What Time is It? The Feast of Christ the King and Our Approach to Marking Time

By Published on November 22, 2015

CHESAPEAKE, VA (Catholic Online) — This Sunday we celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, the last Sunday of our liturgical year. Yet, for many Catholics who commemorate the Feast, it is just one more somewhat esoteric celebration which we go through every year at this time. This mistake is at least right on one count, it really is all about time.  The It is one of many opportunities the Liturgical Church year offers to each one of us consider this creature which is called time, receive it as a gift and begin to really live differently.

The Christian is invited into an eternal perspective, beginning in the here and now. We can actually begin to receive time — and its passing — as a gift from God. This can actually be one of the many things which make us counter-cultural in an age which is obsessed with fighting the passage of time. As the current age rushes toward self-idolatry and falls into nihilism, the number of things which make us counter-cultural is increasing. The West has abandoned its foundations in Christendom and is wandering aimlessly, like Cain, East of Eden in a new land of Nod. (Genesis 4:16)

Our choice to actually live the Christian year, in a compelling, evangelistic and inviting way, can become a profoundly important form of missionary activity in an age deluded by the barrenness of secularism. A robust, evangelically alive and symbolically rich practice of living liturgically can invite our neighbors to examine their lives and be drawn to Jesus Christ, the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. As the emptiness of a life without God fails to fulfill the longing in their own hearts, we are invited to live a missionary witness.

Catholic Christians are invited to mark time by the great events of the Christian faith in a Liturgical calendar. However, like so much that is contained within the treasury of the Catholic Church; the practice must be understood in order to be fully received as a gift and actually begin to inform the pattern of our daily lives. In other words, to move from piety to reality.

Read the article “What Time is It? The Feast of Christ the King and Our Approach to Marking Time” on catholic.org.

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