Lent #21:  “Analogue Church”

When the fullness of time had come,

God sent his Son...

(Galatians 4:4-5).

We’ve been spending our “shelter in place” time going through our stuff and thinning things out. My method is to toss and move on. Linda’s notion is to hold, discuss, contemplate and then figure out where best to keep each item. The process has brought us back into our analogue world of vinyl record albums and printed pictures and eight millimeter film.

These are our agreed upon non-tossables. I’m told the solution is to digitalize all those albums and prints and film. But, we can’t bring ourselves to digitalize our analogue life. I recall the first time someone showed me their digital watch—what wonder. By and by, I got one of my own only even more so—I could store data like phone numbers in it. Recently, I got a new watch after being without one for some years. My new one has hands and numbers one through twelve with twelve at the top and six at the bottom. I can’t store any data in it. It just tells time as time passes.

I’ve been thinking about such things since last Sunday when our pastor, during digitized church, said he longs to get back to “analogue church”. It caused me to think about Lent and the Christian Calendar and the Fullness of Time. Following the Christian Calendar (Advent, Christmastide, Epiphany, Lent, Easter Sunday followed by Eastertide and Pentecost), places us into the Gospel Story. You can’t digitalize it. Like the hands of my new watch, the Gospel story unfolds within the “fullness of time.”

It caused me to think of our present pandemic suffering. It would be nice if we could just digitalize the whole thing, hit a few key strokes, and arrive on the other side. But it wouldn’t be fair—it wouldn’t be real. Analogue life means we must live through it. We have to participate in the suffering. That’s Lent. We can’t just jump to Easter mourning. We have to allow time to play out all the way to Calvary.