New Year, Strange Year, Same Year
Ancient tradition for times of transition
I hung up our new liturgical calendar today.
Before I write any more about the upcoming liturgical year (which starts next Sunday with Advent), let me just rave about the beauty of this calendar. It’s from Ashley Tumlin Wallace of The Liturgical Home, and it’s a treasured piece of art in our home. It’s had some subtle stylistic updates from last year which I love - a new font, size of the graphic, etc. Last year’s calendar traveled with us 7,000 miles across the world and, like this one, was hung in the kitchen where we pass by it about 10,000 times a day. I am a relative newbie to the liturgical year, so I’m ever grateful to Ashley and other creators like The Anglican Compass for providing resources that help shepherd dumb Baptists (and newbies of all stripes) into this great tradition.
The last year-and-a-half has been strange, to say the least. I’ll write more about that later, but suffice to say that last September, I resigned from the pastorate as our family prepared to follow God’s calling to move to the Eastern coast of Africa, where I am a theological educator.
Now, I’m a big fan of transitional markers. I don’t do transition well naturally, so things like new calendars, new journals, new planners (this one will get my life in order, I promise!), help me to cope with the change. I’ve always resonated with places in Scripture like Joshua 4, where the Israelites set up twelve stones in the middle of the Jordan River as a marker to remember God’s faithfulness and a marker of their transition into the Promised Land.
I wonder how that generation felt as they spent their first major holiday in the land of Canaan? Granted they had been wandering in the wilderness for 40 years, so really all they knew was transition. But, the day after that first Passover meal (just 4 days after crossing the Jordan), they ate the produce of a new land and the manna from heaven ceased to arrive every morning. The provision that generation had grown up on, the daily routine they had known their whole lives just...stopped. That must have been difficult. Believe me, I’m right in the middle of teaching children to try new foods; it’s rarely a pleasant endeavor.
And yet, I can’t help but wonder at the timing of that major change. It happened the day after they were able to celebrate a Feast they had also known their whole lives. God gave them a calendar and a festival marker to root them in his grace right in the middle of a time of unbelievable transition.
That’s why I am so grateful for the liturgical calendar of the Church year and why we use it in our home. Yes, there will be differences in how we celebrate in a new place. But the days, the seasons, the feasts, and the fasts are there, every year, as markers of remembrance in our own times of upheaval.
God gave them a calendar and a festival marker to root them in his grace right in the middle of a time of unbelievable transition.
The Church calendar doesn’t demand that we be ready for the inevitable changes of life. It’s not a box that we must force ourselves into (maybe that’s the reason it’s circular instead of square like our secular calendars). But it does invite us to walk along these familiar paths of tradition as directional markers when our lives are in constant states of transition. We wait in Advent, we rejoice in Christmas, we repent in Lent, we celebrate in Easter, we look for the Spirit at Pentecost, and we order our lives toward Christ during Ordinary time.
If you are walking through a season of upheaval and change like me, maybe these ancient rhythms can steady you like they are steadying me. One season at a time.