Patrick Comerford
Today [8 February 2026] is the Second Sunday before Lent, which is also known in some parts of the Anglican Communion as Creation Sunday. In the past, this Sunday was known as Sexagesima, one of those odd-sounding Latin names once used in the Book of Common Prayer for the Sundays in Ordinary Time between Candlemas and Lent: Septuagesima, Sexagesima and Quinquagesima.
These weeks, between the end of Epiphany and Ash Wednesday, are known as Ordinary Time. We are in a time of preparation for Lent, which in turn is a preparation for Holy Week and Easter.
The Sunday known as Sexagesima, although falling 57 days before Easter, was given this name representing 60 days before Lent. In the Western Church, these Sundays before Lent were a preparation for Lent: the refrain alleluia was forbidden in services, and the Alleluia acclamation at the Eucharist was replaced by the Tract, usually verses from the Psalms. The liturgical colour was also changed, so that purple or violet vestments were worn.
In very visible and audible ways, the three Sundays before Lent became an extension to Lent, and the longer period was often called ‘the Greater Lent.’ However, while their traditional names have a certain nostalgic beauty associated with them, they have no real logical, liturgical foundation and they make no sense numerically.
In recent years, the ‘-gesima’ Sundays before Lent have become part of Ordinary Time, and from the late 1960s on they were no longer regarded as a pre-penitential season, and this Sunday is now counted as the Second Sunday before Lent.
Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Sexagesima’ takes its title from this Latin name once used for the Second Sunday before Lent. We are more likely to associate Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) with Christmas rather than Ordinary Time or Lent because two of her poems, ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ and ‘Love came down at Christmas,’ are among the best-loved and most popular Christmas carols.
She was born in London, the daughter of Gabriele Rossetti, an exiled Italian poet, and she was a sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite artist and poet. Their brother William Michael Rossetti and sister Maria Rossetti were writers too.
At the age of 14, Christina Rossetti suffered a nervous breakdown and left school. Bouts of depression and related illness followed. During this period she, her mother and her sister became absorbed in the Anglo-Catholic movement that developed in the Church of England, and religious devotion came to play a major role in Christian Rossetti’s life.
She spent much time spent alone, in prayer, in a single life, devoted to Christ and to working with the marginalised. Her writings have strongly influenced writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings and Philip Larkin. She is honoured in the liturgical calendar of the Church of England and other Anglican churches on 27 April.
Sexagesima, by Christina Georgina Rossetti:
Yet earth was very good in days of old,
And earth is lovely still:
Still for the sacred flock she spreads the fold,
For Sion rears the hill.
Mother she is, and cradle of our race,
A depth where treasures lie,
The broad foundation of a holy place,
Man’s step to scale the sky.
She spreads the harvest-field which Angels reap,
And lo! the crop is white;
She spreads God’s Acre where the happy sleep
All night that is not night.
Earth may not pass till heaven shall pass away,
Nor heaven may be renewed
Except with earth: and once more in that day
Earth shall be very good.
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