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begins with the first Sunday of Advent, four Sundays before Christmas.
Although the year begins on 1 January, the Feast of Christ’s circumcision and
also of St Basil the Great, properly speaking the Church Year is considered to
begin on 1 September, the beginning of the Indiction (the Byzantine tax year!),
a day now dedicated to prayer for the environment, and also the Feast of the
great saint of the fifth century, St Symeon the Stylite, or Pillar Saint.
Within this solar year, other cycles can be discerned: a cycle bound up
with the Feast of the Nativity of Christ, Christmas, stretching from the Feast
of the Annunciation to the Feast of the Meeting of the Lord in the Temple, in
the West the Purification, and another cycle, associated with the life of the
Mother of God, drawn not from the canonical Gospels, but from apocryphal
writings, the so-called Protevangelium of James and the accounts of the
Dormition and Assumption of the Mother of God. The Protevangelium is a
second-century account of the life of the Virgin up to the massacre of the
Innocents. It is a remarkable text, full of symbolism. It is here we find the story
that, at the Annunciation, the Virgin was spinning the scarlet and purple thread
for the veil of the Temple, the veil that will be rent asunder at the Crucifixion,
and the account of Joseph, going in search of a midwife, leaving the Virgin in a
cave, and as Christ is born, finding that time stands still: ‘But I, Joseph, was
walking, and I was not walking. I looked up to the vault of heaven, and saw it
standing still… I looked down at the torrential stream, and I saw some goats
whose mouths were over the water, but they were not drinking. Then suddenly
everything returned to its normal course’ (Prot. 18.2). The Protevangelium yields
the feasts of her Nativity on 8 September, her Entry into the Temple on 21
November, after which the Marian cycle merges with the cycle based on the
Nativity of Christ. The Marian cycle ends with the feast of the Dormition on
15 August, drawn too from apocryphal accounts, which was decreed a feast of
the Byzantine Empire by the Emperor Maurice at the end of the sixth century.
The Marian cycle more or less embraces the Church Year, moving from
September to August. In passing, Joseph’s experience of the stillness of creation
at the birth of the Saviour seems to me to find an echo in the belief that
animals can talk on Christmas Eve—to the fury of the cat Simpkin in Beatrix
Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester!
In the Church Year, therefore, we have a conjunction of various cycles,
that shape the year and enable us to move through the various elements that
constitute the events that add up to the engagement between God and
humanity that culminated in the Incarnation.

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