In the liturgy of the Western or Latin Christian churches, there are three seasons of time: Christmastide, Eastertide and something called “Ordinary Time.” Ordinary time includes all dates on the liturgical calendar that fall outside of the other two seasons, which are the days that herald the mysteries of the Incarnation on Christmas and the Resurrection on Easter. Ordinary Time thus includes the days between Christmastide and Lent, and between Eastertide and Advent.
Growing up in the United Methodist Church, this was a time when you could tell attendance was down. In that other time, when members touched the mysteries of the Annunciation and Incarnation and Crucifixion and Resurrection, you could understand why there were three Sunday services. Spiritual hunger rose as you approached the major holidays: Multiple services in the days leading up to Christmas: Live nativity, Christmas Eve and of course Christmas Day. The evening services were crowded, and coupled with a candle ceremony that would create a somber, haunting atmosphere in the main sanctuary. For Easter, there was the time of preparation, Lent, followed by a series of events: Maundy Thursday, an ecumenical Good Friday service, an Easter Egg hunt on Saturday for kids and of course the main event, come Easter Sunday.
But in Ordinary Time, there was a certain spiritual ennui. Gimmicks could be used to gin up participation: Youth group retreats including a popular trip to Cedar Point, country line dancing lessons and non-alcoholic medieval dinners where teenage congregants served ticket holders as part of an agape feast. I watched my sister and sometimes other kids in the Sunday school room while my parents met at committee meetings. Sometimes I would wander through the halls and the Narthex and Sanctuary when I was there alone, usually waiting on someone or something. Mostly, there was just a sense of staleness. To be Methodist felt performative. It was something that you did because it was expected in the broader community.
This was a time before cell phones, and I was not yet sufficiently irreverent to bring books with me as a distraction from Sunday services. But I would often crack open the pew bible in front of me and flip to an interesting section. The Gospel of John, or Revelation. David slaying Goliath or Moses besting Pharaoh. Sometimes the sermons of the pastor would captivate me enough to pay attention, but I had a wandering mind.
Wandering thoughts eroded my faith over time, to the extent that it ever truly existed. When I was a child it was a kind of conviction, but as I transitioned into adolescence and early adulthood it slipped away, hardened into a near certain atheism. Some of this was the result of self-discovery, especially with regard to my sexuality. But even beyond the Methodist condemnation of homosexuality, up to and including the promotion of ex-gay literature and ministries by the more conservative elements of my home church, Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World, the works of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke and David Brin and the humanism of Star Trek and Babylon 5 and the radical revisionist approaches of people like Bishop John Shelby Spong all lapped at that conviction, eroding it the way that water on a beach slowly deforms and then destroys castles built from sand. Even crossing over the street to attend a liberal Christian church affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Association was not enough to help me hold on to my beliefs. The pastor there was very good; she was trained at Harvard Divinity School, and we remain acquaintances to this day. But the critical reading of scripture just erased my ability to believe in it. The day that I told the pastor I was leaving, I felt a relief. A sense of intellectual authenticity, as I drove home, gazed at the lilac bush blowing in the late Spring wind at my parents’ home. This would have been 1999.
Although I rarely admitted this to myself, much less to those around me, I still longed to believe in something transcendent. The Infinite, the Absolute, God...call it what you will. It was a fundamental wish, a craving of sorts, an inner desire to be in the thrall of something that is truly beyond me, but also pervading me. I suspect that this interest fueled my attraction to the psychedelic experience of drugs like LSD and ecstasy, particularly with the former. Ecstasy is hedonic and easily added as a supplement to physical intimacy of a sexual nature. Methamphetamine also had that same appeal, when I was using it. But my favorite experiences were psychedelic. Unlike the others, psychedelic drugs open your mind to a patterned existence of hidden connections and layered realities, inviting the most hardened atheist into the realm of the uncanny. As I wrote in one of my journals at the time, drugs had become for me a new kind of religion.
As comfort, drugs are a shallow replacement for meaning. For reasons that may or may not have been related to my teenaged interest in drugs, I was hospitalized as a result of bleeding ulcers at age 18, shortly after the 9/11 attacks and before my 19th birthday. That previous summer I had been in France and was training for a ten mile run, and was consuming far too much ibuprofen because of tooth pain. When I returned home, I began to experience stomach pain. This increased substantially and rapidly over the course of a few weeks, until I collapsed in my dorm room and was rushed to the hospital. At the time, I was also abusing a number of illicit drugs: Methamphetamine, cocaine, ecstasy, ketamine, GHB...you name it, and there was a good chance that I was using it.
That hospital stay, though brief (about a week) was surreal. One nurse left the chart with my parents, so that they could see all the drugs I had been using. Another in training mentioned that one of the male nurses was also gay, and suggested that we all go out together once I was out of the hospital. Yet another spoke with me about spiritual and religious matters, and although I told her about that inner longing, I also told her that I knew it was pointless. The death of aim, meaning, purpose and the rest had led to a certain amount of decay.
I do not mean to suggest that all addiction is spiritual in nature. In my case, however, the use of drugs and later alcohol and nicotine served as an escape mechanism, and a way to experience deeper connection with my own inner spiritual desires. When I gave up alcohol the first time, I remember that night how strange it felt, and I had a longing to attend mass, of all things. I preferred to drink alone, but the purpose was usually contemplation. Was some lust involved, on occasion? Of course. But primarily, my focus with intoxication was not the communal experience, but a solitary encounter with my mind. Alcohol would stimulate me, enhance my creativity. It was also a good, socially acceptable replacement for illegal drugs, use of which carried the prospect of prison time.
What I have discovered is that, in getting sober, I become more interested in spiritual questions. In God. It has not always taken the same form, but it has always led to a deeper engagement with a number of traditions: Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and Islam. Not in the sense of desiring conversion, although I have explored that in each case, but in a desire to know more. To move beyond the caricature of the religion, in the dominant secular culture, to the engagement with its deeper dimensions.
Another type of ordinary time can also be juxtaposed with a philosophical concept borrowed from geology: Deep time. Deep time is measured by the scale of birth, life and death not against a human lifespan, but a cosmic one. Though this is immeasurably vast and incomprehensible to us, we touch it daily. We walk on rock and swim in seas that were formed and molded in deep time. When we grasp a rock that plays host to fossils, we hold in our juvenile hands a kind of matter that is as far beyond us as we are beyond the mayflies that measure their lifespans in hours. When we gaze up at the stars at night, some of the light that touches our naked eyes, light that pours out from the constellation Cassiopeia, is older than any of the historical events that are commemorated during Advent or Lent. And just as light from Cassiopeia that is older than the Jesus of history pours down on us, so too does the light from our Sun that fell on Jesus at the Crucifixion still travel to distant stars in Cassiopeia and beyond.
The calendars of ordinary time, the liturgical or the every day, are scaled to match our lives. We commemorate births and festivals and funerals using ordinary time. Think of it this way: If you were to leave Earth, you would leave behind the setting of nearly every significant human historical event, including those that are lost in the haze of time scales that approach the evolutionary. We do not know when humans developed speech, but it was developed on Earth. Beyond that setting, it has no true significance. Conversations on the scale of ordinary time do not reach beyond Earth. Even if our radio signals reach distant worlds, they will not be immediately comprehensible to alien ears. If, in fact, the aliens that receive them even have ears. Given the distances involved, those signals may only reach a willing listener in deep time.
We like to say that science and religion speak in different languages. To this one could add the language of art, which speaks to the human soul in ways that are similar to religion. The writer Iris Murdoch once said that “religious belief is like living in a work of art.” These languages, these perspectives, point to things that are beyond human familiarity. To layers of sediment that speak to millions of years, to organisms that formed over billions of years. To beings that cross from the spiritual into the human realm, and incarnate or speak to poets and prophets. To personas and epics and canvasses and sculptures and chants that are built from the imagination itself, in imitation of one’s Creator. These languages, however, share an important aim that does not exist in the same way, with the same force, as the language of ordinary speech in ordinary time. These languages point to deep time, and mythic time. In order to understand the significance of a fossil, we need the language of science as much as we need the language of art. To decipher the Eucharist, we need the language of religion. For Shakespeare, the language of art.
We live most of our lives in time that is ordinary, using speech that is mundane. In Western liturgy, Ordinary Time is symbolized by the color green, which stands for growth and renewal. It is a time to deepen and renew our spirituality, if we choose. Because our ordinary lives point to that which is deeper, and true and good. This is the case whether or not one embraces a religious framework for spirituality. Unless we are determined to be weighed down by the anchors of anomie and despair and pessimism, we will be drawn to some view of life that is meaningful.
Like Murdoch, I affirm the sovereignty of what is good, and beautiful, and true. For some, indeed many, this is God In the first letter of John, found in the Christian New Testament, the author affirms that God is love. The word he uses in the Koine Greek, agape, is the Christian term for a kind of selfless love that transcends the ordinary, reciprocal forms of love that are commonly found in human relations. At its best, the Christian religion affirms the sovereignty of love itself, and that wherever love is, God is. Similarly, in the Buddhist tradition, metta or “lovingkindness” is a paramount value, and in Hinduism the divinity of others, including even non-humans, is acknowledged at various levels. Perhaps we are most familiar with the greeting namaste, a way of acknowledging the divinity that resides in others in greeting. In Judaism and Christianity, this is perhaps best expressed by the concept of imago dei, the image of God that resides in every human being. In Islam, love of others, believers and disbelievers alike, is the root of all good character and behavior.
Although it rarely feels like it in many of the world’s advanced economies, religion remains very popular. A substantial majority of the Earth’s global population identifies with one or more religious traditions. Christianity leads the way, followed by Islam and Hinduism. At the same time, religion has been declining since at least 2007, in advanced economies first and foremost, but elsewhere as well. Professor Robert Ingleheart of the University of Michigan’s Department of Political Science points to a number of factors, but he believes that the most significant one is the decline of what he calls “pro-fertility norms.” Socially, this is measured by growing acceptance of abortion, contraception, intentional childlessness and same-sex relationships. It is no surprise that the Roman Catholic Church is among the strongest opponents of these things in what was once known as Christendom, but there is also hostility found in Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism. Traditionally, fertility was encouraged because high infant mortality and low life expectancy were statistically normative. As life expectancy has risen and infant mortality has declined, acceptance of individual choice in sexual matters has become increasingly normative in the advanced economies, particularly in the least religious societies.
Ingleheart has identified other factors as well. In the United States, where I live, the Republican Party embraced conservative Christian voters by adopting restrictive policies on abortion and becoming the political face of opposition to rights for gay people, particularly through government recognition of same-sex relationships. While this increased the Republican Party’s appeal to religious conservatives, it also drove young people from religion altogether. As a result, religious “nones” have become the largest religious social demographic in the United States. By comparison, white evangelicals, once nearly a quarter of the respondents in the Public Religion Research Institute’s census, now account for 14% of all respondents. The reason for the swift decline is largely attributable to growing Millennial frustration with the white evangelical focus on “culture war” issues, particularly those related to gender and sexuality.
A similar, perhaps deeper crisis appears to be affecting the Roman Church. If there is one word that describes the demographic trends in American Catholicism, it would be “upheaval.” The long reign of Joseph Ratzinger, first as the conservative puppeteer at the Vatican and later as Pope Benedict, saw the church besieged by the scandal of the sexual abuse crisis even as it exerted its remaining political and moral authority against recognition of same-sex unions and for restrictive abortion policies. Conservative Catholics have scored a number of victories and now dominate the American ecclesiastic leadership, but this has come at a heavy cost in church membership. Since 2000, the rate of church membership has dropped twice as quickly among self-identified Catholics (18 points, down to 58%) than it has among Protestants (nine points, down to 64%). Today, fewer than half of all Americans belong to a church, whether they are Protestant or Catholic.
In this day and age, then, with religion in retreat and on the cusp of defeat by the forces of secularization, what is the value of discussing spirituality? Why the topic of religion? Elaine Pagels, recipient of the National Humanities Medal and an esteemed scholar of Gnostic materials and early Christianity at Princeton University, has most recently written a personal spiritual memoir with just that title: Why religion? And she is not alone. Spiritual memoirs are quite common and celebrated, from popular works for easy consumption like Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love to darker tomes: The experience of the Holocaust in Elie Wisel’s Night, or deep loss in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. These might all be called spiritual memoirs, though their vantage points are radically different.
I am now reading (among so many things) one such book. Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, opens with the carnage of 9/11 and a pilgrimage to the Holy Land by a man whose identity intersects worlds Old and New. He is a man with a brown, indigenous face, who shares the bed of another man. When he wakes on Sundays, he eats and drinks the blood of a god that was sacrificed in the desert, during a religious ceremony that is conducted in English or Spanish. His journey to the Holy Land is made by plane, the ultramodern instrument of murder that prompted this tour, this book. His surname recalls Roderic, the last King of the Goths before the Muslim conquest of Al-Andalus. Yet when he descends into the Middle East, the strange Arabic that echoes all around him has the hint of the familiar: Words borrowed by Spanish. Those blue skies he flies in, the ones shared by the terrorists: Azul. Blue in Spanish, from lapis lazuli, the blazing blue stone that was ground into powder and used as paint to depict the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary. To live in the Twenty-First Century is to encounter these connections and contradictions. To walk in paradox.
Life itself is a kind of pilgrimage. This observation may seem obvious and trite, but it must be repeated if only because so many of us live in an era where a pilgrimage is both common and strange. On the one hand, millions of visitors will trek to various temples and churches and archaeologically significant sites. Generally, however, they are not visiting because they want to expand their horizons and encounter anything divine or transcendent. They are there to watch beautiful sunsets and try exquisite food they have heard about, buy a few trinkets to take back home. This is not without precedent; in the late Middle Ages, Catholic pilgrims would purchase badges to take home as souvenirs, as proof of their blessing by a revered saint. Today, they are content to take a selfie, one that will be added to a scrap book or shared on social media. But the purpose here is not spiritual or existential. It is touristic.
Some of us still long to be pilgrims, and not tourists. I admit that I crave an interior spiritual richness, a view of the world that is enhanced with meaning, with the Divine Transcendent. So I meditate. I contemplate. I pray. I wear a crucifix and carry a rosary and engage with the Christian tradition into which I was baptized and confirmed, as well as those traditions that I have explored as an adult. I ponder the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. Sometimes I go to church, and imagine/believe that the bread and wine are the Crucified Holy One.
Do I believe? In a Higher Power, yes. The cosmos appears to me to be intelligible and ordered. There is something to the drama of the Passion that speaks to me, something about it that suggests the presence of a Divine Hand. Similarly, there have been events in my life, signs and symbols, that point to a spiritual realm. And if today I stand on the threshold of some kind of faith, for many years I have oscillated between this threshold and a deeper commitment. So I write now mostly for myself, to collect my thoughts. To entertain. To talk. To have conversations in real time, about deep time.