Episode 69: Diana Butler Bass – Resisting Christmas (And Why the Christian Calendar Still Matters)

Jared: You’re listening to Faith for Normal People, the only other God-ordained podcast on the internet.

Pete: I’m Pete Enns.

Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.

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Today on Faith for Normal People, we’re talking about the church calendar with Diana Butler Bass. 

Jared: Diana is an award-winning writer, scholar, and speaker. Most importantly, she’s been on a podcast before called The Bible for Normal People. Yes, but she’s the author of 12 books, the most recent of which is A Beautiful Year.

You can also follow her wildly popular substack at dianabutlerbass.substack.com.  

Pete: And don’t forget to stay tuned at the end of the episode for Quiet Time, where we’ll reflect on the conversation. Right. Let’s dive in. You ready? Let’s do it. 

Diana: We’re carrying around this 2000 year old calendar that still shapes our imaginations, and it’s based on imperialism, militarism, and a transactional economic system.

And so the Christian calendar sort of can slam into that, that calendar and act, act as a corrective if we let it.

Pete: Diana, welcome back to the podcast. It’s great to have you. 

Diana: It is great to see you, Pete and And Jared too. 

Pete: And coming to us right from the cottage. The famous, yeah. Where it all happened. 

Jared: I know that’s right. And now we’re on video. I think last time you were on, no, weren’t on video. We didn’t have, we didn’t have video.

So now people can see the cottage. Alright. Well we’re here to talk about the church calendar and why it matters. And, you know, you’ve written a, a devotional based on, on the church calendar here, so why should people care about the, the calendar? Right before we jumped on, we were talking, I was talking about, I think a lot of our audience like me grew up feeling like the church calendar was too rigid or it was part of this tradition and liturgy and we were supposed to kind of do away with that. 

But I think for a lot of folks, as we feel more ungrounded or unboarded from like a conservative or more evangelical tradition, we’re looking for something to sort of ground us and so, you know, make a case for why the church calendar can help with that.

Diana: Yeah, the church calendar, I, I, I get what you’re saying because I grew up United Methodist. So when I was a little kid, I was in Methodist Church and there was some familiarity with the church calendar there in my childhood. But then when I was a teenager, I joined an evangelical church. And in the 1970s, oh, I can’t believe it’s so long ago, but, um, there was a real sort of move towards anything that smacked a ritual. 

You know, the ritual was like the established church and the ritual was boring and the ritual disconnected you from God. It wasn’t something that functioned in a way that would bring you close, have, you could have an experience of God.

And so a lot of people left ritual behind. But eventually, for me at least, I came back into a more mainline, more traditional setting when I was in my early mid twenties and uh, became an Episcopalian. And so for most of my adult life, I’ve been in some sort of faith setting where the calendar has been followed and frequently people ask me, you know, why it is, I’m still a Christian after all these years.

Even knowing all the terrible things I know about Christianity and its history and how it’s involved in politics, one of the things that’s really helped me to the faith is this alternative sense of time that has been built into my very being from following the church calendar, and this rhythm of seasons through the year has made me more attentive to the stories of faith and taken me to places. 

It’s literally taken me to places I never expected that I could go theologically and, uh, in terms of community and also in terms of activism. And so, so it’s, it’s  basically a spiritual practice that’s very ancient. And yet, uh, is still sort of part of everyday churches.

And the churches that do follow it, I’m not entirely sure. They always understand the radicalness of it. 

So in effect, uh, this book was a call to recover the depth, the spiritual intensity. And that radicalness, uh, for people who already are in churches where this may be followed, and certainly for people who have left religion behind, or who still might be Christian, but are uncomfortable in more conventional religious settings, it’s a way to, to live the story without necessarily having to be in a building. The Christian year is a portable practice, as it were. Yeah. 

Pete: Right. Um, you know, I, I’m thinking of again, people for whom this might be very new. You know, I’ve been Episcopalian now for about 15 years. I made that jump a while back ’cause I got tired of 45-minute sermons.

I needed a 12 minute homily and Eucharist where you go up and do it. Right. So, anyway what- give us the stages of the liturgical year. When does it begin? Does it begin in January? No, it doesn’t. Right, so what, just basic stages so people can maybe who, who, who are just totally fresh to this might have a sense of what’s going on.

Diana: Yeah. The calendar begins with advent. The beginning of Advent is coming up on us as we’re taping, but um, when this airs, I think we’ll be right smack at the start of Advent, and it’s usually around December 1st. It’s the first Sunday. Generally it’s the first Sunday after what we celebrate in the United States as Thanksgiving.

Um, and that Advent goes for four weeks. And then we’re at Christmas. Uh, Christmas is a 12 day season. That is actually after December 25th. Um, and then there’s a season called Epiphany, which is in January and most of February you move from Epiphany to Lent. And Lent ends with a, with a special week, uh, called Holy Week.

And uh, anybody that’s ever around Roman Catholics or Roman Catholic family, has Roman Catholic family, will be well aware of that. Um, and Holy Week leads to Easter. Easter is a 50 day season, not a single Sunday. And then you’re in the final season of the year, which is called Pentecost or Ordinary Time.

So that means that the Christian Calendar has six seasons, not four. Um, and it, it begins around December 1st and it ends around November 30th or so. The very last day of the Christian calendar, very last Sunday of the Christian calendar is a feast called The Feast of Christ the King, which is an absolutely fascinating, uh, way to end the year, and I think it’s a very compelling festival in a year where people are in the streets protesting no kings. Is that happening? So we can talk about that. 

Jared: Well, yeah, but maybe, I mean, I think that’s a, I wanna make sure we get back to that, but to set that up, you kind of just went through, which was very helpful. Thank you for kind of taking us through that.

Um, but something you said earlier and is in your book, you’re, you’re framing this as, as the Christian year could be translated as a story as well. And so before we get to the parts of the story, can you just describe what you mean by that? Like how do we get into the story aspect of something that can maybe feel mundane to folks?

Diana: Yeah. I think that that’s one of the problems with ritual is people think that it’s simply structure. 

There’s nothing wrong with structure. I think that we as human beings often benefit from some level of structure that is outside of us. You know, structure can hold us to account for certain things, the ways that we behave.

And also for me, I can go off on tangents pretty easily, and so structure helps me focus. So, there’s nothing bad about structure, but, but structure can be seen as kind of nuts and bolts kind of dull, but the truth of it is, and, and I think that you, you two might really get this, is that I primarily think of myself as a writer, and writers approach work in different ways.

And the way that a book comes to me and said, at first I get an idea and it’s like, oh, that’s a really good idea. Human beings get ideas all the time. Well, what makes an idea into a beautiful article or an essay or, or a book? And that is, for me, at least once I have an idea, I have to think of what’s the structure of this?

What’s, what form is it going to take? And I’ve written 12 books now. This is actually my. Rounds out the dozen. A beautiful year is number 12, and every one of my books was born in an idea, but then the structure came second and I had to think about what kind of structure would bear the narrative that I wanna share about this idea, you know, how does this, how can I create a structure that helps me put meat on the bones of, of the idea?

And so some of my books have structures that are, uh, beginning, middle, and ends. Um, I wrote a book called Christianity After Religion, which is a sort of beginning, middle, and end book that has a dystopian structure. Where you start in one place and then you go into a decline and you think about the, the, the books people love, um, you know, growing up I love the book Little Women and that has a structure.

That’s what you might consider a conventional structure. It’s beginning, middle and end. You’re following three, four girls growing up. And what happens is you go through their lives and there are exciting and dramatic things along the way. And then you get to this point where their lives come to a happy resolution at the end.

A lot of kids’ books are that way. Harry Potter is a dystopian kind of world where it has the opposite structure. So I’ve structured things that way. I’ve also structured things comparatively, uh, this versus that kind of, uh, putting dualisms together in a narrative in order to make contrast that make a point.

That’s another kind of structure. I sometimes structure things poetically. I wrote a book called Grounded and that has a far more poetic structure. Um, I’ve also written structures that are kind of, uh, grid-like books. So every book for me, um, has behind it this sort of architecture of a design that is the structure.

So that to me is what the Christian year is like. A Christian year is like the, the branches on a tree in the wintertime. And if you just look at the branches on a tree in the wintertime, it looks pretty stark. Um, but what you don’t realize is that that’s just the organic shape of the stripped down thing, that’s the structure of the tree.

You’re looking at, uh, the barest possible minimum of the structure of the tree, but then, you know, it flowers out, it leaves out, it becomes something different. Birds sit in it in the springtime and you know, people go under, have picnics in the summer and leaves turn in the fall. And so there’s an entire story, a storied world that goes around that tree, which at its simplest form, it’s just a bunch of branches on a trunk. 

And so to, that’s what liturgy and, and that’s what the Christian year, this Christian calendar is. 

It can be the barest form, but if you go all around all of the seasons, you see that it fills out. That it becomes a storied world.

And so it’s about far more than just the structure of the thing. It becomes about all of the, the beauty and the storms and the, the leaves and the, the people who gather under its branches and all, everything that is associated with it. And so I can never separate structure and story. To me, that’s an absolutely necessary part of the kind of craft that I work on all the time as a writer. 

Pete: Mm-hmm. So, so the, um, the, the church year then is, there’s a story, right? So just what is the story that it’s telling? What, what is the story? And feel free to contrast it with other stories that are told that we live our lives by.

Diana: It’s hard when you want me to tell a story of an entire year, and I just told you I’m very distractible. 

Pete: Well, so am I. So, go ahead. 

Jared: I know this is gonna be, this is gonna be a real treat for people in their sixties with ADD or something.

Pete: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What I’m looking for is, is not just, is like, what, what’s the power of this story that, that liturgical year is trying to get at? Right. What, what is it, what is it? What, what, what, what can people look at and say, okay, that’s different than what I’m used to, than the world. That, and the way I keep time. Typically, this is different. 

Diana: I think that one of the most interesting things about the calendar is that what we would consider the end of the story is in the middle.

And that is if you were just gonna write a story about the life of Jesus and how God deals with the world, in the frameworks that were presented in the New Testament, you would say, well, Jesus was born and then Jesus lived. He taught a bunch of stuff, and then all this nasty stuff happened and he died and was raised from the dead.

Period. End of story. But that’s not how the Christian year works. The Christian year puts that piece that we think is the big dramatic finale, the Easter story, the resurrection, trumpets, the whole thing, uh, puts that smack in the middle of the year. 

And so it’s a different rendering of time if you’re writing a story where the middle, where the, the, the end is in the middle.

Because what it means is everything before. Uh, the, the big, the big reveal, um, it sort of moves from the edges toward the middle, and then you see the heart of the story, and guess what happens? Then you move back out toward the edges. And so it’s a time in the, in the Christian narrative, pulsates in really kind of a, almost a circular way in curves and spirals and switchbacks, and it does not move in a straight line from beginning to end.

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Diana: And this is what I think is really intriguing because in Western thought, um, we’re sort of brainwashed in this idea of linear time. Uh, that time has a beginning and a middle and an end. And so we’ve taken sort of Western frameworks of time and we often plop them on top of the Bible. And when we do that, um, it creates all kinds of mess, uh, because I can think of the, sort of the two biggest sort of Protestant families of theology in the 20th century.

One would have been liberal or progressive theology, and that’s exactly what liberals and progressives did. They took a linear timeframe and they plopped it down in the Bible, and they said that human beings are good and we’re getting better, and we’re moving toward the kingdom of God. And all we have to do is enact, which Jesus taught, and the world will get better and better, and the kingdom of God will arrive here.

In the world, um, particularly in America. And then fundamentalists went kind of the other way with their timeline and they said, yes, there is a timeline. And um, it’s, God divides time up into seven stages and we’re right at the end of history. And pretty soon there’s gonna be this thing called the rapture.

And then there’s gonna be the apocalypse. And all of time will, will wrap up and there’s going to be a judgment. And I’ve been in both of those kinds of churches. Where you have this linear sense of time imposed on the Bible stories, and then the Bible kind of becomes, in effect, almost crammed into a philosophical sense of time.

But in the Christian year, I think it’s much closer. This sort of circular or curved sense of time, the pulses of time, I think it’s much closer to the kind of mere Middle East mindset of the ancient world that would have been native, in effect Judaism and certainly closer to the kind of way that Jesus himself thought about the nature of time. 

So, I think that the Christian year takes us back to an older sense of time and history.

Jared: How do we, this is getting philosophical. I do wanna come back to some of these very practical ways that the, to your first question, Pete, around the story that it’s telling and how is that different than the story we’re often given, but before we do that, how, how do you help people? Because I, I, so my, my family background is, uh, my family’s Choctaw.

And so as I got older, started being smacked in the face with this Western view of time versus a Native view of time. And it, I went through this transition phase where when you let go of linear time, you can almost feel like, then things feel meaningless because, along with a linear sense of time is also a sense of purpose, right?

That liberal sense is like, we’re moving toward progress and we’re, we’re heading to an end, and then the conservative, even if it’s toward destruction, at least we’re headed towards some end. And then when you start to shift your thinking of time, sometimes it can kind of despair. Like, oh, this pulsating thing is just a never ending back and forth.

How, how have you managed that to bring purpose and to bring meaning? How has that become an exciting thing for you rather than a, oh, bummer. We’re just like more circular or more in out, in out. Like, oh my gosh, we just keep going round and round on this merry-go-round here. 

Diana: You know, that’s kind of the complaint that Western Christianity has sometimes had about eastern religions.

Um, is that there’s the, that the sense of time because they are less linear and more into repeating cycles of life and time and, you know, creation, all those things. Uh, that it can be a despairing kind of wheel. Just sort of turning through the universe and it never goes anywhere, as it were.

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Diana: I think that that’s a really kind of, I, I think that’s a really false concept, and it’s certainly not the concept that, that the Bible is trying to communicate because I don’t think the, the way that the Christian year works is it is cyclical, but it’s, and it, and it does rehearse, I would say it rehearses the same things over and over again, but it never really repeats them.

In exactly the same way. Sure, you celebrate Christmas every year on December 25th. But what happens is, is that since human experience is building and changing all around all the, all the time, um, when you encounter these holidays sort of anew, and these seasons anew, they speak differently because we as human beings are in a different place than we were 12 months earlier when the wheel turned toward Advent, what have you. 

Um, and so there’s this mixture of human experience going into the cycles and us getting older. Um, and our whole, you know, everything that entails as far as uh, we as human beings are, are alive, um, that isn’t really so much a circle as it is more like a spiral.

Or so it, it does move. It does have directionality. 

Pete: Right? 

Diana: Um, but the directionality isn’t just beginning, middle, and end. And I think that we don’t pay enough attention to the downsides of linear history. Because the real downside of linear history is that yes, we are moving towards a purposeful ending, but the, the question is always, well, who is in control of that purposeful ending?

Who are the, who are the heroes of the story? Who are the victors at the end of the story? And so what linear history also does is it, also of necessity, creates human beings who want to be in power and in control of the line of history itself. 

Music: Mm-hmm. 

Diana: And to me, that becomes an incredibly danger- that’s the dangerous downside of linear history.

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Diana: Uh, there have to be people who are the bad people in the story, and the people who wanna win the story have to defeat the evil doers. It’s absolutely part of the story. Yeah. 

Pete: Yeah, and I mean, that sort of ties into a couple of things I was hoping we could talk about, um, you know, the disillusionment with Christianity in our country today.

I think it’s palpable and, um, yeah, with, with the, um, rather unholy alliance with, uh, political power and things like that. So what, um, what can the ritual of a liturgical year, how can it give people a sense of a different kind of grounding and maybe some, I’m even gonna say like a sense of transcendence, even that that isn’t just locked into the day to day and the corruption and, and all that stuff that we’re just, we’re so tired of.

Diana: Yeah. Well, I think that the year itself unfolds those possibilities as it plays itself out against sort of the political and social year. Um, that we experience through our calendars and through the ways in which our world, uh, the, the, the world of the 21st century is largely structured. Um, at the beginning of a beautiful year, I talk about how the Roman calendar, this 2000 year old linear calendar, um, is still the sort of functional base of the calendar that the world runs, it’s imaginary, its imagination in the 21st century. 

And so here we have a calendar that begins at the, in January, um, and ends with December, the 12th month. Every month of the year that we have is named after a Roman emperor, a Roman god, a Roman festival, or a Roman number.

And, and so I can remember the day that I was just kind of playing with this in my mind’s eye. And it was the summertime and here we were in July and we were celebrating the 4th of July, American independence and freedom, um, on a day named after Julius Caesar. 

And I thought to myself, well, this is odd.

You know, if you stop to think about it, we’re celebrating liberty and independence on a day named after one of the worst of all Roman emperors. Maybe we should have changed the day of the month or, or the name of the month, uh, 250 years ago maybe. Maybe July should be called The Month of Thomas Jefferson, you know, or something like that.

Rather than Julius Caesar. So this is kind of the contrast about our calendars, is that we’re carrying around this 2000 year old calendar that still shapes our imaginations, and it’s based on imperialism, militarism, and a transactional economic system. 

And all of the, and if you look at the holidays that we celebrate, um, in the United States, probably three quarters of them, uh, follow that pattern.

They still follow that same sort of pattern. As we have the actual Latin names and we have Latin background names for half of the days of our weeks, and we still are celebrating mostly military heroes and military events. We’re celebrating imperialism, people who have had a powerful impact on politics and sort of the way that society is designed.

And, uh, we’re celebrating economic transactional, and many of our newer holidays are just outright economic holidays, Black Friday, right. Amazon, Prime days, bank holidays, those kinds of things. So, so basically, I mean, what I’m saying is that the calendar that we currently have is telling us a story.

But we never notice it. And so the Christian calendar sort of can slam into that calendar and act as a corrective. Um, if we let it in our lives and our communities and our imaginations, and- 

Pete: And by not using the names of the months, you know, it’s like, it’s the first Sunday of Advent, the second Sunday of Advent.

Yeah. You know, the, the, the fourth week of ordinary time. I mean, it’s just, it’s, it’s a whole different way of thinking about the thing that’s, that’s always in the backdrop of our existence. We never think about it, we never analyze it. We never, we never try to understand as you’re doing in your book and here today, um, the impact of that on how, how we do human humanity.

Diana: There’s this, one thing that I think we all can talk about just from our own experience is that over the lifetime of the three of us, um, an entire season of the church got co-opted, uh, by consumerism. 

Pete: No… 

Diana: And that I know is a terrible thing.  

Pete: Did that happen? I didn’t notice. Anyway, go ahead. 

Diana: Yes, did that really happen? And, and what it is, you know, people often say that, oh, I hate commercial Christmas, but the truth of it is, is it’s even worse than most people think. Because the 12 days of Christmas are 12 days of merriment after Christmas, and they’re, they’re literally dedicated to being with families, giving away money to the poor, sharing gifts, feasting, of having huge parties.

I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s literally supposed to be sort of the most, uh, festive and joyous time of the year. And it was considered to be a time of sort of freedom from inhibition. I mean, it was just a great, great period in the church season. And what happened is, uh, commercial interest took the 12 days of Christmas, put ’em before Christmas.

And turn them into sort of the end of Advent, end of Advent. If they pay attention to Advent. Yeah. As the 12 shopping days before Christmas. And so they say, oh, here we are. We’re counting down the 12 days of Christmas. And every time that happens, I go, no, you’re not. You’re counting down the 12 shopping days before a holiday in which you’re gonna close your stores for maybe 24 hours if we’re lucky before you open them again on the day after that special December 25th day, uh, to big sales and people pouring back into your stores and scooping up anything that’s left on the shelves. 

And so we’ve literally seen a traditional Christian practice taken and put in service to a specific consumerist period of time, um, and turned into something it just isn’t. 

Jared: Mm-hmm. 

Diana: And so that’s, that’s pretty ugly. 

Jared: Yeah. How, what are some practical, um, ways that we can keep Christ in Christmas? That’s what I want to say. 

Pete: Wow, I didn’t hear, I didn’t, I did not wake up this morning thinking Jared would say that, but go for it. Go for it, Jared. 

Jared: You know, how do we, it just feels like, I think for a lot of these things, sometimes the, the, the wheel of these transactional economics, the wheel of these things feel so heavy and they feel so, it’s like, what am I gonna do? Inescapable? Well, yeah. And it feels a little bit like I am gonna just not go to work the next day and be like, well, I don’t operate by this calendar. Like, how do we, that feels lonely and it feels like you’re gonna be out of a job.

So how do we resist kind of the pool that feels like it has sucked up so much of our culture now? 

Diana: Well, I, I think that, I feel that I feel the same tension. Um, oh my gosh. You know, the weeks before Christmas, I, I don’t know how men experience the weeks before Christmas, but, uh, many American women, especially middle class women.

And, and here, it doesn’t matter if you’re white, black, Hispanic. Uh, your race does not really count here, but women feel enormous pressure around Christmas time to make like the perfect Christmas. Yeah. And whatever the perfect Christmas is in your tradition, it’s like that’s your business in those four weeks.

Yeah. Before Christmas is to create this perfect environment so that your family will have great memories going forth forever and ever. And they’re not gonna be mad at you at anything about anything from your childhood. Um, and so your kids will love you. Um, so the pressure of that is terrifying.

Yeah. And, um, when it comes to Advent, I think I succumb to it at some earlier points in my life. And now I’m just more low key about it. Um, I, I purposefully choose to go on a mini retreat sometime during Advent and that even this year, I looked at the days when I could go and I thought, oh no, that means I’m gonna miss So-and-So’s party.

And I thought. Who cares? 

Pete: Mm-hmm. 

Diana: I mean, honestly, who, who the hell cares? If I’m really not there, I don’t really care. It  just sounds depressing. Going to parties in Washington DC this year, around Christmas time, I mean, I know what everybody’s gonna be talking about. They’re gonna be talking about how horrible Donald Trump is and whether or not we’re gonna survive the next three years.

And boy, that’s gonna be a really Merry Christmas. 

Yeah. So I’d rather not go. Um, so, so I took, I just literally thought, okay, I’m closing those days on my calendar and I’m gonna go on a retreat. 

And I’m gonna spend time in silence and thinking about some things that matter to me, uh, spiritually. And if things don’t get done, that’s just too bad. Um, Christmas is gonna come anyway. And, and so, so I make purposeful decisions like that. And I also, uh, do, along the season, I try not to think, oh, I’ve gotta get it all out of the box on the first day of December so that we have everything perfect for the whole of the month. I literally build kind of through the month with decorations. 

I sort of start one place of the house and then I kind of build out with different things so I don’t get too exhausted. So I don’t feel like I have to look like Architectural Digest on the very first day of December. Um, but instead I make it kind of a month long unfurling.

Pete: Yeah. 

Diana: And we also do the, we also do the home. Excuse me, religious ritual of lighting candles on an advent wary. 

Pete: Right, right. 

Diana: And so, so we slow it down. We make decisions that take us out of the normal course of things, um, and we look at what’s really important about the season. 

Pete: You know, I, I appreciate that.

Um, you know, I was thinking of my mother, right. And, and other women I know who had, they had that same pressure and, um, maybe finding pockets of, of, of quietness. And, you know, maybe, maybe they can’t go away for a few days, but maybe they can. I’m just not gonna do that this Saturday. I’m, I’m going to restore some sanity into my life to, to try to regain something of that rhythm of the year, you know, and it’s, it’s hard for people to do that, though.

It’s hard for me to do that. 

Jared: Well, yeah, and I, if I can, my, my wife has this for sure, and we’ve talked about it, and so I also don’t wanna always put that on the women. I think there’s also, there’s cultural pressure and if you’re in that, you also feel caught because it’s like, well now I have been complicit.

I’ve kind of created this, and now there are expectations and I may get into right. My kids may be upset with me. So I also think for men out there, it’s also our job to, uh, reinforce that this is not mom’s job. These are the expectations. Like we can do a better job too, of not saying right, you know, women, you need to just figure this out and not do it.

Um, and you know, to hell with the consequences. Like, well, there are real consequences sometimes when, you know, the teacher doesn’t get the present and it’s up to the mom to make sure all the teachers get all the presents and, right. So I think there’s also a place, sometimes I think it’s easy for men to be like, well, why are you doing that?

Just don’t do it. Instead of just, how about we help? Right. Maybe slow down these expectations over time. And be in it together, so, right. Yeah. 

Diana: Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe it will help that I happen to be a woman and I just said, slow down. Yeah. Don’t worry. Things don’t get done. Yeah. 

Yes, yes. And, and you know, it was interesting to me, ’cause when I wrote the essays on, um, Advent.

The, the whole, the whole, that whole section is about time. And then there’s also stuff that weaves in and out about family traditions. And I think that my very favorite essay in that entire section is called Blue Christmas, and it’s about a memory of my father, um, that took place before Christmas, uh, when I was probably six or seven years old.

And I tell the story about how my parents, every single year. I mean, and my dad was a florist. 

So talk about high expectations of what a house would look like. 

Music: Gosh. I mean, literally you poor thing. 

Diana: I’m like a professional. Because I grew up with a professional, uh, people would pay my dad to come and design their homes for Christmas.

So, so this is what my, one of the things my father did, and that meant that our house usually looked pretty good. You know, but, um, every single year my parents would have this, the same exact fight when I was really small. It was, I grew up in the 1960s and so everything was modern in the 1960’s. 

So when I was real small, we had a silver Christmas tree.

We were like the people that Charlie Brown hated. And uh, Charlie Brown Christmas, we had the fake Christmas tree and my dad decorated everything in blue. Now my mom, she actually hated all the modern stuff. She hated the blue, she hated the silver tree, the whole thing. And so they would always fight about this.

And um, finally my mom got my dad to have a green plastic Christmas tree instead of a silver metallic Christmas tree. That was a big advance in our house. And then my mother would, she started nagging him about the lights, and she said, I don’t want blue. I don’t want blue-blues. Horrible. Why would you put up blue Christmas lights?

She, and she was, she wanted white lights. Yeah. My family is pretty working class, and my mom thought white lights were what rich people had on their houses. So my mom wanted the status of these white lights on her house. And so she went, white lights, white lights, and then she got nowhere with white.

And finally she said, well, what about colored lights? The children like the colors of Christmas. And my dad just, nope. Blue lights. And so there’s this memory that I have of being a little girl and going outside on a winter night and helping my dad put up the blue Christmas lights. And he would line the roof and the bushes and he did it so artistically.

It was just, his placement was perfect, you know? Yeah. And um, finally, I, this one night we were out there and he looked at it and I said, daddy, why do we have blue lights in our house? He said he took my hand and it had started about 10 minutes before this, just to really lightly snow. 

And uh, and he said, he looked at me and he said, because they’re pretty when it snows. Hmm. And I looked at the lights and my dad was right.

And there was some way in which that blue light coming through those frosty white snowflakes, it taught me something about Christmas and it taught me something about beauty, and it taught me about how a father loves his daughter. 

That had nothing to do with decorations per se, or getting it all right.

You know, and those are the things that we remember about the year and how the year unfolds. And so, so that essay, Blue Christmas, I use as an example of how a lot of churches recently have started to have blue Christmas services. 

And instead of having right around the longest night, usually December 21st or 22nd, um, inviting people into the church simply to reflect on what’s been hard in the previous year. Right? 

Pete: Oh, right, right. Yep. Yeah. Which we don’t leave a lot of room for in a consumerist society. It’s not supposed to be that way. Right. So, yeah. 

Diana: Right. And I think that the story of my dad really sort of cuts against the grain of that consumerism. You know? I mean, it is about decorations, it is about the kinds of things we do during the holidays, but the memory isn’t a bought one in a package.

The memory is the physicality of my dad’s hand in the snow falling and just the sheer beauty of the season, which takes me immediately back to that. And then causes me to ask the questions, you know, what do I want my daughter to remember about me at Christmas when she’s recalling her life.

Some 10 or 15 or 20 years from now. 

Pete: I think we have time for one more question. Yeah. And, and I’m really curious about this and maybe you can send us off with this, right. Uh, so much of the church year is ordinary time. Yeah. What’s the power of ordinary time? What’s the significance? It’s like ordinary, oh, let’s wait for Advent. That kind of thing.

You know, what, what’s the, what’s the power of or, because that’s where we live most of our lives, I think, you know, in that ordinary time. So just, just maybe send us off with a few words about ordinary time. 

Diana: Well, in, in some senses, it’s easy. The first half of the Christian year is about the life of Jesus.

And so that’s the part that goes from the edges. The waiting and Advent through Christmas, the birth and the manger. Uh, the 12 days of merriment, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter boom, resurrection, the big explosion, the the big bang in the center of the, of the circle, as it were. But then what happens next?

Well, you have to go out. And that’s the second half of the story. 

This, the first half is about moving toward the center of God’s dream for us in the embodiment of Jesus. And then the second half after the, the, the big explosion of the surprise of the story, we carry it out back to the edges and the second half of the Christian year is about us.

And it’s about how well we listened to the things that Jesus taught and how we respond to Jesus’s central call to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. And so in the second half of the year, you hear all of the great parables of Jesus and the questions mount, you know? Am I, am I the good Samaritan?

Um, what happens when I enact the role of the older brother and the parable of the prodigal son? Or am I the prodigal daughter that needs to come home? What, what do these stories mean in the world in which we are living today? What does it mean to live in a story where there’s this constant reversal of hierarchy where the first shall be last and the last shall be first, what does it, how do we actually embrace a social vision of Blessed are the poor, blessed are the mourning.

Blessed are the, the one, those who, um, are persecuted. What, what does that mean for us now and how do we live it in our world? And that’s what the second half of the year is. It’s this quest through the teachings, the stories, the healings, and saying, is all this only about 2000 years ago? Or is this about us?

How does that big moment in the center radiate outward? Through our lives, our communities, and into the world, and that’s ordinary time. We’re supposed to take an extraordinary story into the heartbeat of our days in the second half of the year. 

Jared: Well, Diana, thank you so much for jumping on.

You’ve, you’ve done what I didn’t think anyone could do and that’s make the calendar so compelling and so rich and I, I, as I say that as someone grew, grew up in that tradition that said ritual’s bad, let’s get rid of it. You’ve just really kind of illuminated the power of the calendar. So thank you so much for coming on and talking to us about it.

Diana: Oh, it’s great you all take the Bible and do the same thing all the time. So I’m just, uh, following your lead and trying to make ritual more interesting to people as well as the scriptures themselves. 

Pete: Great. Well thanks Diana. 

And now for quiet time with Pete and Jared. All right, well, here we are, quiet time talking about the church calendar.

And so Jared, did you have any, like, any exposure to it at some point in your life? 

Jared: No. Again, it was never, yeah, it was mostly, yes, but we had like the evangelical version, just like we had our own version of like rap, and it’s like we have like the evangelical version of everything. So outwardly we said, no, no, to the church calendar.

It’s all ritual. It’s dead tradition, not helpful. But we would have like, uh, Lent was a time to like give up something, you know? So if you gave up chocolate, you were like a better Christian. Or something like that. And then instead of. Well, no, not instead of, I guess in addition to Christmasy stuff, we’d make Jesus a birthday cake or something.

Okay. That was like the extent, that’s a nice extent of the church calendar, but nothing epiphany wasn’t a thing. Uh, the Pentecost wouldn’t have been a thing. Nothing like that. 

Pete: Yeah. Well, I mean it’s, it’s, it’s Christmas, which includes Advent. It’s all one blob of Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And then Easter and then VBS.

Jared: Oh yeah. We would’ve celebrated Easter, but not in any, again, it’s like the one day, the one event-

Pete: It’s, those are the two holidays. Yes. You know, and if there’s an acknowledgement of maybe, of other things and maybe Lent, ’cause you feel sort of guilty, you should give something up. Yeah. So that gets a little bit of traction.

But after that it’s, it’s just not much. 

Jared: Yeah. What, what about you? ’cause you didn’t grow up evangelical, so you might have more exposure to church calendar stuff? 

Pete: Well, I, yeah, I mean, my first church experience was in Lutheran Church. Wear robes and all that kinda stuff. And so I remember the colors changing in church at Christmas time, you know, all that stuff.

And, um, so I, I, I had that and, um, but then I didn’t, you know, I, um, had a conversion experience in a Nazarene church when I was like 15. And then it was like, no liturgy anything. Right? No church, no, no consciousness of church calendar. Until really, um, like my late forties, maybe around 50, and I just started thinking to myself, I’m bored out of my mind in church.

You know, and it, it’s really not against the people or anything like that. I just said, I don’t want 45 minute sermons. I, I want some sense. Um, and this came out in the interview a little bit, some sense of transcendence. That’s beyond my day to day. That’s where, you know, now having been a part of, um, the Episcopal world for I guess about maybe 13 years now, 14 years, it’s, I, I, I like, I like that, I like the regularity.

I like doing things on a Sunday that other people are also doing. Uh, whenever their Sunday morning is, you know, wherever they are in the world. And being a part of that and, and, and, and watching the, um, the rector’s robes change, you know, over the year. It’s, it’s just, it’s, it’s nice because it reminds me of something.

You know, I mean, when, uh, related to this, when my, when my son when relatively young, he was about 16 years old and, uh, we were at a, at a church that was, you know, more evangelical and, and all kinda stuff. And, you know, the music was trying to draw the young people in kind of thing. And he said, I, and, and he wasn’t really particularly religious.

He just said, I don’t want the kind of music I hear all week to be in church. It should, it should be something else. And he sensed that. And, and that’s what I’ve gotten out of, uh, trying to observe in some sense liturgical calendar. There are calendars you can buy that start in December. With Advent. And they go and like ordinary times, like this huge page. 

Jared: It just unravels down. 

Pete: And he and Pat and, and you know, Holy Week is like, it’s a little thing. It’s like, it’s like, wow. But that’s it. It, but it, it’s, it’s unsettling to have a calendar like that. It’s like I have to sort of convert that into my currency.

Which is the secular calendar. 

Jared: Well that, that’s a good segue, I think. ‘Cause one of the things we wanted to talk about here was more of this idea of the calendar. We have the quote “secular” calendar is based on these ideas of imperialism, militarism, uh, kind of this consumeristic or transactional economic system and this idea of resistance to that, that really struck a chord with me.

Not something I’ve given a lot of thought to, of how we are shaped by these forces that we just assume are more objective, I think, than they are. And we think that they’re more neutral. It’s like, well, it’s just the aims of the month. Let’s not get carried away.

Yeah. Let’s not read into this. Yeah. But yeah. You know, talking about Christmas and, and highlighting the more extreme examples shows you how it’s kind of penetrated a lot of different things. 

Pete: It’s, it’s baked in, I think, you know, that that’s just it. And, you know, transactional, militaristic, you know, imperialistic.

It’s, we live in that and, and we don’t notice. We don’t notice the myths that we live by, right? That give meaning to everything, that underlying structure. We’re not even aware that it’s there. And the, the notion of being, uh, awakened from that, you know, is, is. It’s very appealing to me, honestly. And, and, but you know, you made the point, and it’s a good point, like, well, how do you actually do that?

Because you still have to go to work, you know, and, and you’ve got off the week between Christmas and New Year’s and you know, not any time before that. And, and everybody’s having these parties and, and how do you do that? And that’s, you know, I mean, not, not to get weird book of revelation on us here, but like, you know, the mark of the beast, you can’t buy or sell without a certain way of looking at the nature of reality.

Right. Right. And interpreting that symbolically, which we should. You know, it’s just, it’s, it’s like, yeah, we’re, we are sort of trapped in a way. Right. You know, it’s like not buying from Amazon. Yeah. But I need it tomorrow and I don’t wanna go out. You know, it’s like, it’s, it’s, it’s how, how do you, how do you live in an alternate time when every aspect of your life is governed by that other way of thinking time.

Yeah. And it’s, and it’s not helpful. It’s destructive to people. It’s dehumanizing. Right, right. It sort of sucks. I mean, so what do you do, Jared? Fix it. 

Jared: Yeah, I, that’s why I asked. I hoped Diana was gonna give us the answer. Diana, you didn’t give us the answer, but, uh, I mean, I think it’s finding these little ways.

‘cCuse I do, I, my hope would be that it snowballs over time and I do think there are times when the resistance is gonna cost us something. You know, like not shopping at Amazon or things like that. Like, that just, just costs us something. And I think that’s what we often don’t want to do is we wanna figure out a way to make change without it costing us anything.

I think that, you know, one thing that came to mind was the move from celebrating Christopher Columbus Day to having it be more of a Native American, uh, day, which I don’t usually care about, kind of token, things like that, but I, it does. I actually appreciate that. Because over time, that is kind of the, helps us think about it a little bit differently. 

It’s interesting because I’d be curious if this is a, maybe an age thing or a perspective thing, but I think of these words of imperialism, militarism, and, uh, transactional economics. I think you resonate with that. It sounded like you resonated with that and Diana, I think for me, the more I think about it, I, I actually am a little bit more worried about the loss of any meaning.

Because growing up. I didn’t know the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Like I, I didn’t practice any of these holidays as anything meaningful. Right. It was a day off of school. 

And that almost scares me more is that, like, we’re not adhering to the meaning of the days.

I get that they are, they’re built on these. It’s that I think they’ve been kind of stripped of any meaning. 

And the question for me is how do we rehab our days? How do we, how do we have them mean something again? Right. And my hope would be, let’s make them mean something that’s a little bit more life-giving and not death dealing.

But there’s that, and maybe that’s part of the answer is maybe it’s because these narratives, this imperialism, militarism, transactional economics don’t compel us the way that they did maybe in the sixties or fifties or forties. And so we’ve just lost touch with them and we need something to replace them.

And I wonder that’s, that’s more energizing for me is how do we, how do we replace them? Maybe not even as resistance, but as resistance to apathy. And meaninglessness, right? 

Pete: Yeah. Yeah. I mean that, that’s a big task. And I know, you know, Tom Wright talks about a renewed sense of transcendence and spirituality, which is sort of like the road that’s been paved over everything and made it all just.

It’s cracking and you’ve got these little plants that are coming up again. And I, and I, in my opinion, I think people are, are getting tired of the apathy. I think they want meaning. But the current structure that we have does not provide them that meaning And people, I think good, normal people see through the transactional issues.

Right. The militaristic issues, imperialistic issues, and. And, and, and they’re looking for something. They’re looking for some alternative way to live. And younger people especially, you know? My kids are all in their thirties and they don’t think the way I did when I was in my thirties. It’s a whole different world.

Right. And I’m like, okay, I’m proud of them. They’re, they’re, they’re actually trying to think through, how do I exist? Well, right. And, and the way they, that’s, that’s hopeful. That’s life affirming and meaningful and not, you know, rooted in, I guess the polarization that we’re in now, that, that may be a direct result of the, the, the myths that we’ve been telling ourselves for so long.

Jared: I think part of the, the meaning making part of this and, and even the resistance part of this, is it takes time and energy and community, to your point, it’s exhausting to go it alone. Like, what am I gonna do? If I have to go to work and these things. Right? But as a community. Is it, it, it does take, it takes time and energy to, to, to reflect on it.

Like it’s, it, the idea that I grew up with that ritual is vacuous can be true. If you don’t put energy into it, right? If you don’t put imagination into it. And so it’s not just about practicing different holidays in some hollow way. But it is taking the time and the energy to reimagine what these things mean for us. Right? 

Pete: It takes effort. I mean, spiritual disciplines they call it, I think, right? Yeah. And that’s part of it. 

Jared: I, I think I’m excited about how the calendar can shape the energy and the mood and the tone of that. To have that whole wheel of emotions that people go through, through the calendar so that this is the time for that. 

And we make sure you mentioned, um, grieving and how we don’t have a time with the Blue Christmas. Right. It’s like, well, where’s the time when we do that so that we know, I think the Jewish calendar does this better. Like with Yom Kippur.

And these other places where this is the time to grieve. Now get it all out if you, if you’ve been so busy and you haven’t been thinking about it. Right. We have a time marked for that. And I think that is really, that energizes me to think about it a little differently because it’s actually helping me be human.

Pete: Right. Reclaiming our humanity, um, from the, the structures that are not helpful to us.

Jared: And using the calendar to remind us and propel us toward that.

Pete: Right. Right. Yeah. All right, well let’s do more of that.

Jared: Yeah. Sounds good.

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Outro: You’ve just made it through another episode of Faith for Normal People. Don’t forget you can catch our other show, The Bible for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team.