The Value of a Calendar of Commemorations in the Church

"The calendar of commemorations is a kind of genealogical exploration of who one's spiritual ancestors have been.  It is a way of encouraging people to examine the personal stories of certain women and men to learn of the richness and the potential of human life lived by the grace of God in Jesus Christ.  A study of the calendar is at once a course in theology, church history (and sometimes political history as well), spirituality, and prayer.  Such a calendar can convey something of the breadth of Christian history and provide a rich assorted variety of the young and the old, learned and ignorant, people of action and contemplatives, whose common denominator is simply that the grace of God worked mightily within them."
-From: Philip H. Pfatteicher, Festivals and Commemorations: Handbook to the Calendar in Lutheran Book of Worship, Augsburg, 1980, 16.

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