Yesterday many Christians began of the season of Lent, which is a 40-day period of fasting or reflection leading up to Easter. This got me thinking about the two sides of how our concept of seasons and holidays affects our work and life in a globalized world.
On one hand, our society has increasingly homogenized our calendar into interchangable slices of the fiscal year, leaving no social cues or expectations prompting us to take time for different aspects of life such as rest, reflection, or celebration, other than a few national holidays. There is something very healthy about a shared expectation of the year having a rhythm to it, and yet this is difficult to maintain in today’s world, as many people shuffle their schedules and times for personal and relational activities based on moment-to-moment demands rather than any longer-term framework.
On the other hand, as the world globalizes, some of the religiously-inspired pacing and rhythms persist (as witnessed even the most secular people visiting most bars in the U.S. on Mardi Gras Tuesday night, much less going to see the spectacle in say, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, or Baranquilla). But each culture and religion has its own seasons, and as these underlying rhythms from different cultures start to bump up against one another.
So much distrust comes from the inability of people of different backgrounds to picture the way that others from different traditions experience life, and this can be dispelled by even a minimal understanding of the very different timing and functions of different holidays.
For example, because how we and our families live our lives in much of the world is so shaped by a work and holiday calendar shaped by Christianity and the climate and customs of Europe, many like myself primarily think of family time as “the holidays” around Christmas. We don’t tend to grasp that the same emotional and relational core of celebration and reflection also happens during the Jewish High Holidays in what is for others a nondescript part of the year in the Fall (well before the minor holiday of Hanukkah.) The same goes for the events celebrated at rotating times in the solar year based on the floating lunar calendar governing Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, etc.
One way to grasp the emotional and social meaning of a different sense of seasons is to see their social impact up close. When I first moved to DC a few years ago and started working with a diverse group of Jewish and Muslim coworkers, it was a year that Ramadan and the Jewish holidays (including the fast of Yom Kippur) overlapped closely, and I was struck by the sense of dedication that many brought to their observances, which reminded me of how (at least a small number of) Christians approach Lent.
Around the same time, a young Indonesian c0worker who missed her family during Eid al Fitr invited some of us over to her apartment to eat octopus. The seafood was good, and even though there wasn’t a turkey or cranberry sauce, seeing how much my coworker longed for family and community during this time in the same way I would at Thanksgiving or Christmas really opened my eyes. For the first time I saw how much American culture has ordered our lives and emotions around a certain calendar, which isn’t shared by all cultures. I also realized that like many westerners, I had projected a very sterile and dour set of moods on Ramadan and Eid, because I hadn’t seen the lighter, community-building side of them.
These are very hard gaps to bridge, but recognizing those seasons in our own culture and others’ cultures just might be a first step to being ruled not only by the fiscal year, but also a kind of year that works for human beings from a variety of cultures.
. I’m not sure I entirely agree with Richard Florida’s approach, but there is a lot of value in his explanations of the differences among cities and the critical role of life stages in shaping choices about place. I need to analyze it more closely, especially given my experience returning to DC.
Since the world didn’t end this weekend…
Since the world didn’t end this weekend, I started thinking about escapism versus realism.
The people preaching the end of the world on Saturday were being escapist–they were hoping that the complexities of life and spirituality would be all wrapped up and resolved before we even made it to Memorial Day Weekend! When they heard a bout this prediction a few months or years ago, they confused whatever kind of urgency they felt with a promise of closure on that urgency, and now they’re having to pick up the pieces.
It’s easy to laugh at them…and I did, when they came to my neighborhood. But the tragic mess they have created for themselves should also remind us of our own vulnerabilities–escapism and the emotional draws of certainty and short-term thinking, which can affect how all of us make any life decision.
On Saturday morning, ironically, while some were counting down to the highly-advertised end of the world, I was working on a spiritual project with a much longer time frame: The old church I’m involved with is looking back over its nearly two centuries of history in Washington D.C., and a team of volunteers is starting to prepare for a series of 200th anniversary-related projects and events, which won’t even start in a public way for a few years.
Spirituality and American culture both have a reputation for getting people caught up in the moment, forgetting the context of history and the humility it can bring, as shown so bizarrely on Saturday. But starting such a long-term project, I was struck by the potential of both spirituality and American culture to foster the opposite. While some people were defining their lives in terms of what they hoped would happen on one day in May, here we were helping launch something that won’t even be starting in earnest for years–until after I’ve completed my current graduate work, and have already moved forward to any range of new enterprises and projects in my own life. That, to me, seems like a much more promising manifestation of the forward-looking impulse in American faith and American culture.
It is my hope that those of us who come from societies like the U.S. with a future time orientation can use it as a strength rather than as a weakness for ourselves and our world, not being rash, but instead inspiring people to not be limited by the past. At the same time, I hope those of us with that tendency can learn from those inside and outside our culture who are more connected with history.
And I hope the next time some American religious group plasters the world with billboards (if they must), they will have the decency to send a message with at least a little more of that long-term perspective and humility.