Newsletter — October 19, 2025
When we think about time and holidays, we are bound to think about calendars. Why? Because calendars write history, helping us to remember the great events. Days, festivals, holidays, the order of meals, rest and vacations, together with religiously observed rituals and symbols, are sources of history.
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy notes that modern society is “completely sensational, totally forgetful, and wonderfully devoid of memory.” He said that seventy-five years ago! He hit the iPhone video MO directly on the head!
That’s why he liked calendars! They shape time by commemorating cataclysmic events that open and close epochs; and the societal creativity to mark those epochs give form to time. They give time rhythm, and that’s important for the church. ERH notes that “liturgical rhythm is expressed in terms of Sunday and weekday, Christmas and Easter, Pentecost and Advent.”
The church’s calendar defies natural time. Nature has 365 days, but the church’s 365 days express the true infinity of all time from beginning of the world to its end. The reasoning mind sees time as consisting of units, days, or years. But for Christian faith, “one year’s course inducts into the whole linear expanse of all time. So much so, that from Christmas to Easter, a whole lifetime of thirty years is remembered, and from Pentecost to Advent, the whole experience of mankind through the Old Testament and our whole era is remembered.”
For ERH it’s clear that our understanding of time is deeply rooted by Christian convictions concerning Jesus, his death and resurrection, and eschatology. So the Christian faith “gives unity to humanity’s times by giving humanity a common future…humanity lives a unified time and history only because of Jesus.”