There's a method of praying which I think I'm right in saying is associated mainly with St Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, which involves taking a scene or an incident, usually from the gospels, and imagining ourselves present in the scene - listening to Christ preaching, perhaps, identifying with an individual in the scene, imagining the attitudes and reactions of the other people present and generally reconstructing the event in our imagination. It's a means of concentrating our mind on Christ, his teaching and his actions, and making them more immediate to us.
Every winter, when the four weeks of Advent come round, and a new church year starts again, that's the kind of thing we're supposed to do with the new liturgical season.
We're supposed to think back to, and place ourselves within, the period before the coming of Christ and, in our imaginations, enter into the attitudes and feelings that people had then as they waited for the arrival of the Messiah.
Among the Chosen People then there was a great sense of anticipation: they were waiting eagerly for a decisive intervention by God. They had a great sense of being in need of rescue and liberation by God, and longed for him to act soon. So the mood of the Jewish people at that time was one of expectation: they were making themselves ready, and concentrating on being found to be ready, when the Messiah finally arrived. That's the mood or mentality that we're supposed to recapture and play through again in our imaginations as we celebrate the Advent Season and commemorate the events leading up to Jesus' birth.
In many ways, what's true for Advent is true for the whole of the Church Year - the liturgical cycle and the seasons and feasts that make it up.
In the course of every year the liturgy goes over the major events in Jesus' life and mission, from the time before his birth (Advent) to his death and resurrection (Easter), supported by scriptural readings about other major events in the history of the Jewish people in Old Testament times, and about major events in the life of the first Christian communities - the institutution of the Eucharist, for example, on Holy Thursday during Holy Week, or the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost towards the end of the Easter Season.
The liturgical cycle as a whole has a purpose. It's a tool for us to use and to engage with, so as to gradually increase our knowledge of Christ and our familiary with him and his message.
The way I often think about it is that if someone is a member of one of the Church's religious orders - the Benedictines, say, or the Francisicans or the Carmelites - then they get a training in the particular spirituality of their order. Through the training they take on the identity and charism of their order; they become recognisable as Benedictines, Franciscans, or whatever.
If we're just an ordinary layperson or an ordinary secular priest, we don't have those particular tools or that special training. But one of the main tools we do have, to help us develop our identity as Christian disciples, is the liturgical cycle.
If we enter into the meaning and the themes of each of the different seasons and feast days as they come round year after year; if we reflect on the particular aspects of the faith that each season and feast highlights, then the church year acts as a training in the whole field of Christian belief and spirituality. It helps us become recognisable as followers of Christ.
But if we don't pay much attention to the changing seasons, or attend Mass so seldom that we lose any sense of the rhythm of the liturgical cycle as a whole, then we'll lose most of the impact that it could have on us.
So the end of one church year and the beginning of another is an ideal time to reflect on the value and purpose of whole liturgical cycle, and an ideal time for all of us to think about taking part in it more consciously, treating it as a spiritual tool that helps us delve more and more deeply into the mystery of our salvation, as we repeat it and journey through it year after year.
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