I’m very often asked about the different kinds of holy days mentioned in the Sunday bulletins and e-newsletters. What’s up with these days? The short answer is that days of obligation are days on which we are obligated to attend the Mass — these days include all Sundays and for us, four other days (see below). Other Holy Days are not obligatory, but are opportunities for growth. Of course, as always, there’s a long answer, too!
The Faith is the power of God in our lives to transform us into the likeness of Christ. Every aspect of our lives must be submitted to this wonderful process: it’s not just something that goes on in our heads. The process has traditionally been called “the cure of souls”: we live the life of the Faith so that our souls may be cured and made fit for intimate union with God. In the second reading for Morning Prayer on All Saints’ Day, we read about the consummation of all things in the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, and we are told, “Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to [the Lord]: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready” (Rev. 19:7).
We are, corporately and individually, the Bride of Christ. To be saved is to be incorporated into that Body as those who have made themselves ready. We do this through the therapeutic, saving work of God in the Church. Like any therapy, there are stages we go through. There are things we must do, whether we want to or not; things we must avoid, whether we want to or not. The goal is for our healing to progress so that we come to want to do what we must do, and so that we want to avoid what we must avoid. What begins as a discipline becomes a habit of virtue, and habits of virtue become pathways to joy.
It is our obligation to “attend Divine Service regularly on the Lord’s Day, and on other days of obligation, as a Christian Duty, and as an act of Worship and Witness, unless hindered by sickness or other unavoidable cause" (Canon 18.2.01(b)). The Bishop Ordinary sets the days of obligation apart from Sundays. Our Bishop has set the following days of obligation: Christmas, Annunciation, Ascension, and All Saints.
If we fail to attend the Eucharist on a Sunday or day of obligation, except for “sickness or other unavoidable cause”, we have shirked our “Christian Duty” and failed in “Worship and Witness”. Our adherence to worship on these days is not only our obligation to God, but is an act of witness to the world around us that the Mass is really the center of our lives. Or that at least we’re trying to make it the center of our lives. Why? Because Christ is the center of our lives, and he is waiting for us in the Mass.
There are, as the exception indicates, acceptable reasons for missing these days: someone who is ill, or who cannot drive at night to an evening Mass, or who has an employer who will not give leave may not be able to attend. There has traditionally been leeway for those who are traveling. But we have a responsibility to ensure that “unavoidable” doesn’t come to mean “inconvenient”: Mass is almost never convenient!
We might rebel against this as legalism, but it is an obligation laid upon us for our health and healing. Legalism is the mistaking of inessential things for essential. But there is an opposite error of mistaking essential things for inessential. Both are to be avoided.
The days of obligation are an essential part of the cure of our souls: God makes demands upon us, but none of these is arbitrary. And as we submit ourselves more and more to them, we find that they become less and less burdensome (most of the time — we all have our ups and downs!). “My yoke is easy”, our Lord assures us — but He doesn’t assure us that it will always seem easy to us. This part depends upon our progress in the spiritual life. But they are part of that practice of “making ourselves ready” for the Marriage of the Lamb.
Prayer Book holy days are those Feasts for which a Collect, Epistle, and Gospel are set forth in the Prayer Book. Most Prayer Book Holy days are not days of obligation, but all of our days of obligation are also Prayer Book Holy Days — Christmas, Annunciation, Ascension, and All Saints.
In everything, Christ asks in and through His Church only that we do our best. So don’t get worked up over the occasional reminder regarding days of obligation, any more than you do when a doctor says, “Take one of these huge, awful-tasting pills three times a day with food”. Or when he directs us to exercise a certain number of times a week for a certain amount of time. We all understand that these things are inconvenient, but we also understand that they are directions given for our health. Somehow, we miss this in the spiritual life, which we tend to think of as something we make up for ourselves, or that we get involved in only so much as is convenient.
Think about the life of prayer: praying in any systematic way is very inconvenient. Something will always present itself as more pressing or more interesting or more entertaining. But the Christian life demands of us that we make time for prayer, not because we love rules, but because you cannot have a personal relationship with anyone if you don’t devote time to communication and sharing. That goes for God as well as other people.
Again, Christ asks only that we do our best: but doing our best will at times be very inconvenient. At times, doing our best will rise to the level of being a real pain. But because doing our best in Christ involves not just ourselves, but Christ, it becomes the work of Christ in us, doing more in and through us than we ever thought possible. It will seem like a pain at times. But it is the pain of protest of our fallen nature as it passes away. It is the pain of eyes used to darkness having to adjust to the dawn. It is a growing pain as “we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13).
