Handout: Liturgical Time - Formation

The Liturgical Year is a time full of meaning and religious symbolism, with a paschal essence, solemnly marking the definitive entry of God into human history. It is God's moment in time, the divine "kairós" in the reality of the created world. Time is understood as a favorable time, a "time of grace and salvation", as biblical thought reveals to us. The celebrations of the Liturgical Year do not only look to the past, commemorating it. They also look to the future, from the perspective of the eternal, and make the past and the future an eternal present, the "today" of God, through the sacramentality of the liturgy. Here, the eschatological dimension of the Liturgical Year is emphasized. The four chapters into which the book is divided, address the formation of the Christmas Cycle, the Easter Cycle and Ordinary Time.