—How many of you worship in a church that recognizes Thanksgiving?
I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
—How many of you worship in a church that celebrates January 1st as the “New Year”?
I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt.
—How many of you worship in a church that recognizes “Mother’s Day”?
I am sorry to tell you your salvation is in doubt. . . .
I have not made the claims above to shock you, but rather to put you in a position to discover how odd being a Christian makes you.19
Though I may not put it as bluntly as Hauerwas does, I agree with the point he is making. Christians have a different culture and therefore a different way of telling time. Indeed, the way people tell time is one shaping feature of a culture. Rabbi Abraham Heschel argues that Judaism creates an architecture of time.20 If the same God of Israel gave them a culture-shaping calendar full of tradition and holy days and practices, why would he change plans with the church? Isn’t it just as important for the church today to pass on a distinct culture as it was for Judaism then? We still tell time, and God has a way of sanctifying time. God is still at work in making a people, not individual monads.
One of the gifts of the church calendar is the opportunity to remind ourselves that time is not a commodity that is running out but is rather a gift to celebrate. As I mentioned in chapter 7, in my own life I can feel like I’m chasing after productivity, striving to make the most of my time. The ancient church comes to me to say, “Stop.” Rather than grasp the limited resource of time, I’m invited to accept time as a gift. “You’re in this rhythmic year. It’s here now. There’s a season. Live into it. This time will come again.” Each year, I experience the same events differently—I’ve grown, changed, reached a different place in life. Each season is different because I’m passing through it a different person, and I see something new each time through. Time is like a spiral leading us and maturing us as we “fall upward.”21 The calendar orients me to the world in a different way. It’s a cyclical calendar rather than a linear life. The weekly and yearly liturgy (“the work of the people”) is the primary place that cultivates a Christ-consciousness in time. The church can slow us down so that we see.22 The world disorders us, and we need the church to reorder us.
You may be overwhelmed hearing about all these practices. By the end of the book, I’ll have given you sixteen practices—and that’s a condensed list. There are more! I remember being overwhelmed when introduced to spiritual formation. How am I supposed to read the Bible, pray, memorize Scripture, do contemplative exercises, fast, and feast? And do I do these things every day? At the same time? In every season? Of course, the answer to these last three questions is no. The practices need to be distributed. Coming up with an original way to distribute them can be overwhelming. Using the church calendar is a helpful alternative.
The church calendar starts in Advent, signaled by the color purple, a color associated with both repentance and royalty. We prepare for the arrival (the meaning of the word “advent”) of King Jesus. This time of preparation is marked by an extraordinary moment before the event, the hush before the orchestra performs, the moment before the sun rises, a time when we hold our breath. These are Advent moments, and the church has a season of holding its collective breath, so to speak, to start the liturgical year.
It is Advent, which usually comes after Thanksgiving, and not January 1 that begins the Western Christian year. The Christian year starts in rest, waiting, making room for Jesus. We remember the coming of Jesus into the world, the coming of Jesus into our life, and the return of Jesus to judge the living and the dead. We sit in figurative darkness in our spirituality just as we sit in physical darkness in this time of the year. This season of silence and waiting is a fitting time for the contemplative practices in the beauty tradition.
One of the interesting things about the church calendar is how it cuts across the secular calendar. How would you describe life and culture between Thanksgiving and Christmas? Usually, people are hurried, rushed, stressed, busy. There may be some kindness sprinkled in, but overall, it is a consumeristic hellscape in every store. For most of our neighbors, the year starts not with rest but with consumption.
The church tells time differently. In all this reordering of time, the church offers an invitation to the larger world: What kind of life do you want? You can live at rest too. You don’t have to live into a fractured and rushed world. Peace is possible.
Then Christmas comes, not as a day but as a twelve-day feast. The light comes into the world, symbolized by white liturgical vestments, and for twelve days the church celebrates. The world may be exhausted by December 25, but the church is just getting started. By engaging in contemplation, analyzing our lives, and making room for Christ, we go into the world with feasting. Parties and presents are prevalent for twelve whole days. The twelfth day is called “Epiphany,” and on it we commemorate the magi coming to honor the Christ child and the good news of God spreading to the gentiles. Historically, many in the church celebrated Epiphany by burning dry Christmas trees to proclaim Christ as the light of the world. If you’ve never burned a Christmas tree, I highly recommend it. Christians should be the best at throwing parties.
Then, until Lent, the church lives through “Ordinary Time.” The liturgical color is green, which symbolizes growth. So much of our lives is lived in the ordinary moments, in which we have opportunities for normal growth. Focusing on the truth tradition during Ordinary Time would be a fitting practice.
Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, which falls anywhere from early February to early March. Ash Wednesday is a visceral reminder that we will die. Christianity, after all, is not merely about living well but is about living well in light of our death. Lent is a forty-day period (not counting Sundays) in which we follow Christ into the wilderness. As Israel was tempted for forty years to reveal what was in their hearts, so Jesus was led to the wilderness to fast and pray and be tempted by the devil to reveal what was in his heart (Matt. 4:1–10). Where Israel failed, Jesus succeeded, and his success ultimately culminates in his death. During Lent we focus on the broken aspects of our lives that need healing, looking forward to the healing that Jesus brings.
Typically, the church practices asceticism in the goodness tradition during Lent—things like fasting from certain foods or other luxuries. Remember that asceticism is not a masochistic requirement. It’s not just hard for hard’s sake. Giving up certain goods is a requirement for joy’s sake. As Saint Augustine remarks, “How hard and painful does this appear! The Lord has required that ‘whoever will come after him must deny himself.’ But what he commands is neither hard nor painful when he himself helps us in such a way so that the very thing he requires may be accomplished. . . . For whatever seems hard in what is enjoined, love makes easy.”23 We all sacrifice for what gives us joy. I wake up early with my kids because I love them and it’s a way to love my wife. You may sacrifice and work out because you want the greater good of health. We take time to read for the greater good of learning. And sometimes those things don’t seem like sacrifices, because the thing we are sacrificing for is so much better than the thing sacrificed. In Jesus’s case, the One who commands us to deny ourselves denies himself. The One who calls us to take up our cross helps us carry it. These practices of giving up give us more in the end.
The final days of Lent are called the Paschal Triduum. These three services—Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday—are actually one continuous service in which the church walks with Jesus through his suffering and death. Personally, these days are my favorite liturgical holidays (“holy days”). On Thursday the church leaders wash members’ feet, following the example of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. Then the people remember Jesus’s betrayal, and all the liturgical colors and elements are stripped from the altar. It’s a tangible reminder of how the disciples, after being served by their leader, have their hopes crushed. It seems that Jesus failed. The despair and hurt I feel as I strip the altar and look at the bare church always grips me. Then, on Good Friday, there is a somber service recalling the final hours and the crucifixion of Jesus. On Holy Saturday we remember Jesus’s descent to the dead and the silence of God until nightfall, when Easter tidings begin to ring.
While Lent focuses on what needs to be healed, Easter is a season that celebrates the healing. Since we are embodied beings, fasting helps me feel the longing I should have for Christ. I remember the first time I fasted during Lent. I gave up meat. When Easter morning came, my body was with my affections, longing for a more tangible reality of Christ’s coming. The longing was not just in my head for what I should know; I felt it in my body. I smoked pork shoulder, grilled some meat, and feasted. And this was only the start! Easter starts a fifty-day celebration season.
One of my favorite things about the church calendar is that Easter always comes. Healing is always on the way. No matter how well, or poorly, I succeed in my fasting and prayers of Lent, Easter still comes—even with my broken promises and practices. Easter does not depend on my success in Lent. God comes with grace to save and to heal and to reconcile once again.
Fifty days after Easter, Pentecost arrives. On this day the church celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter (Luke 24:49; John 14:26; 16:7–15; Acts 2:1–13). The Holy Spirit is what empowers the community to live together in love and graciousness as individual members bear the fruit of the Spirit and walk in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:16–26).
After Pentecost, for about half of the church calendar, the church lives in Ordinary Time again. The ordinary means of grace are always present: hearing the Word preached, seeing the Word in the sacraments, singing the Word in community, engaging in practices of contemplation or asceticism. Ordinary Time is a time for ordinary growth and for living into the practices and rhythms of redemption. Maybe showing up is all you can muster some of the time. The church will pray for you. In other Ordinary Times, perhaps a deep Bible study of one book of the Bible is needed. Sometimes, Ordinary Time may feel like Advent, a season of waiting, and God may invite you into wordless silence in his presence.
So far I haven’t mentioned different feast days throughout the year that celebrate martyrs and saints of the past, but those exist too.
The church calendar helps us live in time differently, remembering the story of God throughout the year. Each season helps heal our vision, which has been blurred and blinded. Each time period helps us contemplate God by focusing on a distinct diadem of his glory. As the priest Luke Bell claims, “The liturgy is about fixing our hearts where true gladness is found.”24 The yearly liturgy, as well as the weekly liturgy, helps reorder our desire.
LIVING INTO PLACE
Earlier in this chapter I mentioned Father Giles and the importance of vows of stability in the Benedictine monastic life. Stability is important for church life, and it’s also important for neighborly life. In other words, stability is not merely a commitment to a holy huddle but can also be a commitment for stewarding a communal shalom.
People aren’t disposable. Places aren’t the same. Sure, I can make new friends, but I’ll never have friends like Nick, Danny, Logan, Jack, Matt, and Ben, because they’ve known me the longest. They knew me in my foolish high school years. They’ve seen me grow. They have loved me when I felt unlovable. I’ve made new friends, but I can’t replace my day-one homies.
Likewise, I could never have friends like Jonathon and Gary if I left Asheville, North Carolina. Our friendships are distinct. We’ve shared life together, cried together, worshiped together. Even if I move to a different house within the same city, I’ll never have neighbors like Luis and Marianne. I can meet new neighbors, and perhaps they’ll offer unique gifts. But Luis makes tacos for my family when my wife is sick. Luis introduced me to the wonder of Oaxaca, his home region in Mexico, and its signature agave plants. These are gifts that are not replaceable.
As I talk about stability, I can’t promise I’ll never move, but I always want to live in a place as if I’ll be there forever. Doing so commits me there. Commitment also makes it hurt to leave. It should feel like I’m being ripped out of a web of connections if I leave a place, because I am. If I lived in a place and it didn’t hurt to leave, then I don’t think I ever cared for it or was nourished by it. If I’m not caring for a place and people, then my love for God is mental and ethereal but makes no impact on where I live. I’m not sure that’s the kind of peace and healing that God is passionate about bringing to earth.
In the aftermath of the first sin, the reaction is to shift responsibility. God asks Adam, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (Gen. 3:11). Adam points his finger in blame: “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate” (v. 12). When Cain kills Abel and God comes looking, Cain asks, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (4:9). The implied answer to this rhetorical question is no, but the real answer is yes. Yes! You are your brother’s keeper. When Christ comes, he comes bearing the guilt as his brother’s keeper. He takes responsibility. Spiritual formation is misguided and distorted if you don’t bind yourself to a connected community, which includes the land and all living creatures.
We are placed beings. We are taken from the land, and we feed on the land. We cannot avoid the truth that “our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land” and that all the living “are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone.”25 We are in a web of existence that includes not only the church and our neighbors but also the very dirt we live on. Creation care is therefore spiritual formation. Caring for the land is stewarding God’s gifts to us. Every created thing is loved by God. But we will not love what we do not know. As Wendell Berry says, “To see and respect what is there is the first duty of stewardship.”26 Perhaps the reason we don’t care much about the maintenance of what we’ve been given is that our hands seldom touch the land. We drive on pavement and walk on cement. Part of the creation mandate of Genesis 1 is ecological care as an act of dominion—not dominance but watchfulness.
On the subject of living into place, the theologian Norman Wirzba proposes, “If you want to be with God, don’t look up and away to some destination far beyond the blue. Look down and around, because that is where God is at work and where God wants to be. God does not ever flee from his creatures.”27 God meets his creatures where they are. God is not around the next bend, at the next big event. God is here, among us, desiring to meet us. Adam is taken from the adamah, the ground. Humans come from humus. God inspires the dirt to create humanity. We’re called to toil and serve the dirt we came from. We’re called to nourish the places that have nourished us. Often, however, we forsake the dirt and fail to live with the land. We deteriorate our genesis.
In an interview with nature writer Barry Lopez, Fred Bahnson asked about Lopez’s time in the 1970s and 1980s among the Inuit population in the Arctic. Lopez asked what adjective these indigenous communities would use to describe white North American culture. The word he heard again and again was “lonely.” “They see us as deeply lonely people,” Barry told Fred, “and one of the reasons we’re lonely is that we’ve cut ourselves off from the nonhuman world and have called this ‘progress.’”28 Maturity in Christ is not escape but presence.
Early in my spiritual life, I knew to care about the land, but I did not care to know about the land. And those few swapped words make a world of difference. The modern world encourages us to try to live as disembodied entities, disconnected from both time and place. We may feel like technology gives us access to every place, but every place is no place. Likewise, every time is no time. Because I buy my food in a package at the grocery store, I am disconnected from the earth and its corresponding seasons, rhythms, and cycles. I don’t know the effects of extended drought or what season certain vegetables grow in. I go to the supermarket, and every season is no season.
“People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love,” Berry argues in an essay. “And to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.”29 An agrarian mindset invites us to nourish life in holistic ways: creating vitality of land, creatures, and people together. It invites us to care for and to love our place and our neighbors.
CONCLUSION
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. When I was young, I lamented my place. I always wanted to leave Cleveland. I’d visit “cool” places like Chicago and see that they had so much more . . . stuff: buildings, restaurants, parks, culture. Even if both Cleveland and Chicago tended to be cold and bitter, with long winters and gray, dreary skies, cities like Chicago seemed hip. Cleveland was boring.
When I left Cleveland for “cooler” places, I realized how much I loved Cleveland. I didn’t know how much it had formed me until I was gone. Place is funny like that. We don’t appreciate things until we lose them. Now that I’ve left, I have a new appreciation for Cleveland. I can’t say I dream of returning, but there’s a longing and love I feel for it. It’s not the best city in the world, but it is my city. I grew to care for it, and it hurt to leave.
It should always hurt to leave. There are reasons for moving on. I live in Asheville now (which is one of those cool places—I lucked out). But there will never be a place like Cleveland in my life. It loved me into being. It formed how I view the world (and determined the blessed sports team I love). The goal of the Christian life is to love our place before we leave it, to grow affection for it, to connect to God, land, and place where we are. Where we are is where God wants to meet us.
