(Contributor Tate Pumfrey here offers a window into the Church’s traditions and customs, which are of venerable lineage, but, we should add, no longer binding on Catholics. That said, one may follow some or some part of these customs out of devotion. The Church leaves much up to our conscience, for better or worse, as we follow the path God lays out for each of us in our pilgrimage in hope to heaven)
Today, we celebrate the Feast of Michaelmas. St. Michael, the chief archangel, has long been loved by the Catholic faithful, going back to the early Church. Although “Michaelmas” has fallen out of familiar parlance, it was once one of the principal feasts in the fabric of European life. Life in Medieval Europe was marked by liturgical time.
In medieval England, liturgical time was not simply something you did at church: it completely permeated the civic sphere. There were the Quarter Days: Lady Day (Annunciation, March 25th), Midsummer’s Day (Nativity of St. John the Baptist, June 24th), then Michaelmas (September 29th), and lastly Christmas (December 25th). The Quarter Days marked the changes of the season in the legal, economic, and agricultural spheres. School terms began, rents were paid, and crops were sown or harvested based on the quarter days. To this day, the fall term at Cambridge University is still called the Michaelmas term. Likewise, laws would be enacted, and men would hold court around the Quarter Days.
Lady Day, March 25th, was the start of the civic year in England until 1752 when the civic year’s beginning was conformed to the Scottish practice of January 1st. It is a great shame that the Annunciation is no longer the beginning of the civic year, for on that day our salvation through the Incarnation of Christ began. As a side note, the Presbyterian Scots with their science and their capitalism could not outdo Holy Mother Church, for January 1st was, until 1969, the Feast of the Circumcision. As uncomfortable as we moderns may find such a feast, there is a beautiful symbolism of the first shedding of the Precious Blood of Christ covering the whole of the new civic year in His blessing.
Returning to Michaelmas, there are many traditions associated with its celebration. As it falls just after the autumnal equinox, it marks the end of the summer’s agricultural activities. The last of the grain crops are harvested, fruits, especially apples, are picked, and carrots are dug.
Folklore tells us that when St. Michael drove Satan out of Heaven, which was naturally on September 29th, the devil landed rather uncomfortably on a blackberry bush, adding insult to injury. There are two versions of this story. In one, the devil spits on the blackberries, cursing them. Alternatively, in his self-pitying, which is a form of pride, he wet himself, making the blackberries unsafe to eat after Michaelmas. In much of England, even today, spider webs typically begin to overtake the blackberry brambles after Michaelmas; the spiritual realm and the natural realm are woven together.
In a passage of George Gascoigne, leading poet of the early Elizabethan era, we find this, from 1575:
And when the tenants come to pay their quarter’s rent,
They bring some fowl at Midsummer, a dish of fish in Lent,
At Christmas a capon, at Michaelmas a goose,
And somewhat else at New-year’s tide, for fear their lease fly loose.
Goose is traditionally eaten on Michaelmas in the British Isles. Its origin is unknown but goes back well before the Protestant Reformation. In Scotland, we find St. Michael’s Bannock. Somewhat between a pancake and a scone, it is a mix of equal parts barley, oats, and rye. Another English tradition is the picking of Michaelmas daisies, which are technically asters. Girls would pick these flowers and decorate the parish church and its altars for Michaelmas.
Thinking of liturgical time in the autumn, Michaelmas falls just after the Ember Days. In most European languages, the Ember Days are called something like quatuor tempora, from the Latin, which literally means the “four times.” This is where tempura comes from: the Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in 16th-century Japan would fry their food in this light batter, and it became part of the local cuisine. Ember comes from Old English ymbren, literally translating to “a running around” in the yearly cycle. These are days of fasting (of some sort) and abstinence, always Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, coinciding with the changes of the seasons in creation. They are a time to ask for God’s blessing upon the farms, which is especially appropriate at this time of year. There is a mnemonic to help remember when they occur: “Lenty, Penty, Crucy, Lucy,” meaning after Lent begins, after Pentecost, after the Exultation of the Holy Cross (September 14th), and after the Feast of St. Lucy (December 13th).
The Ember days go back the Early Church in Rome. St. Leo the Great, who died in 461, asserted that they are of Apostolic origin. Dom Guéranger held that the Ember Days are descended from the seasonal fasts of the Old Testament. Zechariah 8:19 speaks of the “fast of the fourth month, the fast of the fifth, the fast of the seventh, and the fast of the tenth.” They are specifically Roman in origin and were slow to spread throughout Europe. Some places resisted them, like Milan, where the Ember Days were introduced only in the thirteenth century. England was an early adopter of them, celebrated first by St. Augustine of Canterbury in 597. The early adoption of the Ember Days in England explains why the English have their own term which is nothing like the Latin. Think also of “Gospel,” (from Old English godspel, literally “good spell/message”), compared with Evangelium in Latin. The early missionaries to the English favoured these sorts of constructions.
Ember Saturdays have been days of Ordination going back to Pope Gelasius I in the 5th century and made law by Pope Gregory VII in the 11th century. It is an apostolic tradition that men would fast leading up to Ordination, seen in Acts 13:3. Since the Ember Days were already a time in which the Roman Christians fasted, placing Ordination on Ember Saturday naturally joined the Christian faithful with the ordinandi in their own fasting and preparation. The Ember Days thus remind the faithful of the need for holy priests.
Sadly, the Ember Days are no longer a part of the Universal Calendar in much of the world following the introduction of the Novus Ordo Mass. The local bishops’ conferences were given the authority to mandate their times and observances, but many let their observance lapse, and they seemed to have disappeared altogether. If you attend a Traditional Latin Mass, you can still encounter the Ember Days, as well as in the Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter (also known as the Anglican Ordinariate).
The Ember Days teach us that the created world belongs to God. To quote Matthew Plese, “Wheat, wine, oil, water, wax, fire, salt, ashes, palms, and human [labour] all enter the Church’s worship. The Ember Days [remind] Catholics that the created world is ordered toward sacrifice and sanctification.” They also teach us that our labour depends on God’s Providence, that our priests need our prayers, and that time itself must be consecrated.
Which brings us back to liturgical time. The rhythm of Catholicism is not 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, 52 weeks of the year. It is praying the Angelus with the ringing church bells at 6:00, 12:00, and 6:00, Sunday Mass, the liturgical seasons and the natural seasons of creation, Lenten fasting, Ember Days, and the Feast Days of the Church’s calendar. Many of us today in our affluent Western world find fasting difficult. We live in abundance, eating meat three times a day, having snacks and dessert regularly. In a world where we seem to feast daily, we need to recover the great Feast Days and mark them with festivity.
As Catholics, we can do so much more than simply going to Mass on Feast Days. Time itself belongs to God, both inside and outside the walls of our churches. Christ wants to reign in our hearts and in our streets. Invite friends over for a Feast Day bonfire or party, sing carols on Epiphany, have a Feast Day square dance, and recover the particular traditions of different Feast Days. Not only will this enrich our own spiritual lives and the lives of our children, it is one of the surest ways to rebuild Catholic culture. Catholicism is not a set of intellectual propositions; it is an incarnational religion. Christ, the Second Person of the Trinity, came down from heaven and took on human flesh. All the sacraments are physical, whether the laying-on of hands in Ordination, the water, oil and salt at baptism, or receiving into our bodies the bread and the wine which have been transformed into the very Body and Blood of Christ. Let us live out our incarnational faith with our bodies, not just our minds, especially in this age which is so determined to be free of the body and its limitations, clamouring for “artificial intelligence” and the like. May we pray like Christians, may we fast like Christians, and may we feast like Christians.
