KEEPING THE FEAST
Photo from Pixabay.
The stretch of liturgical time from Michaelmas through Advent is one of my favorite parts of the Church year, despite a number of factors that should prevent the season from endearing itself to me. Firstly, where I live, this coincides with the time of year where the world gets darker and colder, which usually feels like an affront directed at me, personally. Secondly, until we hit Advent we are in the back half of Ordinary Time, so every Sunday can feel like the eleventy-fifth Sunday after Pentecost if I let the intentionality of my observance slip.
Blessedly, I have found two practices that help me mitigate both complacent monotony in my spiritual life and existential dread regarding the turn of the year: saints’ days and liturgical baking. These two forms of observance keep me grounded in history and Christian heritage, and provide an anchor to spiritual life that is separate from Sunday mornings.
I’ve been a complete nerd about saints for most of my life. I had multiple books of saints’ lives when I was young, and I loved learning all the symbols that enabled me to recognize them in art. Because I was raised on the hymn “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God” (I even had the picture book), the saints never seemed remote or unreachable to me—as it turns out, singing “For the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too” almost as soon as you can talk makes quite an impact. I learned to see the saints as examples of Christian life, and also as people I could ask to pray for me the same way I might ask a friend who still currently existed in this world, as opposed to the next.
It was during college that I really started to take note of when the feast days of my favorite saints were. While there are some absolute legends scattered throughout the first and middle parts of the year (David of Wales and Joseph in March as late winter turns into spring; a nifty little run at the end of July that includes Mary Magdalene, Ignatius of Loyola, and Mary, Martha, and Lazarus of Bethany; and the Mother of God herself in August) I was pleased to find that so many of my favorite saints could be neatly celebrated within the confines of the fall semester. First assignments came due around Michaelmas at the end of September, and final papers were generally done by St. Lucy in mid-December. In between that I made time to remember Francis and Luke, revel in the beauty of All Saints and All Souls, and reflect on the lives of Martin of Tours, Hilda of Whitby, Cecelia, and Catherine of Alexandria.
Catherine of Alexandria in particular became (and remains) a favorite among favorites. She is the patron saint of women students and scholars, and, depending on who you ask, also of librarians, which I appreciated because it meant I had an alternative to St. Jerome. (1) Whether or not she existed as a distinct historical personage is debated, but I decided that didn’t really matter to me. The entire question made me recall something my father told me when I was young regarding the historicity of St. Christopher: even if the saint himself were a legend and a legend only, he still walked the earth any time someone helped someone else cross a body of water. So too does Catherine exist, I think, when women pursue their studies as part of their service to God, and also when they have to deal with guys on Twitter who say “debate me.”
Marking the saints became a way of marking time that could be separated from the pressures and obligations of my academic life. As my mental health and the political climate took a nosedive halfway through college, I began adopting the strategy of “find joy wherever you can and hold onto it really tight.” Lesser feasts, in my opinion, are perfect for this, and it was researching traditional ways to celebrate these feasts that led to me to the practice of liturgical baking, which has become indispensable to my religious observance.
My liturgical cooking isn’t confined to baking, and neither is it confined to my favorite stretch of autumn feasts. I make Welsh cakes for St. David’s Day on March 1, and my mother and I coped with early lockdown by making homemade pierogi for the first time on St. Joseph’s Day, 2020. (St. Joseph is, among many things, the patron saint of Poland.) Every Lent brings me homemade soft pretzels, as well as new adventures in meatless recipes. Baking, however, mostly belongs to the twilight of the year, the days when afternoons end early and evensong ends in the dark. The three feasts I absolutely have to bake for are Michaelmas, All Saints, and St. Lucy’s Day, which fall almost equidistant from each other.
My journey into liturgical baking actually began with my Michaelmas research, which I found fitting as I was baptized at a parish named for St. Michael. According to English folklore, Michaelmas is the last day to pick blackberries before they turn sour: apparently when Michael kicked Lucifer out of heaven he fell into a blackberry bush, and because sin means we can’t have nice things, this ruined the fruit. I thought this story was as good an excuse as I’d ever heard for blackberry cobbler.
I make soul cakes for All Saints, although the name’s a bit misleading, as the recipe I use yields something closer to sweet biscuits. In Britain and Ireland the practice of souling flourished during the medieval era and continued into the early modern, though by the end of the nineteenth century it had largely dwindled. Souling involved people—often children—going from door to door during Hallowmastide to offer prayers for the household and their beloved dead in exchange for soul cakes. I always make far more than I can eat on my own, which is integral to soul cakes as a concept, I think. They have always existed to be shared. Bringing my extras to my workplace (the library I used to work at had something of an interfaith liturgical baking culture going on, it was awesome) or to tea at a friend’s house helps foster the conviviality that I desperately need as winter comes and I risk retreating into myself.
By the time St. Lucy comes around on December 13, things are properly cold and dark. The feast is widely celebrated in Scandinavia, and it is the Scandinavians we have to thank for lussekatter, saffron buns with raisins. (The raisins are sometimes said to represent Lucy’s eyes, which, depending on which variant of her story you consult, were either removed by the Romans as part of her martyrdom, or by herself, to dissuade suitors from pursuing her. The earliest accounts of her life are missing the eye-gouging altogether. In any case, she is now the patron saint of people with eye trouble, which is one of the reasons I was drawn to her as a child—my eyesight is truly atrocious.)
St. Lucy’s Day had the longest night of the year under the Julian calendar, and Lucy’s name combined with her patronage of sight and the darkness of the season have made her commemoration a feast of light. Since it also falls about halfway through Advent, that journey into the darkest part of the year in which we find the Light of the World, I take time to check in with myself as I watch the saffron-infused milk turn yellow as it heats on the stove—How’s the spiritual housecleaning going? Am I feeling overwhelmed by darkness? Am I ready to take that bone-deep uneasiness and lay it at the feet of Christ? The joy of the ritual comes not only from the comfort of its predictability—this is what we do at this time of the year, and we do it every year—but from the continued nourishment it provides my spiritual development.
Accompanying all of this is music and poetry. I sing “Ye holy angels bright” and “Christ, the fair glory of the holy angels” while whisking cobbler batter, I listen to the same choral music every Eve of All Hallows, and I read John Donne’s “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day” aloud even if I’m the only one home.
Taking the time to surround myself with such beautiful reminders of the communion of saints both helps me mark time, as I progress through another year, and reminds me that life in God supersedes time and space. As the spiritual goes, “same train carry everybody” to that greater light on another shore. I am connected to all the Christians who have come before me and all to who will come after me, and a baked good on a saint’s day helps me make sure I don’t forget.
I will confess when I formed this opinion in college I had not read any of Jerome’s work but was aware that at least some of his writing is not particularly kind to women as a category, so I didn’t want him as my patron saint.
