Stories rule our lives. We use narrative to make sense of where we come from, the kinds of people we want to be, and the relationships and experiences that have brought us to this point. When we make plans, we tell a story about what we think will happen. When we lie down at night and think back on what we did that day, we tell a story based on our memories. Stories stoke our curiosity, help us make sense of the world, and help us understand ourselves and others.

Our lives are also ruled by routines and rhythms, whether it’s a schedule we plan ourselves or the natural rhythms of sleep, work, play, social engagement, or worship that dictate our week. At least in the western world, that rhythm is a strange, potent mix of the religious and the secular. Each week contains days for work and days for rest based on the creation of the world in Genesis and the existence of the Sabbath. We observe the changing of the seasons with holidays and events that pull from natural patterns as well as biblical tradition.

If we think of our life as a story, seasons are how we mark the chapters. Each one contains distinct themes, whether it’s spring, summer, fall, and winter, or the seasons of infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age.

In the life of the church, those chapters are marked by the liturgical calendar, the annual cycle that takes us on a narrative journey through the Bible. As with any good story, we get to know a set of characters, and follow them as they learn, grow, encounter joys and sorrows, die, and in the case of Jesus, resurrect. We’re also constantly thinking about the ways this long story, made up of many stories, applies to the lives we lead now.1

The writer Dorothy Sayers recognized the inherent drama of this process in her 1938 essayThe Greatest Drama Ever Staged, in which she wrote of the role of storytelling in church tradition: “The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama.”2 The Bible tells an incredible story that weaves individual accounts of prophets, believers, disciples, the Son of God, and the early church into a grand arc showing how followers of God have tried, sometimes succeeded, and more often failed, to follow God’s divine teachings, finally receiving ultimate salvation in the form of Jesus Christ.

The individual stories of the Bible contain lessons teaching us how to live well as Christians. They also communicate broader themes about the nature of God’s love, how we’re called to respond to it, the deeply human ways we often fall short of that calling, and the transcendent times when we manage to meet it. These themes link the entire book together and become especially apparent during church holidays, when we specifically engage with the most powerful biblical narratives and the legacy of the church beyond them.