As a perpetual student and sometime teacher, I shape my life around the rhythm of the academic year. September is the real New Year, the time of clean desks, fresh loose-leaf and resolutions. After the dark winter months, anticipation points me towards June with its long-awaited release into the lazy hiatus of summer. I live in a part of the world where the seasonal rhythm echoes that pattern: I luxuriate in warm, sunny summer days and begin the serious business of life as the air grows chilly and the leaves change color.

Human beings need rhythm and pattern to their days. As C.S. Lewis’s canny demon Screwtape puts it:

“The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy [God]…has made change pleasurable to them… . But…He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual year; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.”

Neither the academic year nor the calendar year is specifically relevant to my spiritual life. Seeking a spiritual rhythm to my time, I’m grateful for the Adventist heritage of a Sabbath-centered week. Seventh-day Adventists have been able to hold on to something that most Christians have lost: a week oriented around sacred time, with Sabbath at its heart. I read books like Lauren Winner’s Mudhouse Sabbath and Tilden Edwards’ Sabbath Time and recognize that many Christians are struggling to reclaim a gift I’ve had all along.

Lately, though, I’ve found this weekly rhythm isn’t enough. I crave larger patterns, broader rhythms of sacred time. I find myself envying the liturgical year.

I grew up without even knowing there was a liturgical year. As far as I was concerned, the church year was divided into four quarters, punctuated by Thirteenth Sabbaths—which is, in itself, a liturgical year, but one notably lacking in feasts, fasts, and a sense of history. I knew Christmas and Easter, of course, but the first time I visited an Anglican church and found that it was “Third Sunday in Pentecost” I stared at the bulletin blankly. Like most Adventists and many other Protestants, I had no concept of the church year, of time shaped by feasts and fasts and days dedicated to saints.

One Wednesday evening in the middle of a long, cold winter I saw a man coming out of the drugstore with a smudge of dirt on his forehead. My mother said, “That man’s Catholic. He’s been to church for Ash Wednesday.” This was my first glimpse into the mysterious world inhabited by Catholics and Anglicans and all the other churches who shared a common calendar. Ash Wednesday, I learned, was the beginning of Lent, the (roughly) 40-day period before Easter when some Christians—mostly Catholics—tested their spiritual mettle by giving something up, like smoking or drinking or eating chocolate. Given that I didn’t smoke or drink anyway and couldn’t imagine voluntarily giving up chocolate, I didn’t see any immediate application of Lent to my own life.

God gave Israel a liturgical calendar—an annual schedule of feast, fasts and celebrations instituted in the Torah. Later festivals were added—such as Purim and Hanukkah—to commemorate important events in Jewish history. The existence of such a calendar suggests that the Jews, like other world religions, recognized the need to give shape and meaning to the passing weeks and months. A regular and recurring cycle of festivals gives worshipers opportunity to pause at specified times and look backward and forward as a community.

Though most Christians believe the Jewish feasts were abolished with the coming of the Messiah, the Christian church quickly recognized that people still needed sacred time, feasts and holy days. And here’s the root of the problem, the reason so many conservative Protestants reject the liturgical calendar: all these Christian holy days (including Christmas and Easter) are postbiblical, instituted by the church in the first centuries after the apostolic era. While my mother was not technically correct in telling me that Ash Wednesday and Lent were only for Catholics, she was reflecting an attitude common among Protestants.

As Adventists, most of us accept Christmas and Easter—perhaps a little uneasily, with one wary eye on the festivals’ pagan origins and another on the modern commercial travesties they have become. We don’t “do” Lent—though last year my pastor announced he was preaching a sermon series on the last weeks of Christ’s life during the six weeks before Easter, apparently recognizing that those weeks are an appropriate time for solemn reflection. Advent, the four-week period leading up to Christmas, is generally ignored in Adventist churches too, though some Adventists celebrate it at home.

Ours is one such home. I’ve found that setting aside the month of December as a period for reflection and anticipation of Jesus’ birth helps combat the relentless onslaught of Retail Christmas during the same period. I try to have Christmas shopping done before November ends, and to put off celebrations and parties as much as possible to the traditional twelve days of feasting after Christmas Day. We light candles on an Advent wreath during family worship in December, adding one each Friday night as our seven-year-old reads an Advent prayer for that week. Each week, too, we add new figures to the manger scene, until all is in readiness for Christmas Eve, when we place the Baby Jesus in the manger.

Lent, too, has become an important part of the shape of my year. During those six weeks—cold, dark weeks, where I live—I try to give up something I enjoy. I understand now that a fast is not about earning credit with God, but about building the discipline of self-denial that forces me to rely on God and draw closer to him. One of my Lenten observances involves giving up reading fiction—my favorite hobby—and replacing my novels with a stack of theological or devotional books I’ve been “meaning to get around to.” Immersing myself in spiritual reading during Lent stretches both my mind and my spirit.

After those weeks of reflection and self-denial, the springtime celebration of Easter seems far more meaningful; I have reason to rejoice in the Lord’s resurrection after I have spent sacred time contemplating and drawing close to him. I visit other churches during Holy Week; probably no Adventist church will ever offer me a Maundy Thursday service during which the altar is stripped and every light extinguished till the choir is left singing in the dark, a graphic reminder of Jesus’ darkest hour in Gethsemane. On Good Friday I attend an Anglican church for the three-hour service of readings and reflections on Jesus’ suffering. In an ideal world I’d rise for a sunrise service on Easter Sunday, but my experiments in self-denial haven’t quite toughened me to that point yet!

I’m a spiritual seeker, not a theologian. I couldn’t sustain an argument about why it’s appropriate, maybe even necessary, for me to follow the liturgical calendar of the church. I know I believe in enriching my spiritual walk with any practices that are not contrary to Scripture: as Adventists we have developed our own liturgies and traditions (the order of Sabbath service, the quarterly arrangement of Sabbath School studies) without allowing ourselves to benefit from the richness of centuries of Christian tradition. I think we’re poorer for it, but I’m not about to approach my pastor and suggest he begin decking the sanctuary in purple for Lent, or observing the feasts of Epiphany or Pentecost.

Some evangelical Protestants, uncomfortable with the Catholic associations of the Christian liturgical year, have begun exploring the Jewish calendar of festivals as part of their practice. Sharing a Passover seder, fasting on Yom Kippur, lighting the Hanukkah candles, may be the practice that brings shape and meaning to your year.

I don’t think it matters which feasts and fasts we adopt; I do think we can deepen our spiritual journeys by adopting a sacred attitude towards the calendar. In addition to the weekly celebration of Sabbath, shaping the year around spiritual events gives me a sense of meaning and purpose that often seems lacking in modern life. I need fasts to remind me of the reality of sin and lostness; I need feasts to celebrate the goodness of God and his salvation. Sacred time reminds me of a reality beyond my Day-Timer; it brings to my daily life a faint echo of the rhythm of heaven.

Trudy Morgan-Cole is a freelance writer from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada.