A digital today needs an old calendar

What’s the relevance of an ancient church calendar to life today? Julie Canlis explores its origins and why it is still applicable in today’s digital world.

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

A Calendar of Saints and Festivals.

Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons.

Christians have an odd belief that their little lives are somehow joined up to the very life of God.

And not just God ‘generally’ or in a spiritual sense, but that they are interconnected to the life of someone who lived 2,000 years ago. That they have his ‘spirit.’ That he lives in them, and they in him.

They built cathedrals on this foundation. They faced lions for this claim. They reoriented their sense of time. They believed that in dying, they would meet him - a person - all the sooner, face to face. One of the first early Christian bishops begged his congregation to not try and stop him from entering the gladiatorial arena and going not to his death (as one would think) but, as he eloquently urged, to his birth.

These cultural relics grew from the soil of a deep conviction

It is in this context alone that we can understand something of the significance of things like Easter, Christmas, Michaelmas, Whitsuntide, and all the other festivals that shape our heritage. These cultural relics grew from the soil of a deep conviction that humans could keep step with the life of God, because he had kept step with them, in their skin. These were not celebrations of an ossified past, but of a living present - celebrating what had and was happening to them, in them.

And so these early preachers and teachers told their congregations that Christmas is not Jesus' birth, but their birth. That through these festivals, they were not remembering his past but the mystery that their present was forever bound with his past and future. And because they had died and been raised with him in baptism (an ongoing reality that was celebrated both annually at Easter, and weekly on Sunday which was called a ’little Easter‘) they were to now keep in step with him by caring for the poor (St Nicholas), feeding the hungry (St Thecla), preaching to the birds (St Francis), reconciling towns (St Martin), and averting war (St Leo - who met with Attila the Hun). There were goodies and baddies. There were odd ducks and beautiful virgins. Recluses and repentant sinners. They were an odd, but galvanized lot around the history of a man from Palestine, in whose shoes they sought to walk and to whom they believed they were mystically united.

Strange. But perhaps no odder than our own times, with our own calendar with our important festivals galvanizing our sense of nationalism, or our identity as consumers. The fiscal year. The academic year. The consumer cycle. We need something to hallow our days.

I am caught up in a transcendent pattern that offers me an escape from the narrowness of my echo-chambers, my appetites, my loneliness

So what are we to do with this ancient calendar, filled with its colourful saints and high days and holy fare? I don't know about you, but I need its naive defiance that my life, lived in my ordinary home on my ordinary street in my ordinary family, is somehow connected to something much larger than myself. That year after year I am caught up in a transcendent pattern that offers me an escape from the narrowness of my echo-chambers, my appetites, my loneliness. That my suffering need not destroy me. That my career (or its 24/7 maintenance due to the digital revolution) is not worth the price of my soul. This calendar provided our forebears with an opportunity for an inner journey, an acknowledgement of our hunger for life beyond the material. And perhaps it is time that we listened to their wisdom, if only by lighting a candle or eating a goose on Michaelmas day. Or maybe, just maybe, we might attend to that inner call that asks us how to hallow our lives, and welcome the one who hallows all time.

Events

Identity

Politics

S&U interviews

29 April 2024

4 min read

June 3: Esau McCaulley and Graham Tomlin - get tickets now

Join us in London as we explore today's cultural moments.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A man talks to a camera with his hands together palms up and his finger interlaced.

Esau McCaulley on the Re-enchanting podcast.

Meet Esau and us

Seen and Unseen is hosting an incredibly rare event: Bishop Graham Tomlin in Conversation with Esau McCaulley on 3rd June, at St Mellitus College, 24 Collingham Road, Earl’s Court, London starting at 7.30pm .

As well as hearing more of Esau’s story, this conversation will cover the place of faith in public life, the significance of the black church, US politics, and this cultural moment. Trust me, you don’t want to miss this. I have had a couple of conversations with Esau McCaulley, and they have re-arranged the theological air I breathe.

You can find out more about Esau on his web site and read his New York Times columns. Or listen to my interview with him, as part of our Re-enchanting podcast. 

Places will be limited, get further details and reserve your (free) ticket on Eventbrite.

Belle Tindall writes...

How does one wrestle their faith out of the hands of those who used it as tool to enslave them? How does one keep hold of such a faith when the owner of the local plantation was also the pastor of the local Presbyterian church? When the people who filled the pews were also the people who turned up to the KKK rallies? And how do the descendants of those people wade through the cultural and spiritual residue of such a history? Wrestling, still, with the complex evil that defined their ancestors' days?

And how does one respond when Donald Trump, the likely Republican presidential candidate, endorses a God Bless America Bible as some kind political strategy? What does one do when their community are being peddled their own sacred book, this particular edition of which includes the American Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance and the lyrics of a country song also entitled God Bless the USA? Oh, it also has the American flag emblazoned across the front. For good measure, I suppose.

And finally, how does one look out at an increasingly secular culture and remain confident that what it really needs is to be reminded of an ancient Galilean carpenter, as if he’s still some kind of relevant solution to our deepest hopes and fears?

These questions have something in common: they have been, and are continuing to be, answered by Esau McCaulley.

Answered honestly.

Answered powerfully.

Answered ever so publicly.

Last year, Esau was named by the Washington Post as one of the most influential faith leaders in the USA. He is a New York Times contributor and a New Testament Professor at Wheaton College, he is also the author of the award-winning Reading While Black and his latest best-selling memoir, How Far to the Promised Land? What began as a eulogy for Esau’s (rather complicated) father became ‘one black family’s story of hope and survival in the American south’. The eulogy was unapologetically complex, and so is this book. It was unwaveringly honest, and so is this book. It was utterly profound, and so is this book.

Esau, when reflecting on his own history, stretches for truth, refusing to relax into comfortable simplicities or false binaries that don’t belong in reality. Writing this memoir cost Esau something. You can tell. The grace woven into the paragraphs did not come cheap.

This book, as Esau himself explains, is about his father, but his father is a metaphor for America. And so, when it comes to this book (and much of Esau’s work), the political makes its home within the personal; the story that Esau tells is, to an extent, a trojan horse. A challenging commentary of America is sitting within this book’s pages. Esau is clear, his father – who continued to leave a trail of trauma in his wake – made bad decisions. But society played a significant role in creating the context within which those decisions were made. Were the poor decisions his father made down to personal responsibility or was it structural injustice? Esau’s answer? ‘Yes’.

Again, he has an aversion to binaries that don’t belong in reality.

To borrow an Elizabeth Oldfield phrase that I cannot stop thinking about: this book tells us something of our brokenness and our ‘breaking-things-ness’. And, as Esau writes,

‘patience with broken people and broken things is a manifestation of trust in God’

And Esau seems to have a lot of patience. Patience with himself, patience with his father, patience with Rev. Matthew Bone, owner of the Bone planation where his ancestors were enslaved, patience with those who have hurt him, patience with us all.

And that, it seems to me, has bred a persistence in hope. Real, gritty, bruised and yet still beating, joy-filled hope. The kind of hope that can look at the God Bless America Bible and not face-palm. The kind of hope that can research the links between Christianity and slavery and not fall into spiritual crisis. The kind that can observe the theory that faith is losing its place in public life and can use a New York Times column to prove it wrong.

Ultimately, the kind of hope that the world is increasingly paying attention to.