Buying Time

Calendars are a quick and easy way to add visual interest around the house or office. When I travel, calendars for the next year are often what I choose to bring home for a souvenir of the country or state visited. My family have been calendar givers at Christmas, from the bank calendar we gave to my grandmother every year, to the Far Side editions that I've given to my kids. Once the year is over, wall calendars make great images for a picture file which I often use in exercises at retreats and workshops.
Of course, being thrifty, I often wait until January when the calendars go on sale for half-price to add to my "stock". During the last year, as part of living simply and trying to limit aquisitions and spending - besides having little need for calendar keeping during sabbatical! - I avoided buying any calendars. Then came April and the realization I would be working again, and all of sudden, I had to pay attention to dates and days and times and planning.
Was it too late to purchase a 2007 datebook or a waste to buy a calendar that would remain 25% unused? Or too early for an academic year edition which would begin in September? Never fear, publishers have determined that there is a market for procrastinators!
On a browse through the bookstore, I discovered 16 month calendars which began with March of the current year and goes through August of the next - just perfect for a one-year interim beginning in May. Does this mean there is a market for 16 month calendars that begin every three months? An extension of individualization? Or will software and PDA's rule our time-keeping completely?

Lost Calendar

I've lost my calendar.
Not the datebook I carry with me, not the appointment calendar on my desk, not the scenic wall calendar, or the page-a-day calendar on my dresser nor the one on my Google page or my doc mac site, but the one I've carried in my head for the last two decades. I've lost my mental liturgical calendar, that internal sense of seasons and Sundays that created the rhythm of my weeks and months and years as pastor and preacher.
As one who had the primary responsibility for planning the worship and community life of a particular congregation, I had to carry in my head multiple calendars. At the same time I was dealing with day to day events and preparing for the next Sunday, I had to plan ahead for the next months, the next season, the next holiday. During December, in the midst of Advent and the build up to celebrating Christmas, catalogues would arrive for ordering materials for Lent and Easter. Late winter was almost too late to plan summer activities. By the time school began, folks wanted to know what we would be doing for Christmas.
Whatever the season, Sunday to Sunday served as my markers for the passage of time. That's why I always knew the days of the month that fell on Sundays. The advice given me by an retired pastor proved to be spot on: "Just remember, a pastor's week goes like this - Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday." The relentless march of Sundays demand another sermon, another set of prayers and hymns, another week of preparing and anticipating and build up, and as soon as the service ends, another round begins of getting ready for the next Sunday.
One of the reasons for embarking on this extended sabbatical was to step away from that never-ending responsibility. In a sense, I have stepped out of time, or at least no longer dance to a particular rhythm called liturgical calendar. I knew I'd lost my calendar when the week before Thanksgiving I had to look up the date for the First Sunday of Advent. Nor do I know in what month Easter will be in the Spring.
I've also lost the rhythm of the weekly lectionary, the 3-year cycle of Scripture readings which combines both semi-continuous readings through particular books and seasonally specific passages. When preaching week after week, one is also studying those books and those passages week after week - and always with an awareness of what's coming up in the next weeks and months. Preaching the lectionary becomes one continuous spiral of reading and re-reading - and reading ahead, telling and re-telling the stories that make up The Story. Now that I'm preaching as a guest only once a month or less, and in unfamiliar settings, it feels more like flying in and out from one set of readings to another rather than arriving after a cross country trip. I've missed all the terrain in between.
Now that I know I've lost my calendar, I've realized that I need to find a new one. I must find another rhythm and learn a new dance of days and seasons.