I’m teaching Intro to Worship this fall, and the focus of
this week is the Church Calendar.
Clearly, this could be the subject of an entire semester; but in an
intro class, you only get a week. This
has me thinking about not only the great significance of marking time in terms
of sacred feasts and sanctified souls but also more widely about how we mark
time in a variety of ways. Discussions
lend themselves to everything from the civic calendar to particularities in the
local community to family traditions. The
liturgist snob that lives inside of me wants to just push the Church Calendar
and move on, but how inauthentic is that?
We do not live in a vacuum, and the rhythms and patterns of time that
undergird our theology of new life… giving way to death… giving way to
resurrection (way oversimplified, I know) are cyclical and intricately tied to
our actual experience. It’s all very important to discuss and
debrief.
In addition to all of the established ways that people have
kept time for millennia, we are always creating new systems. In an attempt to be more attentive to my use
of social media, I have recently started scrolling through all of my Facebook
Memories while on my commute. Now, hear
me out, social media is a poor substitute for actually capturing a full
life. It is certainly not even close to
my only outlet for attempting to archive the events that have been most
formational to me or the people who have been most beloved. Of course, even my best attempts at
memorializing such things will fall short of reality. I’m always writing from my own perspective,
through some narrow lens that cannot be expanded beyond my senses and
intellect.[1] But the purposes of this little experiment of
mine, in which I subject myself to my own words and images from the past
decade, day after day after day, is about considering what things I have found
either important enough or ordinary enough to share publicly. I have not actually decided which way the
pendulum swings on this. It might be a
little bit of both.
So, mid-September… It’s
a weird time for me. Ten years ago, I
was downing pizza for breakfast, throwing up all day long, and trying to hold
on a few more weeks before announcing my last pregnancy. Last year I was sitting outside the very
building I am sitting inside, now, drinking coffee that was really just OK with
brand new people, who are really pretty great.
Somewhere in-between, there were academic paper proposals, a need for a
new can opener, listening to my daughter play piano, subbing for second
graders, quiz meets, and an inquiry into which neighbor might feed our fish
while we were out of town. Is this the
stuff that marks the time of my life? I
don’t know. Maybe.
If I’m honest, though, this mid-September week always brings
with it a frustration for me if I stop to think about that one year when it
may have been the dumbest week of my life!
It wasn’t the most tragic or the most painful or the most insanely busy
(although there were elements of all of those things), but when I look back
over it, the only appropriate word I can muster is “dumb” (well, and all of its
synonyms). It was not enough and too
much, all at the same time, and the truth is, that’s exactly how I defined
myself (hear me here, not the week, not the experience, but my actual embodied
self) for far too long, after it was over.
But this post is not about that, at all.
Not really. Because, today I ran
across the funniest glimmer of hope, couched (perhaps too neatly) within the
memories of that week. This is what I
wrote:
”Spraying my jeans with glitter just became the top priority
in my life… I love vacation time…”[2]
I’m thankful the subway wasn’t very full, because in
addition to laughing out loud, I also teared up. That seems to be how emotion works for me
lately. There is almost always this
tension between hope and lament. And no
one who knows me is surprised in the least.
I had such a strong reaction to these words, because I know myself, and
I know I had reached a moment in which I could do nothing else. All my cards were on all the tables, so I
took a deep breath and let go for a second.
There is hope for the future in this. In fact, I was thinking just yesterday about
what would happen if I suddenly failed at everything I am attempting to do with
my life now (just FYI, I don’t think this is an issue anyone should be
concerned about, I was simply pondering all the possible endgames I can
imagine, as is fairly typical for me by week three of any school year), and I
had the strangest sense of peace about the fact that I would still be me. I would still be the girl who has enough hope
left that even in the midst of stupid seasons, she can take a moment to spray
glitter on her jeans. Because here’s the
thing, friends: Those times are going to
come. You can count on it. But, they’re not going to last forever. Hope on…
L.
