My husband and I were married 41½ years ago yesterday. We never paid much attention to the 11th day of each month, as the years have gone by. But with his cancer diagnosis, we realize we’re not likely to make it to our “golden” anniversary. So—inspired by one of the couples in this church!—we started, after our 41st anniversary last August, carving out a day to celebrate the monthly recurrence of the day we were married.
So I guess we just celebrated our 47th anni-versary-ish? We count time differently when it seems important to do so.
Yesterday was also Abraham Lincoln’s 217th birthday—which I wouldn’t have noticed except that Heather Cox Richardson said so in her Letters from an American post for Feb. 11. And what she said there connects to the discussion we’re about to wrap up during our worship series, We the People, which is also about how we count time.
She mentions Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address which, as I’m sure you know, begins with the words “Four score and seven years ago”—which were the only reason most of us know that a “score” is twenty years. Eighty-seven years ago, Lincoln was saying, our founders brought forth this “new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all [people] are created equal.”
I’m not sure I ever understood how significant that dating was, though. Richardson highlights how pointed it was:
Lincoln dated the founding of the nation from the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution, the document enslavers preferred because of that document’s protection of property. In the Declaration, the Founders wrote that they held certain “truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
But in Lincoln’s day, fabulously wealthy enslavers had gained control over the government and had begun to argue that the Founders had gotten their worldview terribly wrong. They insisted that their system of human enslavement, which had enabled them to amass fortunes previously unimaginable, was the right one. Most men were dull drudges who must be led by their betters for their own good, southern leaders said. As South Carolina senator and enslaver James Henry Hammond put it, “I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much-lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson, that ‘all men are born equal.’”
You can read the rest of Richardson’s discussion of this point—which lays out Lincoln’s strong and logical reasoning about the deep risk of ever compromising on the principle of equality before the law. “Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal,” she says, “we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong to one of the lesser groups.”
It matters where we place the starting point of the arc of time.
In August 2019 the New York Times Magazine published “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story,” in which its key author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, argued that the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the Virginia colony in August 1619, rather than the 1776 Declaration of Independence, is the nation’s true founding. To acknowledge this would be to concede that slavery and anti-Black racism stands at the center of American history.
This perspective provoked substantial controversy, but if you’ve read those essays or Hannah-Jones ensuing book, The 1619 Project, you almost certainly came to know some things about our history that were left out of our curricula at all levels of our educations. (Here’s a link that will get you to the original New York Times Magazine .pdf and multiple related resources and some upcoming events. It’s Black History Month; there’s no better time to do some learning in this area.)
Again, the question of where we start the arc of time is significant. It has political ramifications. It might change our sense of self. We might have to examine things we thought were true.
For a long time I dated my own call to ministry from the day I started to pray in earnest, inspired by a heartfelt sermon my pastor preached. For many years I told the story from that point in time, which was memorable and impactful in huge ways.
But the longer I’ve been in ministry, and the more I’ve thought back, I can point to earlier moments that were small clues that I might be headed into this calling I would never have expected. Small nudges and questions that happened across decades—as early as high school, I think. I see today a much more nuanced and longer arc of that journey into this work that I love.
Here’s a religion-related example of the complexity of how we count time, which relates to our language around time itself. Most of us grew up knowing that time in terms of world history was divided into B.C., meaning “before Christ,” and A.D., for “Anno Domini,” the Latin for “Year of Our Lord.” Interestingly, this division wasn’t really put into place until about 500 years into the A.D. period. (This history, too, is really interesting, at least in the Wikipedia entry I consulted to check it out. A monk made this decision, partly because he didn’t like the prior naming of “Era of the Martyrs” because of how it was associated with a tyrant who persecuted Christians!)
Growing up in a Christian home in a Christian community in 1970s America, it never occurred to me to wonder how the rest of the world thought about counting time based on the birth of Jesus Christ—or even whether they did. I was well past college before I began to understand that the terms “B.C.E.” (Before the Common Era) and “C.E.” (Common Era) were coming into use in place of the terms I had always known. I understand now that people had begun to use those phrases as early as the 18th century, but they didn’t come into common use until the last quarter century.
I’m glad for this shift. I care that our communication can be accessible to people no matter their religious affiliation (or lack thereof). I don’t find it necessary to impose my Christian worldview (which is less stable today, actually, than what I grew up with!) on people who believe differently.
Not all Christians agree on this, of course. Which accounts for why this transition is so slow. Even now, if I need to refer to a B.C.E. year in a sermon, say, I’m not confident that everyone will understand that reference unless I take time to explain it.
In September of this year, we’ll celebrate the 110th anniversary of the founding of the church we now call Collegiate United Methodist Church & Wesley Foundation. Any milestone makes us reflect on who we are and where we’ve been. I don’t think our counting of time will be controversial, but the ways we remember, and what we make of our memories, will certainly differ.
It’s worth remembering that the counting of time has long been challenging even while it is deeply important. These debates are not just academic; they help us clarify who we are.
What are the arcs of your life? of your work? or your story? If you put the end point earlier or later, how does it change what you know about yourself, and about the larger story you inhabit? I’ve been delving into some genealogy history that connects me to people who lived—and the places they inhabited–five or six centuries ago. How many ways do different arcs of time affect your life?
