Over the past few months, one of my afternoon traditions has been to take a short break to read through the day’s passages in Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Enuma Okoro’s Common Prayer: Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals. I bought this book after being impressed by Claiborne’s work in Jesus for President (which is much more radical than the title sounds) and with the hopes that it would be another resource for me as I continue to learn about the liturgical calendar. I didn’t stick with it long during the 2024-2025 liturgical year, but I’ve been having more luck with the 2025-2026 liturgical year. Sometimes, I’ll admit, I just go through the motions, but every once in a while, something really stands out to me.

Really want to make a joke involving Holy Saturday and the 1990s comic arc “Reign of the Supermen,” but those ingredients are all I can come up with.

I am not great at observing the different seasons of the liturgical year. A good friend of mine once responded to this complaint with “Welcome to living a liturgical year life,” so I gather that to a certain extent, this is how everyone feels about it. It always feels a little frustrating to me, though, because I love the idea of the liturgical year.

I attended a spiritual retreat sponsored by my congregation last Saturday, and one of the activities we did was to string together some painted wooden beads representing the different liturgical seasons as we read about what each of those different seasons represents. I love the sense of “waiting for something great to happen” of Advent. I love the bursting forth of the spirit associated with Pentecost. I even appreciate the invitation of Ordinary Time to make the everyday sacred in its own way. I’m just bad at making those areas of focus when those seasons roll around (maybe the prayer beads I have up in my office now will help).

I am one of those people who responds to a lot of work coming my way by ignoring that work and instead trying to think about how to change my routines and workflows. With the summer coming to an end and a new academic year approaching, I’ve been reading productivity books, thinking about the software that I use, and wondering what needs to change.

switching to Habitica

In particular, as I’ve posted over the past couple of days, I’ve been thinking about switching habit trackers. I really like Streaks, but there are a couple of things that don’t sit quite right. Besides, to be honest, sometimes just changing things up feels like a breath of fresh air and lets me double down on picking up new habits. After looking into a few different options, I decided to give Habitica another try. I’ve used this gamified habit tracker a couple of times in the past, and besides the gamification gimmick, there are some things about it that I really like.

Wil Gafney and her *Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church° continue to be a source of inspiration for me. For the past two weeks, her readings for the relevant Sundays of the season of Ordinary Time in the Christian liturgical year have begun with Samuel’s miraculous birth to Hannah. I’ve just now completed the reading for Proper 6 reading, in which Hannah’s pleas for a child despite her seeming infertility are answered. In reading Gafney’s commentary on the passage, I deeply appreciated these lines:

I grew up in a faith tradition that—with the exception of major holidays like Christmas and Easter—didn’t follow the Christian liturgical calendar. So, shortly after I began attending Community of Christ regularly (and, given the circumstances, virtually) in 2020, I decided I was going to learn more all of the seasons and holidays that I wasn’t familiar with. A few months earlier, I’d heard an interview with the Swiss abbot Urban Federer on the Babel podcast by Radio Télévision Suisse. During the interview, Federer talked about a book of his that had recently been translated into French from his native German: Sources of friendship with God [Aux sources de l’amitié de Dieu]. I honestly don’t remember much about the interview, but it stood out to me enough for me to write down the title of the book—perhaps because I knew that its chapters followed the liturgical calendar. So, that summer, I ordered that book (and two others) from a French bookseller, and when November 2020 rolled around, I began using it as a guide to my first liturgical year.

I was really hoping to make something special of Advent this year, but the past three weeks have just kind of sucked, and I don’t know if the next one will be any better. I don’t know that I have a takeaway from this, except that maybe it’s okay to have a sucky Advent.

I’ve never had qualms about listening to Christmas music outside of December, but it still surprises me that I’ve been listening to parts of Handel’s Messiah during my morning routines over the past couple of weeks. I’ve never been the biggest fan of the music of Messiah, and in recent years, I’ve let go of my attachment to King James language and learned that a lot of the passages quoted in Messiah represent Christian prooftexting of the Hebrew Bible (here’s a great post on the subject by Pete Enns—and here’s another). In theory, this ought to sour me on Messiah even more, but I’ve spent a big chunk of this morning listening to this performance of excerpts—and really enjoying it!

Despite the underlying problems with the Barabbas story, this seems like a good Friday to remember that we shouldn’t prefer violent insurrectionists over those wrongfully killed by the state.

Pour le 6 janvier, Urban Federer, l’abbé d’Ensiedeln (Suisse), écrit au sujet de « la peur d’être perdant » de Hérode et Saül, qui a inspiré « une jalousie, laquelle les a poussés a la haine meurtrière ». C’est un message pour l’Épiphanie pour tous les temps et tous les lieux, mais ça fait bizarre de le lire en particulier aux États-Unis ce 6 janvier 2021.