Headlong into the New Year

Happy New Year, everyone, nice to be back with you. I took a week off (actually two weeks off from the blog) around Christmas, and it was the right thing to do given all that was going on. But it always feels good to be back at work after even a short break. The discontinuity is important for mental health, I believe, but it’s also nice to be needed. I found the time away healing, but it’s also healing to be able to return!

New year celebrations often bring resolutions (that rarely manifest as revolutions). Having let many resolutions fall to the wayside, I’m not picking any up this year. I feel I work better with projects and goals. I like leveraging effort on production, rather than just self-improvement. To that end, I’d like to address one of the many elephants in the room in 2021: time!

Let’s Make Time…for Time!

Time is always waiting to be addressed, but we rarely make the…wait for it…time. When you’re in a streak of days running together, marking time gets tricky. How do we define the utility of weeks and days when they all seem to have a similar character? I have heard from many folks lately who are feeling “in a rut,” which to me means that they are feeling little variation and lots of boredom and challenge around that. Some routines are just born of laziness, but some arrive imposed by outside forces (work, school, etc.). Whenever we can, it’s up to us to make time special, and to make it really count.

The churches have a built-in set of tools to mark time that actually help us in growing our faith: festivals and feast days. The long tradition of Christian holidays (that’s Holy Days, right?) affords us a chance to mark time in a more meaningful way. This year, it’s my hope to help return Pilgrim Church to a better observance of our holidays. That’s why we celebrated Epiphany on January 3rd, and it’s why we’re celebrating Baptism of the Lord Sunday this week, January 10th. See, every Sunday is not the same. Different weeks have different festivals, and with them, different chances to consider aspects of our faith.

Festivals for the Rest of Us

I’ll take this moment to point you to my podcast, Kitchen Table Spirituality, with my good friend and colleague Jonathan Malone. This week we discuss the movement from Epiphany through to Baptism of the Lord Sunday, and hopefully help you understand why these Sundays and these ideas are important. The next celebration after those will be Transfiguration Sunday on February 14th (also happens to be a feast day for a certain Saint, if you’d forgotten).

I hope in celebrating these days more intentionally we might find ourselves better connected to our faith and to each other. If you have any ideas about enhancing our celebrations, please reach out to me! I look forward to marking time in a new (old) way with you all!