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.

Article

Creed

Easter

Resurrection

18 April 2025

4 min read

Easter is almost too big for our human minds to grapple with

How can we 'go figure' the seemingly incomprehensible?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Adrian Mag on Unsplash.

Forgive me for getting a bit ahead of myself, but I’d like to say something of the Resurrection. We’ve barely even started the Triduum and the Jesuit saying rings in my ears: “If we don’t die with him on Good Friday, we can’t rise with him on Easter morning.”

But part of the problem this epigram presents is that it’s not so much Good Friday that we skip over, but Easter morning. In our determination to focus on the Passion of the Christ, Easter can perhaps be a joyful sermon, a jolly good lunch, an exclamation that “He is risen!” and we move on.

So when it comes to miracles, too often it’s the Big One from which we avert our attention. And we can even skip the entire thing. I encountered two of my erstwhile Church primary-school children on a Holy Week dog walk. “Father George!” they cried. I’m afraid I spoke to them and their parents about clues for an Easter-egg hunt.

Like the size of the universe, Easter is almost too big for our human minds to grapple with. So we confine ourselves to reciting facts and beliefs. Our universe is 13 billion light years wide and came from literally nothing. Jesus Christ was raised from the dead and appeared to his disciples.

There is a real fear of the Resurrection among the faithful. Not in the way that scripture speaks of the fear of God, but a much more basic fear of the schoolchild that we’re not getting it right. It’s as if we’re meant to believe but can’t, with a dash of the awful dread that those who say that - rather like Donald Trump - it’s not to be taken literally but seriously might just be right.

It’s the fear of the yawning abyss between literal truth (in Greek, logos) and metaphorical or allegorical truth (mythos). And it’s as if we’re being forced to make a choice that, in conscience, we can’t. As such, it becomes what St Paul might call a stumbling block, something that gets in the way rather than illuminates. And it’s one we quietly ignore.

I think I want to say that we need to be liberated from the worry that there’s a right way to interpret it, or that there’s a binary choice to be made between literal and metaphorical truth. In the events of Easter morning, we’re being offered a both/and response rather than an either/or choice.

In this model, historicity is useful but insufficient. We know as a historical fact that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Roman authorities and we can very reasonably assume, in historical terms, that one of his disciples, a woman from Magdala called Mary, went to his tomb after the Jewish sabbath and found it empty.

Thereafter the experience of the Resurrection becomes harder, if not impossible, to describe. Not just for us, but especially for the first witnesses to it. That’s partly why this gospel scripture is written in a way that is unlike any other, more breathless, more personal, more anecdotal and more experiential. It’s as if the insurgent Jesus movement is seeing in colour for the first time.

If we’re looking for a miracle, incidentally, here it is. Whatever has happened, the utter defeat and dispersal of this small, provincial band of rebels in death and despair has been irreversibly transformed within three days. The two-word modern term for this phenomenon might be: Go figure.

But we should not avert our eyes from less convenient phenomena, evidence that is not just metaphorical or allegorical but which may be downright worldly and motivated by expedience. It isn’t controversial to observe that there is a difference between the empty-tomb narratives and the apparitions (as the Roman Catholic catechism calls them) of the risen Christ, the latter in part arising from competing factions for patriarchal authority the earliest formation of Church.

The empty tomb isn’t just evidence of the risen Christ. It’s there to show us symbolically where God is not. In John’s gospel, Mary sees cherubim sitting at the head and foot of the slab on which the body lay, echoing the mercy-seat of the ancient ark of the covenant, the empty throne of the invisible Jewish God, Yahweh. The Christ has “gone ahead” to continue the living work of God in his nascent Church of the new covenant.

Above all (and those two words can be read literally), this dualistic approach to the Resurrection calls its observers to relax about it, to let go of our understanding of it. The words and actions of the risen Christ often seem to confirm as much: "Don't hang on to me", "Shalom" (Peace be with you), "Come and eat", "Feed my lambs".

So, struggling to comprehend the Resurrection isn’t a deal-breaker. In a way, the divine message is that the biggest miracle of all is no big deal. Life really does go on.

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