Making Time to Walk Through the Christian Year
Review of
A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom, and Perseverance
Diana Butler Bass
Hardcover: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2025
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Reviewed by Karen Altergott Roberts
Time is organized into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years, and we keep track using clocks and calendars. The Gregorian calendar, devised in 1582, corrected earlier calendars because they had shifted away from the natural seasons and the time the church wanted to celebrate Easter. Later, the insertion of leap years has kept us in line with the seasonal cycle ever since. But still, the January through December calendar is not the Christian calendar.
Acknowledging that our concepts of time have always linked human activity with the Divine, I applaud Diana Butler Bass’s use of the Revised Common Lectionary, which lists scripture that guides us through the Christian year. It includes short scripture readings from the Old and New Testaments for each week, broken into six seasons: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost, as well as the season after Pentecost, which we sometimes call Ordinary Time. The new year begins with Advent, the beginning of the church year for many Christian denominations.
Diana Butler Bass offers thoughtful meditations on each season from Advent to Christ the King Sunday. These artfully written essays, some longer, some shorter, are based on her years of studying scripture and provide companionship on the journey through time. In each of the 52 meditations, she guides us through scripture study, helps us remember our history, and highlights the path of discipleship through the seasons of the year.
The six seasons, as she uses them, can be divided into two main sections. We remember the life of Jesus from Advent to Easter. We are reminded of what he taught and how he showed his disciples the Way. After Easter, the focus changes. The story becomes one of the disciples, from the original and early disciples to disciples today, leading us to think about the meaning of following Jesus in our time. Then we return to Advent. It is good to walk the path from anticipation to the cross and from the cross to living out what it means to be a disciple, to know Jesus and his teachings, and then to follow him with past and present disciples.
I look forward to walking through the Christian year with A Beautiful Year: 52 Meditations on Faith, Wisdom, and Perseverance. But when should I begin reading? Where should I start? What will guide my scripture study this year? This book can be started at any season or read straight through. I intend to read it slowly throughout the year. I will begin with Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent and will review what the disciples did in their lives and what we are called to do in ours. Then, I will go back to review the teachings from Jesus’s life, from Advent to Easter. Diana Butler Bass has provided a wonderful resource for scripture study, meditation, and faith renewal.
Karen Altergott Roberts
Karen Altergott Robertsis a second generation American, first generation to graduate from high school, and familiar with different sides of inequality. She grew up to be an academic sociologist, a parent of three, and, in her40s, a United Methodist pastor. In retirement, she is a reader, a writer, and an artist. She has always yearned for a more egalitarian world, and celebrates kindness, faith, and faithfulness wherever she finds it. To her grandchildren, she is simply Nana.
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