Space Enough, and Time

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)

It is difficult to believe that we are one full month into 2016.  At the end of last year, there were a couple of good articles/essays about things like The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars- The Force Awakens that reminded us of the on-going nature of the story we are in.  The church, of course, retells its story in various and sundry ways.  More often than not (and more frequently than before in evangelical circles), that story is retold through the church calendar.

In his reflection on starting 2016 (along with Advent in general), author Stephen Williams had this to say (and this in light of JRR Tolkien):

It is against the backdrop of these reflections – and questions – about our human history that I find myself reaching for the wise words of an old friend. J.R.R. Tolkien needs no introduction, but perhaps these two passages do, so bear with me. The first may be familiar to some; the second, while more obscure, clarifies the first in breathtaking fashion. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien quietly reveals his historical vision through the words the immortal elf Galadriel, who, speaking of her husband Celeborn, makes this observation about their time in Middle Earth: “Together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.”

Anyone who has read Tolkien will know that he is no pessimist, so why would he use a phrase like “fought the long defeat” when the word “defeat” carries with it an almost automatic connotation of hopelessness? Time and space and my own poor intellectual giftings prohibit me from giving these words the treatment they are due, but thankfully, perhaps Tolkien answers the question himself in a parallel passage buried deep in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn, the King Ellesar, having come to the end of a long reign of peace and renewal, speaks tenderly from his deathbed to his queen, Arwen, of their imminent parting; indeed, these are his last recorded words to her: “In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.”

This eminently poignant scene deserves far more readership than it likely receives, for in a mere two sentences it addresses the very real sorrows of this present life while still communicating the hope that lies in the next. Tolkien wisely recognized that no lot in this old world would ever leave us wishing to stay here; he recognized that no lot would prevent us from facing the agonizing wait appointed to those who are on a pilgrimage to a land beyond circles of their current existence.

Christians have always felt the tension between this life and what comes next, all that business of earthly good and heavenly good.  Living between the two is a necessary good just as much as it can be perceived to be a necessary evil.  One of my favorite lines of dialogue from The Two Towers that didn’t make it into Jackson’s series was upon Gandalf’s return.  “Beyond hope you return to us in our time of need!” Aragorn said.  Always good to be mindful of the Power that exists beyond hope.

You can read the rest of Williams’s reflection here.

(image from youtube.com)