The Liturgical Calendar on Memorial Day

Here we are again at the end of May.

A year ago this weekend is when everything started to get crazy. When the control I thought I had over my life and activities imploded, and I started waiting for the phone calls that would tell me what I needed to do, or would be permitted to do, and when and where.

As I write, this year, today, the kids are all home from school. It's Memorial Day. They are cooking up some joint activity that involves costumes and bonnets and textiles pulled from neatly folded stacks. They are getting along and working together to realize some vision that I can't quite make out from back here in my bedroom. I don't dare step outside and upset the delicate balance of the magic that is happening.

When I look back on last spring, it seems magical to me, too: a time poised before the precipice. For the past couple of weeks I have been dusting off memories of last year in Princeton: "A year ago today we played football on Princeton's practice fields." "A year ago today we drove up to New York and retrieved Pixie from the cousins." "A year ago today it was so hot we drove down Quaker Bridge Road and bought a Slip n Slide and inflatable pool." (Quaker Bridge: because a Bridge. And Quakers.) That last is bittersweet: how I spent time running between stores, looking for the best deal on a sturdy pool that would last. When the next week I was out of there.

This summer will be a series of anniversaries. I am hoping that there will be time and space to process each in such a way that I can put things to rest and move ahead. 

I have often wondered about my propensity to mark time by specific fixed points. Does everyone keep in the back of their mind what they may have been doing on a particular day the year before? In some ways this makes the regular rhythm of day-to-day more terribly beautiful: an overlay of the past on the pattern of today. There may also have been a time when I would do the same with the future ("This time next month I will be_________"), although I have not been doing it much this year. Since last June the view ahead has been more opaque. For example,  J and I plan to take a lovely trip together soon. We have been planning it and mentally marking it with the hashtag #dontwaittocelebrate. And yet, it keeps sneaking up on me.  There has been little counting down of "this time next month" and last weekend I realized that I am afraid to look forward to it. If I get to enjoy it, great. If not, there will be no smashing to smithereens of expectations.

This feels safe, and yet doesn't quite seem to be the way I want to live in the world: waiting without looking forward. And so I want to pick up the church's liturgical calendar like a piggy bank of stored goodness, and shake it, and see what else it might have for me inside.

I can hear the drumming of Deuteronomy, the Gospels, Paul: "Remember!"

"...you shall not be afraid of them but you shall remember what the Lord your God did to Pharaoh and to all Egypt, the great trials that your eyes saw, the signs, the wonders, the mighty hand, and the outstretched arm, by which the Lord your God brought you out."

"You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you; therefore I command you this today."

"He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.”

"Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel, for which I am suffering, bound with chains as a criminal. But the word of God is not bound!"

And so of course I think that the church's calendar invites us to remember. To revisit again and again the things that we need keep before us but are liable to forget. Perhaps not all of those are things in the past. I am coming to think that the calendar is a pointing forward, as well. Around and around the years, seemingly marking time and yet (like a corkscrew) moving forward. Reaching out and pulling the future in.

And so as I revisit and remember this summer, I hope to see clearly God's goodness to me in the past: the ancient past, the recent past, the past year. But also to have a clearer vision for where he may be taking me, us. To somehow mark that he knows the plans he has for us: the gift of a future and a hope.