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By Root 449 0

I was used to typing “Epiphany 1998” or “Easter 1998” but never “Spring 1998.” For twenty years, I had lived on the church calendar, where each season had its own color and mood. While the calendar from Pence Seed & Feed told me that the date was December 17, I knew it was the third week of Advent, the deep blue season of darkening days that preceded the white feast day of Christmas. Soon after the earth turned back toward the sun at the winter solstice, Mary’s labor pains would begin. When her son was born, his cries would call the dawn to come sooner every morning—but not yet. As yet, she was heavily expectant. She stayed on her poky donkey, trusting the journey to deliver her in due time.

After twenty years’ worth of Advents, this was not just a season on a calendar but a season of my soul. Having come through the dark, fertile wilderness of the past several months, I was ready to turn my face to the light. I was ready to make my way back to a new center, which would be a classroom this time instead of a church. Checking the academic calendar, I discovered that the first day of class would fall on the tenth day of Christmas (ten lords a leaping). “Thursday,” I typed, “Introduction and Course Overview.”

From now on, the feast days on my working calendar would not be Epiphany or Easter but Spring Break and Graduation. My longest days would no longer be Saturdays and Sundays but Tuesdays and Thursdays, which would mean canceling classes if I wanted to attend clergy events scheduled during the week. On Maundy Thursday, when diocesan priests renewed their ordination vows at the cathedral, I would be giving a quiz on Judaism under the fluorescent lights of 312 Daniel Hall.

Like most church people, I was free to remember what date it was on the church calendar, but I was no longer free to bend my whole day around it. I would live by two calendars at least, making the same compromises that everyone else made and feeling the same pull between two disparate ways of marking time. Fortunately for me, the academic calendar was as tidal as the church calendar, with low and high times arriving at regular intervals.

While I knew that some professors kept their records on computer programs, I wanted a grade book that I could hold in my hand. In it, I would not only keep attendance but also write notes that would help me remember students’ names (“redhead on back row,” “baseball cap with flames”). In pencil, I would record scores for quizzes, papers, group presentations, and participation, and at the end of the term I would do the math with the help of a small calculator. Those who missed more than three classes would lose points for not being there, as would those who were chronically tardy.

Never, in all my years of Christian education, had I ever dreamed of holding people accountable to such a degree. Because church attendance is entirely voluntary, so is church education. Sunday school teachers do the best they can with those who show up, deciding how much wisdom for life they can pack into the forty-five minutes they have with their students each week. In the case of adults, this often takes the shape of a short discussion of the Bible readings for the week, on the assumption that adults have already been formed in the faith. In the case of children, the process is more complicated.

Many of the parents I knew took their children to church in hopes of immunizing them against drugs, early sex, teen suicide, drunk driving, and lives of general aimlessness. While freely admitting that they did not know how to speak with their children about God, these mothers and fathers trusted that Sunday school teachers did know how to do that. Sometimes they were right and sometimes they were wrong, but with less than an hour each week there was only so much that any teacher could do. Making Sunday school fun was the important thing so that children would want to come back, even if that meant letting them play Red Rover in the yard instead of teaching them the Beatitudes.

One way or the other, most of the children had left by the time they