Last year, I started a thread on Furs For Christ to share thoughts on the Church's calendar claled "Living in Liturgical Time." As I explained there, the liturgical calendar helps us integrate the natural world and our everyday lives with our faith. Which I think is the more important as I think Christianity has, in the West, become more and more of an abstraction.

Since the FFC website is currently down, I decided to start posting here. And might keep posting here even after it's back up; so I hope any non-Christian followers I might acquire can put up with it.

Also, this is late. Passiontide starts on Passion Sunday, or I presume sundown on the previous Saturday; and now it would be, liturgically, Wednesday. ><

Now, Passiontide, the two weeks of Passion Week and Holy Week, is the season of deepest mourning for the Church, the third and final stage of the Lenten cycle that begins with Septuagesima, and the ultimate rup up to the cataclysm of Good Friday. Statues and other religious imagery are veiled (in accordance with the traditional Gospel of Passion Sunday, in which Jesus "hid himself" from the Sanhedrin's guards); the Gloria is no longer said in the Introit. Ritually the church is commemmorating the death of God, and the sins and errors that led to it, and still lead to it figuratively: that is, the killing of God's love on earth by greed, malice and arrogance. (And just plain ignorance.)

Incidentally this year the Feast of the Annunciation falls during Passiontide, so I'll (hopefully) be making another post soon.