Book Notes: "Moments and Days" by Michelle Van Loon

I read this book in the fall, as the year was curving up towards Advent, but it's also a good read for this time of year, with the long season of Lent lying before us.

"Moments and Days: How Our Holy Celebrations Shape Our Faith," is about the Christian liturgical year (that's my jam!), but it's also about the Jewish liturgical year--and it's about how those two calendars do (and don't) fit together.

I really enjoyed it. As Van Loon comments towards the beginning of the book, "By getting to know the Jewish feasts, we know our Jewish Savior better."

That's probably all the reason you need in order to want to read this book, but I'd add a few others: Van Loon is good at making connections (like the one between the Transfiguration and the Feast of Booths) and she's also just a good writer. I love passages like these:

Much of contemporary evangelicalism has been quick to "put the cookies on the bottom shelf," eschewing the church's history and traditions so that spiritual seekers would feel welcome in our midst. In the process, I wonder if we have gotten used to dining on crumbs. Crumbs may fill us for a moment, but we have been made for eternity; our calendar tells us so.

Or this:

...I learned (as we all do at some point in our lives) that mourning is a core reality of our earthly existence. We live in a world shaped by the effects of humanity's disconnection from God. That disconnection manifests itself in loss, sickness, and death. Whether it is a generalized awareness of our brokenness or a specific grief after the death of a loved one, Lent interrupts our regularly scheduled lives to reconnect us with the deepest need behind our pain: communion with God.

Thoughtful passages like that are interspersed throughout the book, but I don't want to obscure the fact that most of the book is dedicated to information: about the Jewish and Christian liturgical years, how they developed, what they are, and what they mean. It's an information-dense book, in a good way.

Recommended.


Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell



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