Calendars

As I was thinking about my old job earlier today I realized that there are many small changes in your life that accumulate over time to make a huge contrast. Today’s small change was calendar related.

For some strange reason I was thinking about how we reckon time. In a couple of days when the solistice comes it will officially be Autumn. In my old Project Managers head the end of September was always ‘week 39’ – each quarter of the year was 13 weeks long, so I always knew that the end of March was wk 13, June was wk26, Sept was wk39, Dec (obviously) was wk52. We rarely scheduled things according to the actual date – usually we knew how many weeks tasks took, so we worked things out that way, much easier than working with months of variable length. Weeks tended to ‘start’ on a Monday, unless you were using a particular piece of bespoke planning software, which for some reason known only by some bean counters in Eindhoven had the week starting on Saturday.

So to most people today is Saturday September 19th, but to my old self it was wk37.6, and to me now it is also the 7th Day of Trinity 15. All clear? No? Read on!

For a few fleeting months last summer I was able to work to the normal calendar, before getting swept into a combination of the Cambridge academic calendar where 3 brief bouts of work called ‘Michaelmas’, ‘Lent’ and ‘Hilary’ (no idea, sorry!) are punctuated by long periods of apparent inactivity, and the Church (or ‘liturgical’) calendar, in which the year begins somewhere around the end of November.

As my life is shortly to be dominated by the liturgical calendar, here’s a potted summary.
The year starts with Advent, 4 Sundays before Christmas, which tends to hover around the last few days of November/first few days of December. So that Sunday is ‘Advent 1’ and is followed by Advent 2, Advent 3, Advent 4 and Christmas Day (which isn’t necessarily a Sunday of course). It’s nice and easy for me now that my week starts on a Sunday. Except of course I might end up having a day off on Monday or Tuesday, in which case it’s almost over before it’s started. But here in Cambridge for me the only day that’s truly a day off is Saturday, so it’s nice and neat for the moment.

After Christmas Day most clergy collapse in a heap, take a week off and rejoice that New Year is not a church festival. But the calendar plunges on relentlessly, through ‘Christmas 1’ and ‘Christmas 2’ (yes, the Twelve Days of Christmas come from us!) to Epiphany in early January, and then (I guess you’re getting the hang of this now) through to Epiphany 4 before it’s Ordinary Time.

Yes, plain old vanilla Ordinary Time, which is what the church calls it when it can’t think of a better name. This pads the gaps in the calendar – sometimes well, sometimes pathetically as was the case in 2008 when the gap between Epiphany and Lent was a whole two days. More Ordinary Time later.

Lent begins 40 days (not counting Sundays) before Easter Day, which moves about through March and April* and takes us through Lent 1 to Lent 5. Lent 6 is called Palm Sunday, and then it’s Holy Week and Easter. After Easter most clergy collapse in a heap, take a week off and rejoice that the next church festival isn’t for another 8 weeks.

So that takes us through to Easter 7, followed by Pentecost in late May/early June. A sporting fact about Pentecost is that the Monaco Grand Prix is always held that weekend. We’re always ancouraged to wear red for Pentecost, and it’s difficult to not be mistaken for a Ferrari fan.

Now we find ourselves back in Ordinary Time with the Sunday which gives its name to the most Sundays in the year, Trinity Sunday – our annual opportunity to preach sermons about ice, water and steam being of one substance but of different appearances, a bit like God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Nearly there now, as we’ve not managed to invent anything major to celebrate for the next 21-23 weeks. Either that or somebody decided that as everybody would be on holiday around now there was no point. So we now plod our way through Trinity 2 to Trinity 23, although prayer book writers always seem to be reluctant to write specific prayers to use on Trinity 22 and 23 as they won’t be used very often. You may notice that in these weeks some of the standard prayers sound quite a lot like the ones from Trinity 21….

Actually Trinity 21 is quite popular for Church of England prayer book writers – if there’s ever an occasion when they were lacking inspiration or couldn’t be bothered they will refer you to the Collect (Special Prayer) for Trinity 21.

So that’s the top level view of the church year. I used to moan as a Project Manager that major milestones always had a tendency to slip towards Easter, Christmas or the holiday periods. Now I’m going to be working where that’s an unavoidable fact.

*There’s a formula relating the date of Easter to the ‘n’th Full Moon of the calendar year, invented by some Pope or other. Yes, it would be easier to have a fixed week for it, but it’s not worth falling out over.