A feast day is when the Church stops to celebrate. We commemorate a saving event in Christ’s life, honor the Theotokos, or remember a saint who shows us what it looks like to become fully alive in God.
These aren’t just historical anniversaries. When we celebrate the Nativity or the Transfiguration or the memory of St. Michael the Archangel, we’re not looking back at something that happened long ago and far away. Through the liturgy, those events become present to us. We step into them. The Church makes them real for us again, right here in Beaumont, through worship and the Eucharist.
If you grew up Baptist or non-denominational, this might sound strange. Most Protestant churches don’t follow a liturgical calendar beyond Christmas and Easter. But the Orthodox Church has always organized time around Christ’s life and the saints who’ve followed him. Every day of the year has a commemoration. Some are quiet, mentioned briefly in the services. Others are major celebrations that shape the whole rhythm of parish life.
How Feasts Are Ranked
Not all feast days are equal. Pascha stands alone at the top, the Feast of Feasts, the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection. Everything else flows from that. Then come the Great Feasts, twelve major celebrations marking events like the Nativity, Theophany, the Annunciation, and the Dormition of the Theotokos. These get special services, often Vespers the night before and Divine Liturgy the day of.
Below those you’ve got feasts of varying importance. Some saints get bigger celebrations than others. The Apostles, for instance, or the Theotokos on her various feast days. Then there are local feasts, like when St. Michael’s celebrates the Synaxis of the Archangel Michael on November 8th. That’s our parish feast day, and it matters here even if it’s not one of the Twelve Great Feasts.
The Church has worked all this out over centuries. It’s not arbitrary. The calendar reflects what we believe about Christ, about the saints, about how heaven and earth connect.
What Happens on a Feast Day
You go to church. That’s the main thing. Attending the Divine Liturgy and receiving Communion on Sundays and principal feast days has always been at the heart of Orthodox life. The services for a feast are different, special hymns, particular Scripture readings, everything oriented toward that day’s celebration.
If you can make it to Vespers the night before, even better. The Church starts celebrating in the evening, and the hymns at Vespers often tell the story of the feast more fully than anything else. Fr. Alexander Schmemann wrote that the Church’s worship is her theology, and nowhere is that clearer than on feast days.
Some feasts come with fasting beforehand, the Nativity has a forty-day fast leading up to it, and the Dormition has two weeks. But the feast itself? That’s when we break the fast and celebrate. Even if the feast falls on a Wednesday or Friday (normally fasting days), we eat. We’re not legalists about this. The feast takes precedence.
Parishes often have fellowship meals on their patronal feast, especially if it falls on a weekend. Here in Southeast Texas, that usually means somebody’s smoking brisket and somebody else is bringing a casserole. The celebration isn’t just liturgical. It’s communal.
Why Feasts Matter
Feast days teach us the faith. When you show up for the Transfiguration on August 6th and hear the hymns about Christ revealing his glory on Mount Tabor, you’re learning Christology. When you celebrate the Dormition on August 15th and sing about the Theotokos falling asleep and being taken up to her Son, you’re learning what we believe about death and the communion of saints.
The calendar also keeps us from turning Christianity into an abstraction. We don’t worship ideas. We worship the God who became man at a specific time and place, born of a specific woman, who died and rose and ascended and sent the Spirit. The feasts make that concrete.
And the saints’ days remind us that holiness is real. These aren’t mythical figures. They’re people who actually lived, who struggled and prayed and became transparent to God’s grace. When we celebrate St. Basil the Great or St. Mary of Egypt or St. Thekla, we’re saying: this is possible. You can become like this. That’s what theosis means.
For those of you coming from churches where the calendar was mostly ignored, this might feel like a lot at first. You don’t have to memorize everything. Just start showing up. Let the rhythm of the feasts shape your year. You’ll find that the Church knows what she’s doing. She’s been doing this for two thousand years, and the calendar she’s given us is a gift, a way of living inside the story of salvation instead of just hearing about it.
