The Wheel of the Year

## The Year as a Spiritual Curriculum The seasons of the year are not random.

They are a curriculum.

Every culture rooted in the land has noticed it: there is a time to plant and a time to harvest, a time to wake and a time to rest, a time of fierce light and a time of generous dark.

The Wheel of the Year is the contemplative tradition's name for the eight hinges of that curriculum, the two solstices, the two equinoxes, and the four cross-quarter days that fall between them. ## The Eight Solar Festivals **Yule** at the winter solstice (around December 21), the rebirth of the Sun. **Imbolc** on February 2, the first stirring of spring under the snow. **Ostara** at the spring equinox, the hinge of light and dark, the courage to begin. **Beltane** on May 1, the marriage of earth and sky, the height of fertility. **Litha** at the summer solstice, the Sun at full strength. **Lammas** on August 1, the first harvest. **Mabon** at the autumn equinox, the second balance, the gathering in. **Samhain** on October 31, the thinning of the veil between the living and the dead. ## How the CNE Keeps Them We do not keep the Wheel as if Christianity were not also true.

We keep the Wheel and the Christian liturgical year together, in the conviction that the One Light has been speaking to humanity through the seasons for as long as there have been seasons, and that the gospel does not erase that older speech but completes it.

The CNE Sacred Calendar, fourteen festivals across the year, folds the equinoxes and solstices into the same year that holds Easter, Pentecost, Advent, and All Saints.

Each is observed in its own voice.

Together they teach us the long shape of the spiritual life. ## A Suggestion If you have never kept the Wheel, do not begin with all eight festivals.

Pick the next one on the calendar.

Light a candle the evening it falls.

Read what the tradition has said about it.

Sit for ten minutes.

Notice what the year is asking of you.

The whole curriculum unfolds from that single, faithful gesture.