Templar Edification

Holidays are often accused of being pagan, when in fact they are simply seasonal. Every culture that knows winter knows a winter feast; and a spring celebration; and a harvest festival come fall. Such are our shared natural responses to our shared natural world. They are pagan only in the sense that G.K. Chesterton used the word: as a synonym for human. Last month I spoke of the Loaf-Mass, or Lammas, a traditional Christian observance thanking God for the firstfruits of the grain harvest. This of course coincides most cleanly with the climate of northern Europe and the British Isles; other Christians would harvest at other times. And just as we solemnized the firstfruits, so now we salute the gathering of last sheaves at harvest’s end. In the Hebrew Bible, the Festival of Ingathering—also known as Sukkot, the Festival of Booths—corresponds to the end of Israel’s agricultural year. For 2023 this falls on 29 September  (Mon, Oct 6, 2025 – Mon, Oct 13, 2025) , a day that Christians ma...

I find that life is better with holidays. Wouldn’t you agree? St Paul wrote to the Christians at Rome that holy days are a matter of adiaphora; that is, of something neither commanded nor forbidden. We can take them or leave them. Yet I find that special seasons and celebrations add a certain spice to life, as well as a yearly pattern of festival and fasting, of darkness and light, which brings a magic and a mysticism into our hearth and our home. Blame my mother. She was the one when I was growing up who cooked and baked and decorated for all the holidays: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Independence Day, the sacred and the secular alike. It made my childhood wondrous; my adulthood too, now that I have children of my own. And it certainly does improve one’s mood to ever have something to which one looks forward. As I’ve aged, my love for the holidays has only deepened. I still prepare for the big festivities a little too early and a little too long, but now I also champion...

The liturgical year of the Western Church begins anew at Advent, the season of four Sundays preceding the Nativity of Our Lord. It is a time of hope and expectation, of preparing our hearts and our homes for the King. In it, we await and we watch for light amidst the dark. When it comes to Yuletide celebrations, the Church often seems out of step with the surrounding culture. We laugh, a bit bitterly, regarding the appearance of Christmas decorations even before Halloween. My children cast covetous eyes upon those homes which have decorated their trees well ahead of Thanksgiving. And who could blame the advance guard? Perhaps you may be one yourself. It’s been a rough few years, a rough couple of decades. Who am I to begrudge someone their joy? If Christmas makes you happy, well, it makes me happy too. And we could all use some good holiday cheer both early and often. Yet Advent offers to us something a little different, something more than simply delayed gratification or finger-waving...

Thanksgiving is an awkward observance for most clergy, or at least those of a liturgical bent. This is because, quite simply, Thanksgiving is not a Church holiday; it is an affair of state. As such, we do not have a ready-made observance, no rubrics to follow. This leads to an improvised hodgepodge of Thanksgiving Day or Thanksgiving Eve services, some certainly better than others, yet all of them blurring the line betwixt the secular and the sacred. Thus we must take care. Render unto Caesar, and all that. One could approach the story of Thanksgiving from several different angles. School plays often point to the Year of Our Lord 1621, when the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony, both Strangers and Saints, shared a three-day harvest festival with their Wampanoag allies. Historians often point to 1863, the height of the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a Federal holiday commemorating the founding unity of the American nation. But an honest account of its origins, methinks, lies somew...