Many of us spend our lives shuttling between different calendars.  We live by the Gregorian calendar: Tuesdays and Februaries.  As teachers and students, we live by the school calendar: quarters, semesters, grade-check periods.  And as Christians, we often live by a church year/Hallmark hybrid: Christmas and Easter, Valentine’s Day and Halloween.  This can produce an odd relationship with our perception of time.  Enter Peter Leithart and his thoughts on time:

We organize our lives by organizing our times. We schedule our days for waking, preparing, eating, working, relaxing, talking, sleeping. We orchestrate our weeks in a rhythm of work and leisure. We compose our years with holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, vacations.

And we do this collectively. Every society has a liturgical calendar. Every people punctuates time, italicizing this moment and underlining that. In the U.S., we have national holidays like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. Nearly every American celebrates Christmas, even if they are not Christians. Other countries have other holidays, and organize their year differently.

But should there be more for Christians than that?  Leithart, who comes from a liturgical tradition, continues:

More deeply, many Christians have accepted the flattening of time characteristic of modernity. If we acknowledge that we organize our time, we still believe that real time is the mechanical movement of the clock. Diverting as they are, our holidays and festivals and celebrations are wispy fantasies, epiphenomena dancing along the hard surface of time itself. We should ask: Is this too an accommodation to the world?

And we should wonder: Should a Christian arrangement of time be stamped with Christ?

The church has long answered Yes to that question.

Many Christians will continue that “Christ-stamped” calendar tomorrow when they commemorate Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent.  This has always been the more awkward event for me (when compared to Advent, at least).  Part of that is its absence from my faith experience growing up.  The other part has been trying to navigate the slow and awkward assumption of the “season” by the evangelical Protestant church.  What starts in ashes ends in fasts from social media or television or other time-consuming practices, a kind if do-it-yourself holiday that works as a way of refocusing on “ashes to ashes” and “discipline before celebration.”

I’m still trying to process a plan for the season myself, particularly by reflecting on Robert Webber’s discussion of the time in Ancient-Future Time, his look at the Christian year.  More on that tomorrow.

You can read the rest of Leithart’s article (which was originally posted to Patheos for Advent) here.

(image from nbcnews.com)