Feasts and Fasts: An Anglican Perspective

The Christian Year, Holy Days, and the Discipline of Fasting

One of the distinctive gifts of Anglican Christianity is the liturgical calendar, a structured ordering of time around the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and reign of Jesus Christ. The year is not merely a sequence of dates. It is a theological argument, a sustained claim that time belongs to God and that the Church’s movement through the seasons is itself a form of worship. At the heart of this ordering are feasts and fasts: days set apart for celebration or discipline, for rejoicing or self-examination, for remembering the mighty acts of God and the saints in whom his grace bore fruit. Understanding these days is therefore more than a matter of liturgical literacy. It is an invitation to enter more fully into the rhythm of Christian life that the BCP 2019 gives to the Church.

The calendar does not compete with the Gospel or add another layer of salvation to it. Its purpose is to keep placing the Gospel before us. It teaches the Church when to rejoice, when to mourn, when to fast, when to remember, and above all what to remember. Left to ourselves, our attention is notoriously short. The calendar keeps returning us to Jesus Christ: his coming, his Cross, his Resurrection, his Ascension, the gift of his Spirit, his present reign, and his promised return.

The Two Cycles of the Christian Year

The BCP 2019 describes the Christian year as consisting of two cycles of holy days. The first is the Paschal Cycle, which follows the lunar calendar and orders the movable portion of the year around Easter Day. The Season of Lent precedes the Season of Easter, while the Season after Pentecost follows it. The second is the Incarnation Cycle, which follows the solar calendar, placing the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ on December 25, with the Season of Advent preceding the Season of Christmas and the Season of Epiphany following the twelve days of Christmas. (BCP 2019, p. 687)

These two cycles are not two different stories. The child born at Bethlehem is the Lord who goes to the Cross, rises from the dead, ascends to the Father, pours out the Holy Spirit, and reigns until every enemy is placed beneath his feet. The Christian year tells that one Gospel from different directions, allowing the Church to dwell upon mysteries that would otherwise pass too quickly.

Sunday is the structural heartbeat of the entire calendar. The BCP says that “every Sunday is a celebration of our Lord’s resurrection from the dead,” even while each Sunday also reflects the character of the season in which it falls. Following ancient Jewish practice, the liturgical celebration of Sunday begins at sundown on the preceding Saturday, which is why Evening Prayer on an ordinary Saturday uses the Collect appointed for the coming Sunday. (BCP 2019, p. 687)

This weekly rhythm is more important than it may first appear. Before the Church reaches Easter once each year, she reaches the first day of the week every seven days. The Resurrection therefore does not remain an annual memory. Sunday after Sunday, the risen Christ gathers his people again.

The Principal Feasts

At the top of the calendar’s hierarchy stand the seven Principal Feasts: Easter Day, Christmas Day, Ascension Day, the Epiphany, the Day of Pentecost, All Saints’ Day, and Trinity Sunday. The BCP states simply that these feasts “take precedence over any other day or observance.” All Saints’ Day may additionally be observed on the Sunday following November 1. (BCP 2019, p. 688)

Each Principal Feast gives the Church concentrated attention to an essential part of the faith. Easter celebrates the bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ and therefore stands at the center of the Paschal Cycle. Christmas celebrates the Incarnation, the eternal Word made flesh. Ascension Day celebrates the exaltation of the risen Christ to the right hand of the Father, where he reigns and intercedes for his people. Pentecost celebrates the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the sending of the Church into the world.

The Epiphany celebrates the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles and opens the season in which the identity of the incarnate Lord continues to be revealed. All Saints’ Day gathers the whole communion of saints into the Church’s worship and turns our attention toward the resurrection and consummation still to come. Trinity Sunday is distinctive because it does not commemorate a particular event in salvation history. After the Church has celebrated the saving work of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Trinity Sunday turns our attention toward who this God eternally is: one God in three Persons.

Together these feasts keep the central mysteries of the faith from becoming vague abstractions. Christ was born, crucified, raised bodily from the dead, and ascended; the Holy Spirit was poured out; the saints belong to a communion that death cannot destroy; and the God who accomplishes our salvation is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The Red-Letter Holy Days

Below the Principal Feasts are the Holy Days traditionally called Red-Letter Days because of the historic practice of printing them in red rather than ordinary black type. The BCP 2019 lists these days immediately after the Principal Feasts and includes the Circumcision and Holy Name of Our Lord, the Presentation, Joseph the Guardian of Jesus, the Annunciation, the Feasts of the Apostles and Evangelists, the Visitation, the Nativity of John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene, the Transfiguration, the Virgin Mary, Holy Cross Day, Holy Michael and All Angels, James of Jerusalem, Saint Stephen, and the Holy Innocents.

These observances have their own appointed Collects and Holy Day readings. In liturgical language, the propers are those portions of the service appointed particularly for the day rather than the ordinary portions of the liturgy that remain substantially constant. The appointed Collect, Psalm, and Scripture lessons, together with the Proper Preface where the Prayer Book appoints one, help the Church hear the particular theological accent of the observance.

The Red-Letter Days give human faces and historical particularity to the claims of the faith. The Visitation is not merely a pleasant reunion between relatives but the meeting at which John leaps in the womb, Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit, and Mary sings of the God who brings down the mighty and lifts up the humble. The Transfiguration is not simply an extraordinary mountaintop experience but the unveiling of the glory of the Son before his Passion. Saint Barnabas is not merely an interesting figure from Acts but a witness to the grace that makes a generous man willing to spend his credibility on someone else’s restoration.

This is one reason the saints belong within a Christ-centered calendar. Their feasts are not alternate centers of devotion alongside Jesus. Properly observed, they show what the grace of Christ produces in actual human lives. Apostles are sent because Christ sends them, martyrs bear witness because Christ is worthy of their lives, evangelists proclaim Christ, pastors tend his flock, and teachers hand on the faith once delivered to the saints.

The BCP also provides clear rules of precedence. A Red-Letter Holy Day falling on a Sunday outside Advent, Lent, and Easter may be observed on that Sunday or transferred to the nearest following weekday. Sundays in Advent, Lent, and Easter retain their own proper observance. No Holy Day or other observance can replace the fixed propers for Ash Wednesday, Holy Week, or Easter Week, and no lesser observance displaces a Principal Feast.

These rules are not bureaucratic trivia. They express theological priorities. The calendar itself tells the Church that some mysteries must govern the way other commemorations are received.

Optional Commemorations

Beyond the Principal Feasts and Red-Letter Holy Days, the BCP 2019 provides Optional Commemorations. The Prayer Book notes that the 1662 BCP included optional commemorations traditionally known as Black-Letter Days and presents two categories in the current calendar: Anglican and Ecumenical. These include pastors, missionaries, teachers of the faith, reformers, martyrs, monastics, ecumenists, and other notable Christians from across the history of the Church.

The distinction between Red-Letter Days and Optional Commemorations is important. The calendar is not declaring every worthy Christian figure to have identical liturgical weight. Optional commemorations may be observed or transferred as local needs dictate, and the BCP specifically cautions against allowing too many weekday commemorations, particularly in Advent and Lent, to obscure the character of the season.

The Prayer Book provides Collects and lessons in nine general categories for these observances: Martyr, Missionary or Evangelist, Pastor, Teacher of the Faith, Monastic or Religious, Ecumenist, Reformer of the Church, Renewer of Society, and any Saint. The ordinary Daily Office Psalms and lessons are not usually displaced by these commemorations.

That restraint is healthy. The communion of saints is immensely larger than the number of days in the year, and the Church does not need to turn every worthy memory into a major observance. The optional calendar allows Christians to receive the wisdom and witness of those who have gone before without allowing the saints to crowd out the Lord whose grace made them saints.

Why the Church Keeps Saints’ Days

For Christians unfamiliar with the practice, the language of “keeping” or “celebrating” the feast of a saint can initially sound as though attention is being diverted away from Christ. Classical Anglican practice understands the matter differently. The saints are not alternate mediators of redemption, and their lives do not supplement the once-for-all saving work of Jesus Christ. They are witnesses to it, and the New Testament itself teaches Christians to remember faithful examples. Hebrews 12 places the Church within a great cloud of witnesses and immediately directs believers to run with endurance while “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:1–2, ESV). The witnesses surround the race, but Jesus remains its object and goal.

This gives the Church a sound principle for receiving the saints. We remember Mary Magdalene because Christ delivered her and made her a witness of his Resurrection. We remember Peter because Christ called, corrected, forgave, restored, and sent him. We remember Thomas because the risen Lord brought him from unbelief to the confession, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28, ESV) We remember Stephen because grace made him faithful unto death.

The saints matter because Jesus Christ matters. Their lives show that the Gospel does something to people.

Ash Wednesday and Good Friday

The Church’s calendar contains not only days of celebration but days of deliberate self-denial. Within its category of Days of Discipline, Denial, and Special Prayer, the BCP 2019 gives particular weight to Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, describing them as “traditionally days of special devotion and total abstinence.” (BCP 2019, p. 689)

Fasting in its proper sense concerns food. The BCP goes on to describe fasting as involving reduced consumption and normally joining that bodily discipline to prayer, self-examination, and acts of mercy. The Prayer Book does not prescribe one universal menu, number of meals, or detailed dietary formula for every Anglican. Christian practice has varied considerably across times and places, and pastoral wisdom remains necessary.

The bodily character of fasting is important. Christianity does not treat the body as irrelevant to spiritual life. Hunger can expose habits of self-indulgence, interrupt routines of gratification, remind us of our creaturely dependence, and create occasions for prayer and mercy. Fasting does not earn forgiveness, add anything to Christ’s atoning sacrifice, or make God indebted to us. It disciplines Christians who have already received mercy.

Ash Wednesday and Good Friday give that discipline its most concentrated annual expression. Ash Wednesday confronts us with mortality and sin as Lent begins. Good Friday brings the Church before the Cross and refuses to let us hurry toward Easter without remaining for a time with the cost of our redemption.

Christian prudence also matters. Age, pregnancy, medication, medical conditions, eating disorders, strenuous labor, and other circumstances may make a strict fast unwise or inappropriate. The purpose of fasting is not injury or spiritual display. Where necessary, the discipline should be adapted faithfully and pastorally while preserving its fundamental purpose of bodily self-denial joined to prayer.

Fridays and the Weekdays of Lent

The BCP places a broader pattern of fasting around Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. The weekdays of Lent and every Friday of the year outside the twelve days of Christmas and fifty days of Eastertide are encouraged as days of fasting. The word matters. The Prayer Book commends a regular discipline to the Church without giving ordinary Fridays the same status as Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

Friday fasting has an obvious Christian logic. Friday is the day of the Lord’s Crucifixion, and a modest weekly fast keeps the Cross within the bodily memory of the Christian year. The practice need not be dramatic. A reduced or noticeably simpler pattern of eating can be joined to Scripture, prayer, self-examination, and an act of mercy.

The point is not to recreate Good Friday every week. It is to allow the Cross to shape ordinary Christian time. In a culture organized largely around appetite and convenience, even a modest recurring fast can teach us that not every desire must immediately be satisfied.

The weekdays of Lent intensify this same principle across the Church’s principal penitential season. Lent is not forty days of spiritual punishment but preparation for the Paschal feast. Fasting serves repentance, and repentance serves restored communion with God.

Ember Days

Ember Days belong to the BCP’s category of Days of Discipline, Denial, and Special Prayer. There are four sets each year, each consisting of Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday. The BCP places them after Saint Lucy’s Day on December 13, after the First Sunday in Lent, after the Day of Pentecost, and after Holy Cross Day on September 14. They may be kept as days of fasting, but their particular purpose is prayer for those called to Holy Orders.

These four sets are conveniently described as the Advent or Winter Ember Days, the Lenten or Spring Ember Days, the Pentecost or Summer Ember Days, and the Holy Cross or Autumn Ember Days. Their repeated appearance through the year gives the Church a seasonal rhythm of prayer for ministry.

This emphasis is deeply practical. The Church always needs faithful bishops, priests, and deacons, and she should not assume that such laborers simply appear. Jesus himself commands his disciples to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into his harvest. Ember Days give that command a place in the calendar.

They also provide an opportunity for Christians to pray for those discerning a vocation, for seminarians and ordinands, for clergy already serving, and for the holiness and faithfulness of the Church’s ministry more broadly. The BCP provides Ember Day Collects for precisely this purpose.

A congregation need not make the observance elaborate for it to matter. Three days of particular prayer, perhaps accompanied by a simpler diet or other appropriate fasting, can remind the whole Church that ordained ministry is a gift to be sought from God rather than an institutional resource to be taken for granted.

Rogation Days

Rogation Days are a separate annual set of three days immediately preceding Ascension Day. The name comes from the Latin rogare (roh-GAH-reh), “to ask” or “to beseech,” and the BCP identifies these days as especially devoted to asking God’s blessing upon agriculture and industry.

The distinction from Ember Days is useful. Ember Days turn the Church’s prayer particularly toward those called to Holy Orders. Rogation Days turn prayer particularly toward the created order, human labor, and the provision by which God gives daily bread. Both may include fasting, and both remind Christians that ordinary life depends upon gifts we do not create for ourselves.

Rogation prayer is especially natural in rural communities, where weather, soil, livestock, harvest, and the work of farmers remain visibly close to daily life. Yet the observance is not only for agricultural places. Modern life can conceal the enormous network of labor through which food reaches a table, homes are built, goods are made, and communities function. Rogation Days ask Christians to notice that dependence and pray for the people whose work ordinarily becomes invisible to us.

The old practice of “beating the bounds,” walking the boundaries of a parish while praying for the land and those who labor upon it, is one traditional expression of Rogation. A parish need not reproduce a medieval custom exactly to receive its wisdom. Walking the neighborhood, praying over gardens or farms, giving thanks for rain and work, remembering those whose livelihoods depend upon the land, and asking God to bless the work of human hands all belong naturally to the spirit of the days.

Feasting and Fasting Belong Together

The Church needs both feasts and fasts because Christians are susceptible to opposite distortions. Without feasting, Christianity can become grim, suspicious of created goods, and unable to receive joy as gift. Without fasting, Christian life can become comfortable, self-indulgent, and spiritually inattentive. The calendar refuses to choose between them.

At Christmas the Church feasts because the Word became flesh. During Eastertide the ordinary Friday fast disappears because the Resurrection has transformed the character of those fifty days. On Ash Wednesday the Church fasts because she is mortal and sinful. On Good Friday she fasts because the Son of God gave himself upon the Cross. Ember Days train prayer toward the ministry of the Church, while Rogation Days train prayer toward creation, labor, and daily bread.

Feasting and fasting therefore arise from the same confession: God is God, and we are his creatures. We feast because creation and redemption are gifts. We fast because gifts are not gods and appetites are not masters. Both disciplines teach gratitude.

Why This Calendar Matters

It would be easy to regard the liturgical calendar as elaborate ecclesiastical machinery, useful for clergy and liturgical enthusiasts but peripheral to ordinary Christian life. That would miss what the calendar is trying to do. It makes a claim about time itself: our days do not belong finally to commerce, politics, entertainment, school schedules, sports seasons, or even our own plans. Time belongs to the Lord.

The feasts give the Church memory. Without Ascension Day, Christians can easily speak as though Jesus disappeared after Easter rather than confessing that the risen Christ has been enthroned at the Father’s right hand and presently reigns. Without Holy Cross Day, the Cross can recede into the background after Good Friday. Without the apostolic feasts, the people through whom Christ first carried his Gospel into the world can become names detached from actual lives of costly obedience.

The fasts perform a parallel work. Ash Wednesday tells the truth about sin and death before Lent can become a vague season of self-improvement. Good Friday keeps Christians beneath the Cross long enough to remember that forgiveness is costly because the Son bore the cost. Ordinary Fridays return us quietly to that Cross throughout the year, while the Ember and Rogation Days teach us to pray for ministries, vocations, harvests, work, and provision that we might otherwise simply assume will continue.

The calendar also resists the tyranny of whatever happens to be urgent today. News cycles demand that every present controversy become the center of the universe. The Christian year answers by returning us to events that actually determine the meaning of history. Christ was born, Christ died, Christ rose, Christ ascended, Christ reigns, and Christ will come again. The Church can therefore take the present seriously without being swallowed by it.

How to Begin

For someone new to the Christian year, the full calendar can feel like too much at once. The best beginning is not to attempt everything but to learn the hierarchy and receive its rhythm gradually.

Begin with Sunday. Gather with the Church on the Lord’s Day and allow the weekly Resurrection feast to become the foundation of Christian time. Then learn the Principal Feasts and make a deliberate effort to observe them, particularly those such as Ascension Day that often fall outside the ordinary Sunday pattern.

From there, begin noticing the Red-Letter Holy Days. A weekday Eucharist is ideal where one is available, but meaningful observance can also begin with the Prayer Book Collect and the appointed Scripture readings. Let the feast ask its own questions rather than treating every saint as interchangeable. Andrew asks whom we are bringing to Jesus. Thomas turns us toward the risen Lord whom he confessed as God. Mary Magdalene teaches the Church to announce what she has seen and heard of Christ.

The Daily Office provides one of the simplest ways to inhabit the calendar because its Collects, Psalms, lessons, seasons, and commemorations bring the Christian year naturally into ordinary prayer. A household calendar or parish calendar can likewise make the Red-Letter Days, Ember Days, Rogation Days, and fasts visible before they arrive.

The calendar is also inhabited through practices that serve its seasons without replacing them. The Advent wreath can teach households to wait for the coming Christ; the Great Litany gives the Church a comprehensive language of repentance, deliverance, and intercession especially suited to Advent, Lent, Rogation Days, and other solemn occasions; and the Paschal Candle gives visible expression to the Resurrection hope proclaimed from the Great Vigil through the Great Fifty Days. The Reconciliation of a Penitent gives Christians a pastoral means of bringing particular sins and a burdened conscience into the light of Christ’s forgiveness, while The Exhortation calls communicants to self-examination, repentance, reconciliation, and lively faith as they prepare to receive Holy Communion. These practices serve the calendar best when they direct attention beyond themselves toward Jesus Christ.

Then consider the disciplines of fasting. Begin wisely rather than dramatically. A simpler Friday meal joined to prayer can be more spiritually useful than an unsustainable discipline attempted once and abandoned. Keep Ash Wednesday and Good Friday with particular seriousness, and allow the Ember and Rogation Days to broaden fasting beyond private self-examination into prayer for the Church, human work, and the needs of the world. The purpose is not to become proficient at calendar keeping but to let Christian time form Christian attention.

Conclusion

The Anglican calendar gives the Church a disciplined way of remembering what is true. Its Principal Feasts proclaim the great mysteries of the faith, its Red-Letter Holy Days show the grace of Christ embodied in particular lives and events, its Optional Commemorations widen our memory across the history of the Church, and its fasts teach the body to join the soul in repentance, prayer, dependence, and mercy. Around all of them stands Sunday, the weekly celebration of the Resurrection from which Christian time receives its deepest character.

The hierarchy and disciplines of the BCP are therefore not arbitrary layers of religious obligation. They order the Church’s attention. Feasts teach us to receive God’s gifts with joy, while fasts teach us that neither comfort nor appetite can save us. Both lead us away from self-sufficiency and back toward grace.

The calendar is not an end in itself, and it should never become a substitute for the living Christ to whom it points. Its value lies precisely in its ability to return the Church to him, year after year, through Scripture, prayer, Sacrament, repentance, remembrance, and praise. From Advent’s expectation through Christmas and Epiphany, from Lent and the Cross into the joy of Easter and Pentecost, and through the long green season of ordinary discipleship, Christian time keeps telling the same story: Jesus Christ is Lord, time belongs to him, and the Church is learning to live accordingly.