the spiritual practice of weirding time

you are not behind

One morning I followed

Anne Helen Petersen

down an old rabbit trail about calendars and time. The weeks, months, and fiscal quarters we use to mark and plan our lives are rather arbitrary, and to some degree we all know that. But knowing it and resisting—or at least expanding—the ways our calendars constrain our imaginations are two different things. Without some alternatives to the default Google or Outlook grids, we can get stuck trying to make our lives fit into the squares, rather than having words and tools that actually fit our priorities and our experiences. And why wouldn’t we? We were first discipled into this way of understanding our time when they put a school-branded agenda full of study tips into our uncoordinated little first-grade hands.

Petersen and one of her inspirations, Ross Zurowski, mention quite a few ways people have conceptualized time in contrast to this vision of “efficiency.” “Crip time” is a word for the generally slower and weirder pace of life with a physical disability—and for the ways that pace can enhance our lives and relationships, even if it’s not acknowledged or accommodated by the wider world. The sekki or “small seasons” of ancient China and Japan divide the agricultural year into roughly two-week microseasons based on what’s happening in the ecosystem right at that moment. (I remember, with nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, taking note of far more “springs” at the beginning of lockdown than I’d ever quite registered before.) The Hebrew calendar or a lunar calendar help people pay attention to, and orient around, things that matter to them.

At its core, this is what drew me to mash together some research and musings about Advent, menstruation, and waiting: these are all experiences well beyond Google Calendar’s and patriarchal, colonial capitalism’s orientation to time. 

The Advent season forms a part of the liturgical calendar, which every year tells and retells the story of Christianity and Christian life. Advent begins the entire Christian year four Sundays before Christmas—a shifting target, rather than on January 1. It opens, like Genesis 1, in the dark before any candles are lit, in what we could even conceive as the warm, brooding dark of the womb. Traditionally, it’s more than a cheery “love, hope, joy, peace” add-on to the marketing jingles and 25-day countdowns of our usual consumerist Decembers. It is a time of repentance and watchfulness, both in remembrance of the Messiah’s first arrival and in anticipation of Christ’s second coming.

If we let it, the menstrual cycle can also shift our experience of time. Whether our cycles are regular as the moon or harder to predict, they divide our lives into our own personal months that can’t be standardized or legislated. They also divide those months into four distinct phases marked by varying hormonal profiles, which means different tasks and projects, physical activities, and social/emotional stances suit our body-minds best in different phases. These are experiences that connect us to menstruators around the world, but whose specific inflections and timing are also unique to each of us.

And the experience of waiting draws us into a deeply uncomfortable relationship with time. It asks us questions we don’t want to answer. What interval of a human life is appropriate to dedicate to this thing? How do we live purposefully when the present time feels dominated by a conspicuous absence? Can we really speak of wasting “our” time, or does time belong to God, or does time belong to no one? 

God, of course, does not live within our sense of time—especially not within time organized by colonial capitalism. Our understandings of time “running out” or being scarce, of what constitutes “productivity” and “achievement,” of “using time wisely” or hacking our schedules simply don’t make sense in God’s time. They’re organized around profit and competition, not around what makes us human or contributes to the flourishing of our world. December can shift these perceptions of time into overdrive, with its packed schedules, its pressure to demonstrate what we have to show for the year past, its looming resolutions and new dates to write. But we are created for something better.

Jesus observed the seasons and holy days of Jewish custom, and he also heeded the rhythms of the body—his own needs for food, rest, solitude, tears. He was willing to pause in the midst of the apparently urgent to tend to the important: the people around him. He organized his time around these things, things that connected him to community and to God.

The women whose stories intersected with Jesus’s birth were familiar with waiting. The more I studied Mary, Elizabeth, Anna, and the women of Jesus’s genealogy, the more this jumped out at me. All of them trusted deeply that while “nothing happened” on the outside, God was working in the depths. What the world is quick to label as times of stagnation or failure, they knew to be seasons of courage.

Within this Advent is an invitation for us to prayerfully do the same.

Peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey

P.S. each week in December, paid subscribers will get a bonus email with prayers and practical ideas for integrating one phase of the cycle with our lives. You’ll have access to the full archives as soon as you upgrade! Thanks for supporting my work.