On Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday of this week, the Church commemorates the “Ember Days” of autumn, which are held traditionally each year after the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Ember Days, called “The Four Times” in Latin, are ancient liturgical commemorations of the changing of the seasons. They are penitential days, in which the Christian does extra penance like fasting and abstaining from meat.

Ember Days are a wonderful synecdoche of the Church’s nuanced relationship to creation. On the one hand, these celebrations affirm deeply the goodness of creation. The presence of these celebrations of the changing seasons in the Roman Liturgy from ancient times witnesses to the deep connection of the Christian soul to the cosmos and the marvels of nature. Together with the direction of liturgical prayer “ad orientem,” facing the rising sun, the Church’s Ember Days tell us that nature is good and is part of our connection to God’s Uncreated Goodness.

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Today we celebrate the great Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. We raise our eyes in faith and love to Christ Crucified and worship Him and His Holy Cross, singing with the Church, adoring the Cross: “Dear Cross, best hope o’er all beside,/That cheers the solemn passion-tide:/Give to the just increase of grace,/Give to each contrite sinner peace.”

There is a profound intimacy between Jesus Christ and His Holy Cross. St. Thomas Aquinas helps us understand why and how we worship the Cross of Christ. He explains that something can be worshipped as an image of the One worshipped (like an icon of Jesus) or as belonging to the One worshipped (like the Sacred Heart of Jesus). The True Cross of Christ, he says, “is to be venerated by us in both ways–namely, in one way in so far as it represents to us the figure of Christ extended thereon; in the other way, from its contact with the limbs of Christ, and from its being saturated with His blood.”

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On September 8, the Church celebrates the wonderful feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. On this day, we receive into the arms of our Christian hearts the little baby who is our Blessed Mother. At this feast, God’s masterpiece of human personhood is born for us and we are present at the birth of our own Mother.

There is something special about the birth of a baby, distinct from his beginning to exist in the womb of his mother. When a baby is born, even though he already existed in himself in the womb, he now begins to exist in a new way, in that he is present to the world around him. This is how St. Thomas explains the fact that the Church celebrates the Birth of Christ more solemnly than His Conception. We have something of this logic in the solemnity with which we keep the feast of Mary’s birth from St. Anne.

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