This wonderful journey through the sacred year

With Advent and the beginning of the next liturgical year coming at the end of the month, I bought a used copy of An Introduction to the Liturgical Year, written by Inos Biffi and (gorgeously) illustrated by Franco Vignazia. Much like their delightful An Illustrated Catechism, this book is a visual and textual feast. Biffi is one of the Pope Benedict's favorite theologians who frequently "ghostwrites" draft texts for him, and he writes with an economy of style that still manages to be comprehensive. Vignazia's watercolor illustrations resemble icons and help convey the liturgical truth expressed in Biffi's text. You can view sample pages via Google books here and the introduction is reprinted below. My copy is addressed to a girl named Anna, and the book was her First Communion book in 1999. She's probably a teenager now; as a father it saddens me to think that this book might have been discarded.

The events of the life of Jesus are not definitively passed: they live again in the liturgical year. The Church relives them with loving and grateful memory, and appreciatively receives the infinite blessings that come with them. In every Christian celebration the gift of salvation is renewed.

This book was created to help readers understand these feasts as they appear one after another in the missal, and to inspire a desire to participate in them. The illustrations evoke the events of Christ's life, doing so with the incisive and suggestive power of images. The text describes these events briefly, and above all explains their significance.

With the wisdom and further explanation of parents or catechists (who are called to be companions on this wonderful journey through the sacred year), this book can help children begin to feel the attraction of the life of Jesus, and to discover it in the memorials and solemnities of the Church, which mark Christian time and enrich it with grace and beauty. This book will also be helpful to converts.

But readers will not only be instructed in the liturgical calendar and its annual cycle of dates; with persuasive and careful invitation they will be introduced to the celebrations themselves, in which the dates on dates on the calendar are transformed into words, gestures, symbols, and songs; in which faith continuously rediscovers its origins and life regains its vitality.

In this way not even a single hour will be wasted, but all time will be spent in the secure company of Jesus, who leads us from the fleeting days of earth to eternity.