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The Church Year
There is no human society without celebrations, holidays and feasts, "The feast is part of man's inescapable rhythm of work and rest," observes Fr Schmemann. But beyond the need to rest from work, the development of celebrations in human culture has much deeper root in man's absolutely irrepressible need, not just for rest, but for joy, for meaning that we find the true source of celebration and its tenacity in human society. Feasts, in every culture, have become the repository and expression of a society's goals, ambitions, and worldview. As Fr Schmemann writes, "tell me what you celebrate, and I will tell you who you are." Christianity is also best understood through its celebrations rather than through abstract dogmatic and theological formulas. Orthodox Christianity in particular has from its earliest days expressed its faith, its understanding of the world and its approach to life through a network of feasts that embrace the entire year. "Without exaggeration we can say that the believer lives from feast to feast, and that for him these feasts sanctify all time through the coming and going of each season." In this volume, Fr Schmemann examines first the phenomenon of celebration and then its expression in the Orthodox Christian church year, focusing especially on the Christmas and Easter cycles. His reflections on feasts devoted to Mary, the Mother of God, will be included in Volume III of Celebration of Faith . I The Virgin Mary. Father Alexander Schmemann (†1983) was a prolific writer, brilliant lecturer, and dedicated I Believe...
- GenresTheology
162 pages, Paperback
First published March 5, 1994
About the author
Alexander Schmemann
69 books208 followersProtopresbyter Alexander Schmemann was a prominent Eastern Orthodox theologian and priest of the Orthodox Church in America.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 18, 2026
Another 5 star review for a Schmemann work. What’s new!! His theology and practical teachings here are consistent with all his writings and are consistent with his teaching of the mission and goal of the church, the vision of the liturgy and the Eucharist, and the pastoral and practice-able nature of the Christian faith.
Schmemann’s theology is so grounded in practice and practicality. And it is always pointing towards the divine and the sacred as it unites heaven and earth and as it unites all the world (inside the church and outside) to this Kingdom through feast, liturgy, and Eucharist (all the sacraments).
This one would be a good intro book on the life of the church for someone who isn’t aware (a beginner) or someone more advanced.
My notes by chapter:
Why celebrate?
◦ Humans have a constant need to celebrate
◦ Feasts are about rest from work. REST and JOY
◦ Through feast, man gives meaning to work itself because of rest. But man doesn’t simply rest, he celebrates, because he also needs joy. So feast gives meaning to all life
◦ Feast as witnessing the joy of one’s labor
Roots
◦ Christianity is best understood through its feasts, not its theology or dogma
First day of new creation
◦ Seven means wholeness and completeness. Seven symbolizes the world and cosmos that God calls very good.
◦ “The numerology of the ancient world seems childish and naive when considered from the pedestrian and joyless perspective of the modern world”
◦ Time = completeness
◦ Time = death
◦ On Easter, there is a new day that arrives with a new experience of time , not bound up with death.
Magnify o my soul
◦ When the mysteries bubble up and we overcome with joy. That is feast. The breakthrough of the mundaneness of everyday life and the repression and sorrow
Longing for freedom
◦ Freedom is a child’s experience. Adult’s recognize they are in prison in this world. Slaves to time, sadness, strife
◦ Finding freedom in God’s rest is what it means to be like children. And that is strived for and attained in feasts
Elevation of the cross
◦ “Neither gold nor silver nor precious stones can erase the original meaning of the cross as an instrument of humiliation, torture, and execution on which a man was nailed, a man rejected by all, gasping from pain and thirst.
◦ “Through this rejected, crucified, and condemned man, God’s love began to illumine the world and a Kingdom was opened which no one has the power to shut”
◦ Victory is - not outward - rooted in Christ’s suffering by His own choice - to believe He has given us victory - to believe He has overcome the world and opened a new kingdom which no one has the power to shut
◦ Contrast between earthly kingdoms and victory and Christ’s Kingdom which is not on this earth
Christmas
◦ Taking of a theme familiar to followers of natural religion and using it to show faith in Christ. This is common but for Christmas is most seen in Jesus’ title of “Sun of Righteousness”.
◦ String theme around what Paul shares in his Acts 17 sermon - “this is what you’ve been looking for!”
◦ Christ as FULFILLMENT of what everyone has been seeking, loving, looking for, praising, and worshipping. Light, sun, love, wisdom, knowledge.
◦ “Christmas is a feast for children, not just because of the tree that we decorate and light, but in the much deeper sense that children alone are unsurprised that when God comes to us on earth, he comes as a child.”
◦ “Eternal childhood of God”. Christ commanded us to be like children. But adults, even religious ones, want explanations and analysis. They want it to be intelligent and serious… and boring.
◦ A king is a child. And light overcomes darkness. A reversal of what we think we know.
New year
◦ we share a faith that this year, happiness might be around the corner and we can hope for it
◦ 2 opposing forces in our consciousness- FEAR and HAPPINESS
◦ Without Christ’s eternal joy, fear will always persist more strongly in your mind than happiness does
◦ Grief permeates society. “Only down below, at the bottom of human culture, do crowds go wild with noise and shouting, as if noise and feverish partying could bring happiness. “
◦ “And no one can take your joy from you”. Isn’t that what we dream about when the clock strikes midnight? Joy that cannot be taken away. Feast that PERSISTS.
Lord’s Baptism
◦ Water as a callback to the beginning of creation.
◦ Water encompasses that which is of the WORLD, of EARTH, of MATTER. Christ unites himself with the world and all matter when He is submerged in the water
◦ John’s repentance is to see the world in this light and to see the world as God made it
Meeting of the Lord
◦ Waiting, expectation, anticipation
◦ Life is waiting, deepening through anticipation, faith growing in expectation for your all-satisfying peace-bringing encounter with the Lord
Zacchaeus
◦ Desire - lean into the desire for Christ. It will lead you to love of Him and repentance
Publican and the Pharisee
◦ Pride leads to hatred
◦ Humility means acceptance and respect of the other, the courage to admit one’s own imperfection, to repent, and to set out on the path toward correction
Parable of the Prodigal Son
◦ “It is relatively easy to admit my mistakes and shortcomings, but how much more difficult it is to suddenly realize that I have broken, betrayed and lost my spiritual beauty, that I am such a lo way from my true home… this realization is precisely repentance, and therefore necessarily involved a deep desire to go back, to return, once again to find the lost home”
◦ Memory and remembrance of God is what the prodigal son experienced
Parable of the Last Judgment
◦ Love toward a living and concrete human being >>>> much greater than love for humanity in general or love as an abstract concept
◦ Christian love us about seeing, recognizing, and encountering Christ in each person
Forgiveness Sunday
◦ What we know from our conscience
◦ Our self-centeredness makes us divided from everyone else. Lonely, selfish, absent of love - “self love”
◦ “Forgiveness does not mean indifference or scorn or cynicism. Only someone who has suddenly realized with all his soul the full horror of love’s absence from the world, who has felt the bottomless grief of that loneliness to which man has condemned himself by his self-affirmation and self-love - only they are capable of forgiving and being forgiven.
Lenten prayer of st ephrem the Syrian
◦ Emptiness, despair, lust of power
◦ Idle talk and empty words - the creative power of words - words as a gift
◦ Chastity as wholeness - as peace and harmony of spirit, mind, heart, and body
◦ Humility - accepting myself a as I am.. and others as they are
◦ “Christianity calls us to believe that man’s essential being does not consist of evil and fall. It believes that human beings can always stand up once again, that they can return to their bright essence”
Sunday of the cross
◦ Like Pontius Pilate - we have a lazy approach of washing our hands and casually participating in the inertia of evil
Death
◦ Faith in immortality is a GOOD thing.
◦ Death as contrary to nature
◦ Can’t overcome fear of death by working for future generations and their happiness. “If human beings are doomed to nothingness… how does this awful absurdity become any less absurd in the future with, let’s suppose, more justice and better home heating?”
◦ Religion’s depth lies in refusal to avoid the subject of death
Palm Sunday
◦ “Lazarus come forth” is a summons announcing Christ’s declaration of war on death
◦ Christ is king. The only king. The KINGDOM is now and the kingdom will remain forever. Be a citizen.
Christ is risen
◦ Experience of faith as the thing you KNOW
Easter faith
◦ We must take the resurrection celebration outside of the inner sacred place we love to take it in. It shouldn’t be a secret pleasure. “In the deepest corner of our conscience, we know this… minimalism, this inner escape… is incompatible with the authentic meaning and joy of Easter.”
◦ This is the good news - news should be proclaimed. Share the faith
◦ Transmit joy and faith to other people. Unite inside the church and out.
Doubting Thomas
◦ Believing without seeing
◦ “We live in a world of great oversimplification and therefore spiritual poverty”
◦ “Empirical analysis is useful and necessary, but to reduce all human knowledge to this level is like trying to comprehend the beauty of a painting by a chemical analysis of its paint”
The myrrhbearing women
◦ Simple human faithfulness and love, steadfast human love
◦ Why do we complicate our love and following Christ - be simple like these women
◦ God responds to their grieving beautifully
◦ The image of “woman” as being able to be stripped down to love
Sunday of the Paralytic
◦ The pool of Siloam is a an image of the world and human society - selfish, narcissistic, and alone
◦ Even collective interest is collective “self interest” - my family, my nation, my my my
◦ Christ brings love, co-suffering, and care
◦ Co-personhood
Samaritan woman
◦ Spirit and truth
◦ The center of Christianity as truth (not law), thirst (not appeasement), freedom (not slavery), love (not rule keeping)
Ascension
◦ Opening of Heaven
◦ “Progress ends in the cemetery”
◦ Heaven not in the sky but rather - Heaven is the name of our authentic vocation as humans - final truth about earth - what Christ gives back to us that we lost - kingdom of eternal life, truth, beauty - spiritual transformation of human life - fulfillment of ultimate desire
◦ Earth should become a reflection of Heaven
Pentecost
◦ Sun filled, flowering, spring into summer
◦ See God’s world in all of its beauty and grace
◦ Beginning of the last and great day of the Lord
Transfiguration
◦ Light
◦ Glorification from Heaven, not earth
◦ Blessings are about joy and gratitude - not fear and need of protection from whatever you’re scared of and don’t trust
◦ “The world itself is the fruit of God’s love for humanity, and only through the world can human beings recognize God and love him in return… our fall… is taking everything for granted… bread is just bread… the eternal task of faith and of the church is to overcome this sinful, monotonous habituation; to enable us to see once again what we have forgotten how to see…”
◦ “Heaven and earth are full of your glory, we sing in church. The significance of blessing is that through it, this glory breaks into our drowsy consciousness, opens our ears, opens our eyes, and life itself becomes praise, joy, and thanksgiving”
Schmemann’s theology is so grounded in practice and practicality. And it is always pointing towards the divine and the sacred as it unites heaven and earth and as it unites all the world (inside the church and outside) to this Kingdom through feast, liturgy, and Eucharist (all the sacraments).
This one would be a good intro book on the life of the church for someone who isn’t aware (a beginner) or someone more advanced.
My notes by chapter:
Why celebrate?
◦ Humans have a constant need to celebrate
◦ Feasts are about rest from work. REST and JOY
◦ Through feast, man gives meaning to work itself because of rest. But man doesn’t simply rest, he celebrates, because he also needs joy. So feast gives meaning to all life
◦ Feast as witnessing the joy of one’s labor
Roots
◦ Christianity is best understood through its feasts, not its theology or dogma
First day of new creation
◦ Seven means wholeness and completeness. Seven symbolizes the world and cosmos that God calls very good.
◦ “The numerology of the ancient world seems childish and naive when considered from the pedestrian and joyless perspective of the modern world”
◦ Time = completeness
◦ Time = death
◦ On Easter, there is a new day that arrives with a new experience of time , not bound up with death.
Magnify o my soul
◦ When the mysteries bubble up and we overcome with joy. That is feast. The breakthrough of the mundaneness of everyday life and the repression and sorrow
Longing for freedom
◦ Freedom is a child’s experience. Adult’s recognize they are in prison in this world. Slaves to time, sadness, strife
◦ Finding freedom in God’s rest is what it means to be like children. And that is strived for and attained in feasts
Elevation of the cross
◦ “Neither gold nor silver nor precious stones can erase the original meaning of the cross as an instrument of humiliation, torture, and execution on which a man was nailed, a man rejected by all, gasping from pain and thirst.
◦ “Through this rejected, crucified, and condemned man, God’s love began to illumine the world and a Kingdom was opened which no one has the power to shut”
◦ Victory is - not outward - rooted in Christ’s suffering by His own choice - to believe He has given us victory - to believe He has overcome the world and opened a new kingdom which no one has the power to shut
◦ Contrast between earthly kingdoms and victory and Christ’s Kingdom which is not on this earth
Christmas
◦ Taking of a theme familiar to followers of natural religion and using it to show faith in Christ. This is common but for Christmas is most seen in Jesus’ title of “Sun of Righteousness”.
◦ String theme around what Paul shares in his Acts 17 sermon - “this is what you’ve been looking for!”
◦ Christ as FULFILLMENT of what everyone has been seeking, loving, looking for, praising, and worshipping. Light, sun, love, wisdom, knowledge.
◦ “Christmas is a feast for children, not just because of the tree that we decorate and light, but in the much deeper sense that children alone are unsurprised that when God comes to us on earth, he comes as a child.”
◦ “Eternal childhood of God”. Christ commanded us to be like children. But adults, even religious ones, want explanations and analysis. They want it to be intelligent and serious… and boring.
◦ A king is a child. And light overcomes darkness. A reversal of what we think we know.
New year
◦ we share a faith that this year, happiness might be around the corner and we can hope for it
◦ 2 opposing forces in our consciousness- FEAR and HAPPINESS
◦ Without Christ’s eternal joy, fear will always persist more strongly in your mind than happiness does
◦ Grief permeates society. “Only down below, at the bottom of human culture, do crowds go wild with noise and shouting, as if noise and feverish partying could bring happiness. “
◦ “And no one can take your joy from you”. Isn’t that what we dream about when the clock strikes midnight? Joy that cannot be taken away. Feast that PERSISTS.
Lord’s Baptism
◦ Water as a callback to the beginning of creation.
◦ Water encompasses that which is of the WORLD, of EARTH, of MATTER. Christ unites himself with the world and all matter when He is submerged in the water
◦ John’s repentance is to see the world in this light and to see the world as God made it
Meeting of the Lord
◦ Waiting, expectation, anticipation
◦ Life is waiting, deepening through anticipation, faith growing in expectation for your all-satisfying peace-bringing encounter with the Lord
Zacchaeus
◦ Desire - lean into the desire for Christ. It will lead you to love of Him and repentance
Publican and the Pharisee
◦ Pride leads to hatred
◦ Humility means acceptance and respect of the other, the courage to admit one’s own imperfection, to repent, and to set out on the path toward correction
Parable of the Prodigal Son
◦ “It is relatively easy to admit my mistakes and shortcomings, but how much more difficult it is to suddenly realize that I have broken, betrayed and lost my spiritual beauty, that I am such a lo way from my true home… this realization is precisely repentance, and therefore necessarily involved a deep desire to go back, to return, once again to find the lost home”
◦ Memory and remembrance of God is what the prodigal son experienced
Parable of the Last Judgment
◦ Love toward a living and concrete human being >>>> much greater than love for humanity in general or love as an abstract concept
◦ Christian love us about seeing, recognizing, and encountering Christ in each person
Forgiveness Sunday
◦ What we know from our conscience
◦ Our self-centeredness makes us divided from everyone else. Lonely, selfish, absent of love - “self love”
◦ “Forgiveness does not mean indifference or scorn or cynicism. Only someone who has suddenly realized with all his soul the full horror of love’s absence from the world, who has felt the bottomless grief of that loneliness to which man has condemned himself by his self-affirmation and self-love - only they are capable of forgiving and being forgiven.
Lenten prayer of st ephrem the Syrian
◦ Emptiness, despair, lust of power
◦ Idle talk and empty words - the creative power of words - words as a gift
◦ Chastity as wholeness - as peace and harmony of spirit, mind, heart, and body
◦ Humility - accepting myself a as I am.. and others as they are
◦ “Christianity calls us to believe that man’s essential being does not consist of evil and fall. It believes that human beings can always stand up once again, that they can return to their bright essence”
Sunday of the cross
◦ Like Pontius Pilate - we have a lazy approach of washing our hands and casually participating in the inertia of evil
Death
◦ Faith in immortality is a GOOD thing.
◦ Death as contrary to nature
◦ Can’t overcome fear of death by working for future generations and their happiness. “If human beings are doomed to nothingness… how does this awful absurdity become any less absurd in the future with, let’s suppose, more justice and better home heating?”
◦ Religion’s depth lies in refusal to avoid the subject of death
Palm Sunday
◦ “Lazarus come forth” is a summons announcing Christ’s declaration of war on death
◦ Christ is king. The only king. The KINGDOM is now and the kingdom will remain forever. Be a citizen.
Christ is risen
◦ Experience of faith as the thing you KNOW
Easter faith
◦ We must take the resurrection celebration outside of the inner sacred place we love to take it in. It shouldn’t be a secret pleasure. “In the deepest corner of our conscience, we know this… minimalism, this inner escape… is incompatible with the authentic meaning and joy of Easter.”
◦ This is the good news - news should be proclaimed. Share the faith
◦ Transmit joy and faith to other people. Unite inside the church and out.
Doubting Thomas
◦ Believing without seeing
◦ “We live in a world of great oversimplification and therefore spiritual poverty”
◦ “Empirical analysis is useful and necessary, but to reduce all human knowledge to this level is like trying to comprehend the beauty of a painting by a chemical analysis of its paint”
The myrrhbearing women
◦ Simple human faithfulness and love, steadfast human love
◦ Why do we complicate our love and following Christ - be simple like these women
◦ God responds to their grieving beautifully
◦ The image of “woman” as being able to be stripped down to love
Sunday of the Paralytic
◦ The pool of Siloam is a an image of the world and human society - selfish, narcissistic, and alone
◦ Even collective interest is collective “self interest” - my family, my nation, my my my
◦ Christ brings love, co-suffering, and care
◦ Co-personhood
Samaritan woman
◦ Spirit and truth
◦ The center of Christianity as truth (not law), thirst (not appeasement), freedom (not slavery), love (not rule keeping)
Ascension
◦ Opening of Heaven
◦ “Progress ends in the cemetery”
◦ Heaven not in the sky but rather - Heaven is the name of our authentic vocation as humans - final truth about earth - what Christ gives back to us that we lost - kingdom of eternal life, truth, beauty - spiritual transformation of human life - fulfillment of ultimate desire
◦ Earth should become a reflection of Heaven
Pentecost
◦ Sun filled, flowering, spring into summer
◦ See God’s world in all of its beauty and grace
◦ Beginning of the last and great day of the Lord
Transfiguration
◦ Light
◦ Glorification from Heaven, not earth
◦ Blessings are about joy and gratitude - not fear and need of protection from whatever you’re scared of and don’t trust
◦ “The world itself is the fruit of God’s love for humanity, and only through the world can human beings recognize God and love him in return… our fall… is taking everything for granted… bread is just bread… the eternal task of faith and of the church is to overcome this sinful, monotonous habituation; to enable us to see once again what we have forgotten how to see…”
◦ “Heaven and earth are full of your glory, we sing in church. The significance of blessing is that through it, this glory breaks into our drowsy consciousness, opens our ears, opens our eyes, and life itself becomes praise, joy, and thanksgiving”
January 5, 2019
This book, particularly the last chapter on the Transfiguration, is spectacular. Each chapter is a vignette of the liturgical year - concise and profound.
Read
May 20, 2021 The Church Year has been allowed to go out of print. Part of the reason is that there are numerous dated references to Soviet Russia and the situation of the Church there. However, there is much much more in the slim book; keep an eye out for it in religious and used bookstores.
Part I is a short group of essays examining the spirit of celebration within Orthodoxy and focusing on Pascha, the root of all our joy. Why focus on Church life as celebration? Fr. Schmemann says:
"And this is exacting the meaning of the feast: … man liberating himself from a life chained solely to necessity and unbreakable law. … man does not simply rest, he celebrates. And this is why … through man in celebration, that one best appreciates the meaning of various faiths and worldviews. Put another way, “Tell me what you celebrate, and I will tell you who you are …" (p. 17)
Part II tells us who we are in light of our feasts, featuring 23 essays based on important feast days across the church year. Of the feast that falls on February 2, he says: I have seen the child, who brings the world so much divine love and who gives himself to me. Nothing is feared, nothing
is unknown, all is now peace, thanksgiving and love.
Part I is a short group of essays examining the spirit of celebration within Orthodoxy and focusing on Pascha, the root of all our joy. Why focus on Church life as celebration? Fr. Schmemann says:
"And this is exacting the meaning of the feast: … man liberating himself from a life chained solely to necessity and unbreakable law. … man does not simply rest, he celebrates. And this is why … through man in celebration, that one best appreciates the meaning of various faiths and worldviews. Put another way, “Tell me what you celebrate, and I will tell you who you are …" (p. 17)
Part II tells us who we are in light of our feasts, featuring 23 essays based on important feast days across the church year. Of the feast that falls on February 2, he says: I have seen the child, who brings the world so much divine love and who gives himself to me. Nothing is feared, nothing
is unknown, all is now peace, thanksgiving and love.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews