Today is the last day of the Christian church year. Tomorrow is the first Sunday of Advent, which initiates a new year. I love the fact that the church year thumbs its nose at the secular calendar. Advent always begins four Sundays before Christmas. This means that the beginning of Advent and the beginning of the church year fluctuates between late November and early December. It's not totally disconnected from the secular calendar, of course, since Christmas is a fixed, non-movable feast day on December 25. But, nonetheless, by making the entire church year start (and finish) on days tied to particular commemorations of sacred events, the calendar still asserts the primacy of sacred time over secular time. We basically claim that the events of what we understand to be salvation history condition our understanding of time itself.
In a day and age when we will apparently trample people to death to save a few bucks, I take some small hope out of our ability to also hold onto our sacred time.
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