#liturgical year

Interrupting the stream of November comics to let you know I made a free printable liturgical calendar, for the liturgical year fans out there. (Happy Advent!)

For folks who are new here: I’m a UX designer and a liturgical calendar nerd and I think a lot about how different tools shape our perception of time. I think the way we experience time is deeply linked with the ways that capitalism warps our souls, and I’m interested in tools and rituals that invite us outside of “productive” time and into sacred and communal time.

I designed the calendar to be split up by liturgical seasons, rather than calendar months, with Sunday (Christian sabbath & reminder of resurrection) as the core of the week.

Download the printable calendar here

A few quotes from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath, which has deeply influenced how I think about time and the sacred:

“Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours alike, qualitiless, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.

Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals; and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn …

To the biblical mind … labor is the means toward an end, and the Sabbath as a day of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one’s lost strength and becoming fit for the forthcoming labor. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.

The sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of the Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.”