The Church gives us a calendar

Most calendars are flat. Mondays look like Mondays. Decembers look like Novembers. The Church's calendar is not flat. It is a map of grace. Advent. Christmas. Lent. Easter. Pentecost. Ordinary Time. The same year, lived liturgically, becomes a path of conversion that draws the soul deeper each turn around.

This is the rhythm Bishop Davies preaches in his pastoral letters. Each season opens with a letter. Each season ends with the next.

Advent: waiting

Four weeks before Christmas. Purple vestments. The Advent wreath, one candle a week. The cry of Isaiah and John the Baptist: prepare the way of the Lord.

Bishop Davies opened our 175th anniversary year on the First Sunday of Advent, 30 November 2025:

I write as this Jubilee Year draws to its close and our Shrewsbury Diocese celebrates 175 years since its founding. The Jubilee of 2025 has been dedicated to hope. Christian hope is never a vague expectation that things might work out, rather it is knowing on what, or rather on who we can truly depend.

Pastoral Letter on Advent and the 175th Anniversary, 30 November 2025.

Practise Advent: light a candle a week, say the O Antiphons in the final week, go to confession before Christmas. Refuse to skip ahead.

Christmas: God among us

Twelve days, not one. The Church does not stop on Boxing Day. The Octave runs to 1 January, the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. The Christmas season runs to the Baptism of the Lord in early January.

From the Bishop's Christmas Message 2025:

The Christmas lights, which at this moment of the year illuminate all our streets and roads, gently recall that sure light which has guided the best in our history. In these increasingly unstable and uncertain times, we will always find in the light of Christmas, our truest guide.

Practise Christmas: keep the crib up until 2 February (Candlemas). Sing carols all twelve days. Visit a friend, a neighbour, a relative who is alone.

Ordinary Time: growth

The longest stretches of the year, in green vestments. Between Christmas and Lent, and again from Pentecost to Advent. Most of the Church's year is Ordinary, and that is the point. Holiness happens in ordinary weeks, on ordinary Tuesdays.

This is where the daily disciplines do their work. Daily prayer. Weekly Mass. Monthly confession. The Examen at night. Friendship with the saints. Without Ordinary Time, the great seasons would have nothing to grow in.

Lent: conversion

Forty days from Ash Wednesday to Easter. Purple again. Fasting, prayer, almsgiving. Bishop Davies framed Lent 2026 around the surge of adult converts:

It is by striving to live our own conversion that we can best support a new generation of converts. For Lent calls us to recognise that every member of the Church must always be a convert.

Pastoral Letter for Lent 2026.

The 171 candidates at the 2026 Rite of Election in Shrewsbury Cathedral are the fruit of countless quiet Lents. Yours is part of theirs.

Practise Lent: pick one thing to give up, one thing to add, one thing to give. Go to the Stations of the Cross weekly. Confession in Holy Week.

Easter: resurrection

Fifty days. The longest season of the year. White and gold vestments. The Easter Vigil at the Cathedral with new fire, baptisms, Confirmations, the Exultet sung in the dark. From Bishop Davies' Easter homily 2026:

This Easter morning, many thousands of adults, mainly young adults mostly from no religious background, have made their way through the shadows and darkness of our time like the women and the apostles on the first Easter morning to 'see and believe' that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead and truly present in His Church, supremely in His Eucharist.

Practise Easter: keep celebrating for fifty days. Eat well on Sundays. Go on a pilgrimage to Holywell. Renew your baptismal promises at home.

The Chrism Mass and the saints' days

Two more rhythms run through the year. The Chrism Mass, celebrated by Bishop Davies in Holy Week at the Cathedral, when he blesses the oils used across the diocese for the year ahead. And the saints' days, which fall like punctuation across every month.

Use the saints' calendar too. Saint Werburgh on 3 February. Saint Winefride on 3 November. Saint Newman, Doctor of the Church, on 9 October. Each name is an invitation.

Why this matters

We are bodies, not just minds. We learn through repetition, through colour, through fast and feast, through the same prayers said at the same hour. The liturgical year forms us in a way no podcast can. It teaches us that life is going somewhere, that the path leads through the Cross to the Resurrection, every year, deeper.

The Catechism puts it: In the liturgical year, the various aspects of the one Paschal mystery unfold (CCC 1171). One mystery. Unfolded slowly.

Your next step this season

Look at where you are in the calendar today. Then do one thing.

• Subscribe to the Universalis app for the season, the saint of the day, and the readings.
• Mark Ash Wednesday, the Chrism Mass, the Easter Vigil, and the First Sunday of Advent in your diary. Be at the Cathedral or your parish for them.
• Write to info@dioceseofshrewsbury.org for the diocesan pilgrimage calendar.

Stop drifting through the year. Let the Church carry you through it.