A little help from Liturgical types (re: free October devotional resource)

Please forgive me if I get really basic here. Since I don't know you and your background, I cannot get visual cues about when you get it, and so abbreviate what I am going to say...

The Church Year is dominated by two big festivals - Christmas and Easter. Christmas is on a fixed date - December 25 here in the west. Easter, however, is based on a simplified lunar calendar, and so is on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Spring Equinox, if I recall correctly. And so it floats around a bit depending on the year.

Christmas is surrounded by 4 weeks of preparation for it (Advent), twelve days to celebrate it (Dec. 25 to Jan. 5) and is followed by Epiphany - the wise men coming to bring gifts to Jesus (Jan 6 traditionally, but at least in the USA, the Roman Catholic Church moves it to a Sunday) and the Baptism of Jesus on the Sunday after that to tell the story of Jesus beginning his earthly ministry. Also based on the date of Christmas are minor festivals like the Annunciation 9 months before Dec 25 (So Mar 25), and the birth of John the Baptist six months prior (June 24), the events that followed on the relevant days for Jesus as he came from a pious Jewish family, so circumcision on Jan 1 (8th day), and presentation at the temple on Feb 2 (40th day).

Easter has a season of preparation for it as well - 40 days of Lent which starts on "Ash Wednesday". In figuring out the days, Sundays are traditionally not counted since they are all to some extent miniature celebrations of Easter. The Sunday before Easter is "Palm Sunday" - a celebration of both Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem and how this brought him into a conflict with the authorities that lead to his death. (Some churches have separated these into two separate Sundays). And then "Maundy Thursday" - where Jesus gives us a new commandment to Love one another, and gave us the meal of his Love for us. Then Good Friday - the day when Jesus choose to offer himself for us. Then there is Easter Vigil where while Jesus is going from Death to Life, there is an ancient tradition of bringing people into the church by Baptism - uniting with Jesus in his passage from death to life and reminding us all that we are also brought from death to life in this by Jesus.

Easter itself proper is then celebrated by a week of weeks (seven weeks), and then on the 50th day is Pentecost - the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the community of disciples bringing the message of Jesus to the World. The Sunday after this is given to the celebration of how we understand the God who has done all this - the Holy Trinity.

In addition there can be minor festivals for significant figures and events in the life of the church. For people, it is almost always on the anniversary of their death - the date their earthly struggles finished.

Since the seasons of preparation and celebration of Christmas and Easter do not cover the entire year, the rest of the year is filled with telling the story of Jesus's earthly ministry, reading through stories from the four Gospels. Traditionally this was a one-year cycle, but Vatican 2 expanded it to a year each of Matthew, Mark and Luke (with John filling in Mark's summer and lots of Lent and Easter) and other "liturgical" bodies have generally found this expansion to be a good idea. This is where Year A, B, and C come from... For the weeks after Epiphany, it is easy to number them consecutively since they have an easy start date. But for the current part of the year (between Trinity and Advent) it is more complicated. The readings themselves pick up basically where they were interrupted by Lent/Easter. And the Roman Catholics show this by just numbering the readings as what week in Ordinary Time it is.

But we Protestant liturgical bodies have generally referred to those Sundays as "x Sunday after Pentecost" (or after Trinity), and so number those same readings as "Proper x - for Sunday between y and z".

As a LCMS Lutheran, using our current Lectionary, we are on the week of Proper 21, with Mark 9:38-50 as the Gospel text which was read last Sunday. In looking through year A of the resource, which is what I have, it would look like this would be week 43.

In short, for traditional devotional use, you use the Sunday reading for the week, and so the date of that Sunday determines what reading to use, not today's date. That said, it might not be a bad thing to use next Sunday's readings as a devotional to prepare for Sunday. My understanding of the RCL daily lectionary (which I admittedly have not used) is that it kind of mixes the two. The first few days of the week it tries to offer Biblical readings that reflect on the previous Sunday, but at the end of the week it offers readings to prepare for the next Sunday.

Is it possible to map these resources to the Catholic Daily Readings or Lectionary?

Deacon Steve said:

Is it possible to map these resources to the Catholic Daily Readings or Lectionary?

Probably not, strictly speaking, because they don't follow that Catholic calendar.