With that said, we have been celebrating Advent as a family this Christmas season. We celebrated Holy Week last Easter. I love the concepts of both seasons and felt like we could incorporate them in an appropriate way into our family life.

I personally love Pioneer Day for many reasons, some deeply personal and spiritual, and I feel cheated when my ward leaders do nothing to acknowledge that day in Sacrament meeting.

I’m also intrigued by the questions you raise about ritual, and its place in our culture. I like your point about how we seem to want ritual to be necessary in some way to justify its existence–thus the official reason for repeating temple worship isn’t for the experience per se, but in order to further the work of saving the souls of the dead. How much (if any) room do we have for ritual for the sake of the experience itself, as opposed to ritual as a means to another end? Kaimi’s example of pageants might fall into such a category, though I suspect that many would justify the existence of such pageants as facilitating the goal of missionary work. But the sacrament might also perhaps fit into this category–as you note, we’ve closely connected it to other necessary saving rituals, but in and of itself it isn’t strictly necessary, and one could certainly say the same thing about the yearly Primary program, Conference, or Pioneer Day celebrations.

Really, my guess is that what would be required for Mormons to adopt the liturgical year would be an influx of converts like Kaliki, who come from high church traditions.

Thanks for all the other comments as well. You’re all of course right to point to pageants and pioneer parades as part of the Mormon experience of the year, and that may amount to something in the way of a “sacred calendar.” And maybe it’s just my own biases that prevent me from considering them liturgical commemorations exactly–but other sacred communal events in the Church typically occur within sacred space (chapel or temple) and are relatively solemn (if not extremely so).

Of course the dividing line between the sacred and the secular is ultimately arbitrary; for example, Santa Claus, today an icon of Christmas’s commercial secular dimension, is in origin a saint (a bishop who lived in Turkey in the 4th century), and it wasn’t so long ago that he was still being portrayed in all the regalia appropriate to his position: with a bishop’s mitre and rosary and crucifix. Just as one could make an argument that Santa Claus belongs to the realm of the sacred, one could certainly argue that pioneer parades and pageants are an event sacred to the Mormon community. But I personally see them more in line with Young Men’s stake basketball championships, which are also important to the Mormon community, and are cyclical, but are nevertheless neither central nor sacred.

Such celebrations, as fundamentally Mormon as they are, are relatively spontaneous, festive, and local rather than official, religious, and global. (I haven’t ever noticed any Pioneer Day celebrations where I live–perhaps I haven’t paid close enough attention?) Again, this may just be my own religious predilections: I adore high church ritual. I’m less attracted to sentimental temple pageants.

Peter, I’m not actually proposing the adoption of another holiday (though heaven knows I’ll take whatever days off work I can get! ). I’m musing more on why the possible holy days and holidays we have do not have a specifically religious component to their observance, and whether that’s endemic to Mormon sensibilities or the result of happenstance. In asking this, I’m considering, as a hypothetical, Mormon holy days that could potentially replace the Christian liturgical calendar if the reason we reject it is its origins, not the idea of a liturgical year itself.

Great comment, JKC. I’m really still not sure exactly what I think about the lack of a Mormon liturgical year, although I suspect, as you say, that it’s largely an inheritance of low church sensibilities. I wonder how millenarianism might have played a role? As you say, it could well have oriented the saints toward the future and away from the past. On the other hand, our scriptures point us to religiously significant events in the past, and all of our claims to authority are grounded in an appeal to the distant past. It could well be that the Church’s young age plays a role in this as well–what are pageants today could conceivably be liturgical commemorations in the future–but one could argue that we’re too young to have any ritualistic activities at all. Yet we do.

Thanks for your correction, Alea–I had no idea General Conference was so scheduled to commemorate the organizing of the Church, although it certainly makes sense!

The incessant Pioneer Day celebration on July 24 used to bug me when I wasn’t living in Utah, but a few years ago, Elder Robert S Wood gave us some compelling thoughts in a stake conference about how Mormons everywhere should recognize Pioneer Day, even if they have no Utah connections.

Nowadays I encourage locals in Texas to research both the historical pioneer aspects of the local area, augmenting that with July 24…

queuno,
who has serious Utah Pioneer cred, but outside BYU, never lived a day of his life there (I was the BYU freshman considered a “gentile” because I came from the Midwest, despite having three campus buildings named after ancestors).

Even stakes in South America celebrate July 24. Stakes in Ohio — *Ohio* — celebrate July 24.

Despite my initial sarcastic tone, I maintain in all seriousness that July 24 and April 6 are as close to a common day of celebration around the entire Church.

Also, though queuno is being sarcastic, I think you can make a pretty strong case that, for those of us still in the Rocky Mountains, July 24th is, in fact, part of a liturgical year. Is not the annual parade a religious ceremony, despite lacking a lot of the trappings of ritual? Isn’t it a very Mormon approach to take the religious aspect out of the chapel and into the streets?