C. Jay is away this week, but Jared carries on with a fascinating conservation about Time. With returning guest Jesse Nigro of The North American Anglican, Jared talks about how the way we think about Time can serve catechetical purposes. One reason Christianity was able to survive through the Middle Ages is how they thought about Time, and the rituals in which they engaged throughout the day, week, seasons, and years.

Jared and Jesse discuss the need for us, here in the 21st century, to think about how we inhabit time. St. Paul wrote in Ephesians that we should be “redeeming the time.” How do we apply that in a world that resists deep reflection on Time? Ritual and the Christian Calendar can be helpful here: filling the hours and days with Christian meaning rather than emptying them and creating a vacuum for our secular age; or rejecting them in the name of a “simple, old-time religion.”

Join the conversation as we consider various questions: How is ritual useful? How can we, as modern, untethered, evangelical Christians, think about ritual? Why was it virtually impossible to disbelieve in God in the Middle Ages, but so easy, perhaps unavoidable, for many in our modern day?

Instead of living in a world where Time is marked by reminders of the God who created us, we live in a world where, if you’re mindful of Time at all, you’re doing it wrong. But what if there is a better way?

Time will pass, no matter how or whether we mark it. Life will still fly by, but in a world where Ritual marks Time, you can think back: “what did I do this morning, or last week, or last year at this time?” And you will know. Because it’s a particular season of the Church Year, you know what you did, and what was going on, because you’re aware of the time.

And because you mark the time using Christian categories, you can relate your story, your time on earth, to the Great Story of Christ.

Image of Anglo-Saxon map by Hel-hama - Own work using:InkscapeSource: England and Wales at the time of the Treaty of Chippenham (AD 878). From the Atlas of European History, Earle W Dowe (d. 1946), G Bell and Sons, London, 1910 (see: File:England-878ad.jpg), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19885072

The image on the thumbnail, "The Ancient Custom of Blessing the Fields on Rogation Sunday at Hever, Kent", was taken from the Geograph project collection. The copyright on this image is owned by Ray Trevena and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en