The Church Year: Feasts, Fasts, and Pascha Every Sunday

What you'll notice

New Orthodox Christians often end up with two calendars on the fridge. One is familiar: the school schedule, work deadlines, national holidays, tax day (Kyrie eleison!), birthdays, and the vet appointment for the dog. The other, a glossy one from a monastery or a plain one from the parish bookstore, is crowded with saints' names, little fish symbols, color-coded fast days, and feasts with names like "Entry of the Theotokos" and "Meeting of the Lord." It's beautiful and slightly overwhelming, as if your phone's calendar had married a medieval manuscript. And most newcomers, and plenty of old-timers, feel the question underneath it: I already live in one kind of time. How do I live in this other one too?

The good news is that the Church's year isn't meant to be a second full-time job. One calendar tells you when the electric bill is due. The other tells you what the day is for. The Christian calling, put simply, is to sanctify time.

Spend a year in a parish and you'll feel the second calendar working on you. Some Sundays the church is gold, some it's blue, and in the spring it goes dark and purple for weeks. People greet each other for forty days with a line you've never heard before. A feast you didn't know existed turns out to be the biggest party of the summer.

What it's called

The Church's calendar runs on three wheels at once, and every service sits where they meet.

• The daily cycle. The day begins at sunset, as it does in Genesis, with Vespers, then Compline, the Midnight Office, Matins at dawn, and the short services of the Hours. Monasteries keep all of them; parishes keep what they can. Vespers, Vigil, and the Daily Round walks through them. Because the day starts the evening before, Saturday night's service already belongs to Sunday and sings the Resurrection.¹
• The weekly cycle. Each weekday has its own hymns, gathered in the book of the eight tones, one tone a week.² Every Sunday is the Day of Resurrection, which is why its hymns sound like Easter all year and why the Church has stood, not knelt, for Sunday prayer since Nicaea (Standing, Sitting, Pews, and Kneeling has the canon).³
• The yearly cycle. This one has two parts. The fixed feasts fall on the same date every year. The movable feasts swing around Pascha, which lands on a different Sunday each spring.

What's actually happening

At the center of the year is Pascha (Easter, the feast of the Resurrection). It isn't counted among the Great Feasts because it's above them; Hapgood's service book calls it "The Feast of Feasts."⁴ If the year is a wheel, Pascha is the hub, and everything else turns around it. Around it stand twelve more:⁵

You don't have to memorize the dates, and nobody's giving a quiz. Knowing these are the "big twelve" is enough to notice them when they come around. Churches on the Julian calendar keep the fixed ones thirteen days later by the civil calendar, so their Christmas is January 7;⁶ Why Is Orthodox Easter on a Different Date? explains why.

Woven through the year are four fasting seasons: Great Lent before Pascha, the Apostles' Fast in early summer, from the Monday after the Sunday of All Saints to the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on June 29, the Dormition Fast in the first two weeks of August, and the Nativity Fast before Christmas. Most Wednesdays and Fridays are fast days too, except in a few "fast-free" weeks.⁷ The rules and the range are in Fasting: The Rules, the Range, and the Point. The point is the rhythm. The Church fasts so it can feast, and you feel the feast differently when you've waited for it.

Why it matters

The Church's calendar tells the whole story of salvation every year, starting with Mary's birth in September and ending with her falling asleep in August, with Christ's life running through the middle. You don't have to read it in a book. You live it. If you go to church through one full year, you'll have heard the Gospel told in order, sung, censed, and eaten.

And it keeps time honest. The Lord rose "early on the first day of the week" (Mark 16:9), and Christians have gathered on that day ever since (Acts 20:7). Every Sunday says the same thing Pascha says, a little quieter. Modern catechesis often calls it a "little Pascha." That's why the resurrection hymns come back every week whether or not anything else is happening.

Field Note: the Church's year starts September 1. The Orthodox liturgical year begins on September 1, the old Byzantine new year, called the Indiction; Hapgood's table of feasts opens with it.⁸ That's why the first Great Feast is Mary's birth on September 8 and the last is her falling asleep on August 15. The story starts where she does. If you've ever wondered why your parish's "new year" letter arrives with the school supplies, now you know.

Where it came from

Sunday worship is apostolic. The yearly Pascha is nearly as old, and by the second century churches were arguing about its date, which tells you how much it mattered. The fixed feasts came later, mostly between the fourth and the eighth centuries. Christmas and Theophany were the first; the Theotokos feasts and the Elevation of the Cross followed as the Church's memory filled out the year. The fasts grew alongside them.

The colors of the vestments change with the seasons in many parishes, but there's no single Orthodox color scheme; Vestments at a Glance has the general picture. Some parishes keep the fixed feasts on the Revised Julian calendar and others keep them thirteen days later on the Julian calendar, and Pascha itself is the same for nearly everyone.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: put the Church's calendar on the fridge next to the other one, and let it decide a few things. Go to the Great Feasts, especially the ones that fall on a weekday, and go to the Vespers or Vigil the night before when you can. Keep the fasts by the rule you've been given. From Pascha until the Leave-taking of the feast, forty days later, greet people with "Christ is risen!" and answer "Truly He is risen!" (Holy Week and Pascha has the greeting in Greek, Slavonic, Arabic and Romanian).

If you're visiting: you'll see the calendar more than you'll be asked to keep it. If someone says "Christ is risen!" to you in the spring, "Truly He is risen!" is the answer, and nobody will mind if you mumble it. If you want a good first service outside Sunday, try the eve of a Great Feast, or Holy Week, or the midnight service of Pascha itself. Bring earplugs for the bells and a candle for the procession.

Go deeper

• Matthew 28:1–10; Acts 20:7.
• Hapgood, Service Book, "The Feasts and Fasts of the Church," pp. xiii–xviii.
• OCA, "Icons of the Twelve Great Feasts."
• Alexander Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology.

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