarily to the general reader. It was written for liturgists by a liturgist—one with a deep and wide knowledge of the various prayer books of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions. For example, about the "Sunday within the Octave of Christmas" Pfatteicher writes:
The first reading in Year A was introduced as the (Old Testament) Lesson for the First Sunday after Christmas in the 1958 Lutheran Service Book and Hymnal; the second reading in Year B was appointed in that book, in the 1928 Prayer Book, and in the previous Roman lectionary; the Gospel in Year B was appointed in the Service Book and Hymnal following medieval and the Roman lectionary. The Gospel in Year A is an expansion of the Gospel for the Second Sunday after Christmas Day in the 1928 Prayer Book.
Since I'm not a liturgist myself, this sort of thing made my head spin. Fortunately, though, this detailing of the history of a collect or a lectionary reading is the very least of what this book is about. Pfatteicher includes these details; he never gets lost in them. And he never forgets that they are not the purpose for his writing. It is clear from the flyleaf forward that his primary goal is to open his readers' eyes to the beauty of the liturgical year, its stunning seamlessness, every season, every holy day related to all the others—and he succeeds. I came away from the book with a sense that the church year is less like the circle I had imagined and more like the divine fugue Lewis evokes, with different voices—the seasons and their themes and images—rising to the foreground and then dropping into the background but never disappearing altogether, ready to rise to the forefront again.
This seamlessness is perhaps especially evocative in the often-overlooked season of Epiphany, which comes to vibrant life in Pfatteicher's hands. He shows how Epiphany's primary images of light, manifestation/revelation, baptism, and the miracle at Cana are inherently related to one another, disparate though they may seem at first glance. As one particularly beautiful antiphon for Epiphany has it:
Today the Bridegroom claims his bride, the Church, since Christ has washed away her sins in the waters of the Jordan;
the Magi hasten to the royal wedding;
and the wedding guests rejoice, for Christ has changed water into wine, alleluia.
The light of the star links the theme of light to the epiphany itself, for it is the star that guides the Magi to the Child, Light leading the nations to Christ. Our forebears in the faith understood that the manifestation of God in Christ extends beyond the nations to the natural world. This understanding is still prevalent in the East, where Epiphany and the Baptism of Christ are more closely linked than they are in the West. As Maximus of Turin preached: "Christ is baptized, not to be made holy by the water, but to make the water holy, and by his cleansing to purify the waters which he touched." The final theme of Epiphany, water-to-wine, also plays on the theme of manifestation: "This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory" (John 2:11, ESV). Pfatteicher quotes a 5th-century hymn translated by John Mason Neal:
Oh, what a miracle divine,
When water reddened into wine!
He spoke the word, and forth it flowed
In streams that nature n'er bestowed.
Then he notes, "As Jesus baptized the water in which he was baptized, so too he consecrated the water at the marriage feast. Its transformation showed the surpassing recreation of nature that his passion was to effect."
Hence these Epiphany images echo and reprise themes found in other seasons. The image of light, for instance, dominates the seasons of Advent and Christmas but is not exclusive to them, for it is also a vivid and central image in the Easter season: the light of the risen and ascended Christ. The "water reddened into wine" that flows forth in "streams that nature n'er bestowed" anticipates the crucifixion, when blood and water flow from Jesus' side. These images and themes of Epiphany (and Pfatteicher makes clear it's not just these, but all the images and themes in our liturgical treasury) look both backward and forward in the church year, coming into sharp focus, receding to the background, returning to the fore, but always present.
On Candlemas (February 2), Epiphany ends with the blessing of the candles and the celebration of Jesus' presentation in the temple:
The block of the liturgical year that began with the successive lighting of the candles of the Advent wreath finds its fulfillment in the blessing and procession with lighted candles in the celebration of the arrival of the Lord in his temple.
Simeon's song, when he holds the infant Christ, pays homage to the "light" that "will reveal you [God] to the nations and the glory of your people Israel" (hear the Epiphany echoes), but he does not stop there. He turns to Mary and tells her a sword will pierce her heart. This day looks both backward, to Christmas and Advent, and forward, to Lent and the crucifixion.
Similarly, the final Sunday before Lent (which sometimes falls during Epiphany, sometimes not) is a celebration of the Transfiguration, the icon of which makes the book's cover. This is my favorite feast, and I love that we celebrate it twice every year—first on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and again on August 6. In the manifestation of Jesus' glory in light and in the Father's commendation, we again see Epiphany themes emerge—even an echo of baptism in the words of the Father. Pfatteicher notes that the Transfiguration commemorates "a stunning manifestation of the glory of Christ and at the same time [serves] as a bridge to Lent, a glimpse of glory before descending into the shadowed valley of the great fast." It also points forward to Christ the King, the final Sunday of the church year, when we celebrate the return of our glorified Lord. Throughout the book, Pfatteicher is continually making such connections, reminding us where we have been, reminding us where we are going, showing us that every season is linked to every other.
Before I conclude, I feel bound to say that for all this book's virtues—and they are many—I wish the copyeditors and proofreaders at Oxford had done their jobs better. I found many typos, spelling and punctuation errors, even a laugh-out-loud oversight. (Jesus' conception, we're told, was "thought to have taken place on April 6, which was also the date of his crucifixion. His birth would have been exactly nine months earlier, January 6.") By the time I was three chapters in (admittedly, they're long chapters), I began to be annoyed by the errors; it seems shameful that a book so beautiful and thought-provoking is riddled with such unnecessary distractions.
Distractions notwithstanding, however, Pfatteicher's book immersed me in the world of the church year to such a depth that several times I found myself moved from mere reading to active worship by the rich language of the prayers and hymns that he liberally includes. The book's title is apt: the church year, especially as Pfatteicher explores and explicates it, is indeed a journey into the heart of God.
Kimberlee Conway Ireton is the author of The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year (InterVarsity Press) and Cracking Up: A Postpartum Faith Crisis (Mason Lewis Press). She lives in Seattle with her husband and four children.
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