Ep. 365 Diana Butler Bass - Time, Love, and a Calendar that Says No to Imperialism and Empire

In this episode, I talk with Diana Butler Bass about her new book A Beautiful Year and the deeper story that sits beneath our experience of time. We explore how the Roman calendar still shapes us with the imagination of empire - militarism, consumerism, and control - and how the Christian calendar offers a counter-formation rooted in love, hope, peace, and a circular sense of time that keeps drawing us deeper into God. Diana walks us through Advent’s darkness and silence, the meaning of waiting in an age addicted to noise, the subversive beauty of St. Martin’s Day on November 11, and the power of saying “no” to imperial narratives through the ordinary practices that shape a life. We talk about storytelling, grief, Candlemas, the parables of Jesus, and how the Christian year can help us embody a different kind of presence in the world - one marked by compassion, courage, and light. This is a conversation about time, but really, it’s about learning to live a better story.

Diana Butler Bass, Ph.D. (Duke University) is an award-winning author of eleven books, a speaker, preacher, and a trusted commentator on religion and contemporary spirituality. Her bylines include The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, CNN Opinion, On Being, and Readers Digest. She has appeared on CBS, CNN, PBS, NPR, and other global news outlets. She currently writes The Cottage, one of the most widely-read Substack newsletters. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia.

Diana's Book:

A Beautiful Year

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Transcript

Diana Butler Bass: 0:31

You can look at the calendar that we have from Rome as probably one of the longest lasting impacts of the Roman Empire on global society. So that means, in effect, that Rome never really goes away, and we have the same tension that the early Christians did, is that, how do you live with Empire, and how do you live with a system of time and storytelling that's based around militarism, imperialism and economic transactionalism, capitalism and the early Christians did not have an easy answer, and I suspect we won't have an easy answer. I

Joshua Johnson: 1:24

announcer, hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus, I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, you know, time has a way of shaping us, quietly, subtly, almost without our consent. Most of us live inside a calendar formed by Empire, by efficiency, by consumerism and by the stories that the Roman world left behind. And because that's the water we swim in, we rarely stop to ask what that time is doing to our souls. Today, we step into a different story. In her new book a beautiful year, Diana Butler Bass invites us to recover the ancient rhythms of the Christian calendar, not as nostalgia or church trivia, but as counter formation, a way of living inside the empire without absorbing its imagination, a way of waking up to a rhythm rooted in God, in love, in community, and in a circular sense of time that keeps drawing us deeper rather than driving us faster. In this conversation, Diana and I explore the architecture of storytelling, the tension between linear and circular time, the meaning of Advents, darkness and silence, the subversive beauty of St Martin's Day on November 11, and how the Christian year teaches us to embody a story of peace in a world addicted to violence. We talk about what it means to say no to imperialism, yes to love, and how ordinary practices, lighting candles, noticing beauty, tending to grief, can reshape the way we live. This is a conversation about time, but really it's a conversation about becoming the kind of people who carry light into shadowed places. So join us, and let's shift culture together. Here is my conversation with Diana. Butler Bass, Diana, welcome to shifting culture. Such an honor to have you on thanks for joining me.

Diana Butler Bass: 3:18

Well, thank you, Joshua. And what a great name for a podcast. I love it. Shifting culture. We need to do a lot of that.

Joshua Johnson: 3:26

Yes, we need to do a lot of it. And we live in a shifting culture as well. So there's two different ways that we go about doing this. One is we need to figure out, how do we root ourselves in the story of God? One of the things that you have written a lot and long explored how stories shape our faith and the Christian faith. So how does the story that we tell about time and the way that we live time, what we mark, what we celebrate, shape who we become.

Diana Butler Bass: 3:58

Stories are interesting because we think, Oh, if you have a good story, well, then everybody's going to find it compelling and that everybody will listen to it. But stories actually involve a number of different things. They have structure, they have form. They have heroes, they have villains, they have larger points. So simply, to tell a story isn't enough. Lots of us have good stories, but I mean, I'm a writer, so I think about these other aspects, and one of the most important things for me as a writer, is this idea of structure, always trying to imagine, what's the how is the story shaped? What are the what are the mechanisms by which the story is carried? And because it's just a I love, like the architecture behind storytelling, if that makes sense. Whenever I wrote a book my my former agent who sadly passed away this year and didn't actually see my new book come to fruition, although he had a big hand in it, he used to say, you know, Diana, once you have the structure down, you have an entire new book in your mind. But it's until the structure that the story doesn't make sense to me, and so that's just the natural way that I work as a storyteller, and knowing that what it means is I look around to the world, and I'm always looking for these deeper architectures of meaning, these deeper structures of meaning, when that comes to time we. Have this pretty obvious structure. In Western society, we think of it as linear, and it has a beginning, middle and end, but the beginning middle and end story, it's finite, and there's a lot of problems connected with it, especially when it comes to living a life of faith. So there was an alternative way of telling the story of Jesus that I never paid as much attention to as I probably should have when I was a little younger. And that is, it's not a beginning, middle and end story, it's the story that is structured around the Christian year. And that might be a foreign concept to some people, even people in churches, but there's a different cycle of time that is presented through what has historically been known as the liturgical year, or the Christian calendar, and that's a big cycle, set of cycles about feasts and fasts. And it is not linear. It's actually circular or spiral. It moves through ritual and action, and it's a bit more like like a labyrinth, or perhaps a pulsar. It moves differently than linear time. And it's not finite. Actually, it's infinite. And if you have an idea of history being finite, and that we live in a line, that means whatever, wherever we are in the line is the most important thing ever, and we want to stop it, or we want to keep it going, or we want we love it, or we hate it, and we're constantly thinking, it's the end of the world. This has got to be the end of the world. And so linear history sets up false starts, and I think false endings, if you have a different concept of time, which is something that this spiritual tool of the Christian year introduces, it puts the line in some interesting perspective that I have through my life, actually found provides me with more grounding, more depth and way of understanding things like courage and what's important in life that that the linear year does not entirely offer. And we can go into more specific examples of that, but when you ask generally about the shape of time. It's a really interesting question. Is time align? Actually, I'm not a physicist, but I know enough about physics to know that there's no physicist that would say that.

Joshua Johnson: 8:04

Yeah, exactly. I've long been fascinated thinking about time and how God is outside of time that we're trying to, trying to make time in a linear fashion, but God is outside of time. And I think, you know, if God is is love, I think love is outside of time. And if it, if time then emanates from God in this circular fashion, goes back into him and through him and back out to us through the story and love. I just think that it's just a fascinating concept to think about. How do we actually then imagine our life and imagine history, imagine who we are as humans, if then the God that created us that we emanate from is outside of time, and love is outside of time. How does that reshape your thinking and the way that we start to figure out who we are as humans?

Diana Butler Bass: 9:53

One of the very early essay what I do in a beautiful year is I'm not theorizing about time, although I have actually done a lot of thinking about this. Because you write a book about time and write a book about a year, you have to reflect on that as the background information. So for me, that's like the the work that I did that is on the page, but in very subtle ways. What I do in a beautiful year is I actually take my readers through a year and not just tell you about it, but I show it to you, and I invite people to walk with me through the year. And one of the early essays, actually, it's a little fun to have it be so close to the beginning of the book is in the Advent section. Advent is the first season of the Christian year, and it's called a wrinkly, wrinkly time. And you probably recognize where the title comes from, A Wrinkle in Time. A Wrinkle in Time. Yeah, by Madeleine Engle. And what we're talking about here, if people think, oh my gosh, this is going to be too heady of a conversation for me. I would like you to remember that A Wrinkle in Time is about exactly this thing we're talking about right now. And there's this fabulous scene, which I quote in the book from A Wrinkle in Time in which Meg, who is the main character, and I love the book I first read. Read the book when I was 12 or 13, probably about the same age. Meg is as the character in the book, and she's not a physicist. She's She's a girl who loves to read, and she's very smart, but she's not a science person. And these three mystical sort of angels show up in the guises of old women, and they're about to take her on a journey. And the journey is going to be a journey through time, at time and space, because she has to move through space to rescue her father, who is being held in an evil place on the far edges of the universe. And so in order to get there, they have to go through time. And Meg does not understand this at all. I didn't understand it when I was 12. I still don't understand it in my mid 60s. But Mrs. What said, I believe, holds up the edge of her skirt, and she holds it taut, and so it looks like a line. And she said, This is how we usually think of time, like a line. And how long does it take an ant to crawl from one end to another? And of course, it takes a long time. It takes a while. And then Mrs. What's it brings the two edges where her hands are holding the skirt taut. She brings them together, and she says, This is what we do with time we wrinkle it, and now the ant can get from one place to another in a second, you know, a half a second, even. And that, to me, is what you're talking about. Is that from our perspective, it looks like the skirt is taut and like, Oh my gosh. How are we ever going to get out of this? But in the sense of divine time or or the time that the angels were introducing Meg to in A Wrinkle in Time, the edges actually are very close together, and that when we bring the edges to a different point, we see that, like the Bible verse, 1000 years is a day into the Lord. And so now, all of a sudden, the whole arrangement of the picture around us changes, and Meg is no longer feeling like rescuing her father is a helpless quest, but rescuing her father is possible, and that even she is a little girl, can do that.

Joshua Johnson: 13:44

I mean, that's beautiful. So let's get into then the calendar and the church calendar. And I mean, we started off with story, and I think that we have started to merge stories within Christian life in the West, because we're following a Roman calendar, we're merging the story of the Christian calendar and Christian life in with the Roman calendar. How do you think the merging of those stories together has shaped who we are as people of faith?

Diana Butler Bass: 14:17

Yeah, early Christians had a had a lot of problems. Obviously, because they were they were in trouble for the word go with the empire. But one of the problems they had was a problem they inherited from their Jewish roots, and that in a lot of Christians don't think about this is a primary problem of Judaism, but Jews follow a different calendar. They follow calendar that is primarily lunar and very ancient calendar, and it's seasonally based around harvest festivals and other kinds of things that are more typical in lunar based agricultural settings. And so here the Jews were functioning with this kind of calendar about Passover and about their major festivals. And then they get conquered, you know, over and over and over and over again in the ancient world. And one of the groups, of course, that conquers them are the Romans. And the Romans don't like difference. The Romans like everybody to be on the same page, because once you get everybody on the same page, then you can have power over them. And so having a religious group that has an entirely different sense of time. It's very dangerous for the Romans. And so what they have to do is they have to figure out, how do we accommodate these Jews who don't see the world in the same way we do? And that is an uneasy accommodation. And we see that all if you're a Christian, you read the New Testament, you see that all the time. In the New Testament, the Romans are uneasy with the Jews. The Jews don't know how to deal with the Romans. The Jews are fighting among themselves, and Jesus becomes part of that fight about how to deal with the Roman Empire and how to deal with the oppression, and how do then they celebrate their own fast feast and fest. Levels, given the fact that the Romans want to wipe them out. So this is a problem in early Christianity, and the way that the early Christians, once it becomes clear that they're separating from their Jewish roots, they've inherited two things. They've inherited that Jewish tradition of an independent spiritual calendar. And now there lots of them are, never were Jews. They're converting. And they're converting from being Gentiles or secular Romans or people from other religions that are coming to Christianity. And so they're they have a there's the Roman calendar, and now they've got two calendars, and what do they try to do? And at first that's a bit of a conflict, in the same way it was for the Jews when the Christians are celebrating Easter at the same time as Passover or Christians are setting up sort of their own holy days and their own fasts and festivals, but then they start borrowing stuff from the Romans, like, when should we celebrate the birthday of Jesus? Oh, we know. Let's put it on the birthday of the the Festival of the invincible sun, because we worship the Son of God. So, hey, yeah, this works. Yeah, and actually, that festival in ancient Rome on December 25 was so out of control that even the Romans worried about it. They thought it had become too wild and unhinged, and so they were that Romans were trying to rope it in a little bit themselves. So then the Christians start borrowing the stuff, and they say, you know, this accommodation thing, this is not a bad idea. We will appropriate Roman dates and Roman views of time. And what that'll do is it'll sort of soften the Romans attitudes towards us, and also, we don't have to be quite so counter cultural. We can sort of fit in a little better with the world. And so that that process becomes an uneasy alliance. It's one of those uneasy alliances that develops in the early centuries of Christianity, when Christians are trying to figure out, what does it mean to be Christian, and how do we accommodate to the Roman Empire, and eventually, the Roman Empire wins the upper hand in many of those discussions, and we don't really even in the society that used to be known as Western Christendom. We don't really follow the Christian calendar nearly as much as we follow the Roman one. Yeah.

Joshua Johnson: 20:02

I mean, it's just fascinating that now we're merging these ideas of the Roman calendar, which then seeps into our bones and our life, and it's just the water that we swim in. And so it has confused a lot of people when it comes to Christian life and Christian faith of what we are following sometimes, then I think it would think that, oh, being a part of the Empire is Christian. And we see that with Christian nationalism. We see that today, and I think that part of it is this idea and sense of the story that we're living in, and we've been immersed in this story, is there a way to recognize the story that we've been living in, the story of empire, jump out of it and start to root ourselves in this Christian calendar and the story of God?

Diana Butler Bass: 20:59

Well, I don't know it's that it's ever possible to completely jump out of a calendar that has so much power and is become, essentially the way that the whole world tells time. It's sort of shocking in some ways. You know, we've got this 2000 year old calendar that's based around the the vision of ancient Rome. And, you know, it's been modified many times through the years, but it's still at heart the Roman calendar. And now the other calendars that are in conflict with it are the Jewish calendar and the Islamic calendar. And there are calendars of that are used in in China that are very ancient calendars and calendars in all kinds of different parts of Asia. And the Buddhists have their calendars. And so we have all these different religious calendars and different traditional calendars that are around the planet. But when it comes to doing business together, when it comes to capitalism, frankly, we all follow the same calendar, and it's that Western calendar that was based in Rome. So you can look at the calendar that we have from Rome as probably one of the longest lasting impacts of the Roman Empire on global society. So. So that means, in effect, that Rome never really goes away and and we have the same tension that the early Christians did, is that, how do you live with Empire, and how do you live with a system of time and storytelling that's based around militarism, imperialism and economic transactionalism, capitalism? And the early Christians did not have an easy answer, and I suspect we won't have an easy answer, but the first step is even knowing this calendar exists, and stepping into it and saying, Okay, if there is this alternative structure of time, that's not a line, but is more circular, where time and eternity touch like Mrs. What's its skirt? What does that mean about the daily rhythms and simple things that it means is that the secular calendar has four seasons. They're different, north and south, they are roughly agricultural, but we've turned them into also other ways of talking about time. Most of these calendars around the world celebrate nations, military victories and economic sort of Holy Days, as it were, Black Friday, Amazon Prime days, bank holiday, that's the way people talk about them now, and they they usually celebrate heroes that are politicians or some sort of celebrity figure, usually who did not earn that position of her of heroism by being kind to their neighbors. They earned it by being famous in some way, shape or form or holding power. It's so. So that's what we have to live with. And now you step into the Christian calendar. And the Christian calendar doesn't have four seasons. It has what six. It has Advent. It has Christmas, which is the 12 days after Christmas, it has epiphany, it has lent, it has Easter, and then it has Pentecost and that. So six major seasons. And within those those seasons, there are some sort of special times that get called out that are kind of like mini seasons. So you have Holy Week, which is right before Easter. And you have some newer additions to the calendar, which I think are very intriguing. You have the season of Creation, which happens in September now in many churches. And then you have very special times of the year. So you have the three days that surround Easter as a special thing, and then you have three days that, as we we are together on this podcast recording, we just went through what something that's called All Hallows tide, which is a very ancient celebration of three days around November 1, where you celebrate All Hallows Eve, which we celebrate as Halloween, All Saints Day. That's where the word hollow comes from. An old fashioned word for Saint was hollow people who are hollow, who hollow God. And so you celebrate All Hallows Day, All Saints Day, and then the day after that, you celebrate something called All Souls Day, which is the which is mostly known in North America through Latin American cultures. It's the day, also called The Day of the Dead. And so we have these three special days that fall in the autumn, and they kind of mirror the three special days that fall in the spring, around Easter time, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, Easter Sunday. Are there three special days in the spring? And so, boy, that's different. You know, right away, you're in a different world. Wait a second. You mean to tell me that there are different seasons, and not only are there different seasons, but there are different heroes, there are different values, and there's a different sense of of time altogether. I

Joshua Johnson: 26:27

want to start with advent, and we're coming up on Advent. Soon, it'll be the beginning of the Christian calendar, and that's it. And you know, in Advent, we start with waiting, we start with darkness. We start with like, Hey, we're in the dark here, and we're waiting for something to come and and help, because we need some help. And so this is perfect, this Advent, this year is probably a perfect time to celebrate this darkness and waiting period that we're in. As you started to reflect on Advent, what started to stick out to you that may have been new, even if you've been immersed in the calendar for a long time.

Diana Butler Bass: 27:09

One of the things that's that I'm really thinking about this year is the contrast between the beginning of the Christian year, which is around December 1. Again. Now this is more based in lunar time. This is the weird thing about the Christian calendar, some of it's lunar, some of it's solar, and so, so Advent is based in lunar time, and it starts right, usually right after Thanksgiving and in the United States. And contrast that to December 31 January 1. That's the beginning of the secular calendar. And you think about New Year's Eve, it's parties and romance and finding your true love and standing in Times Square and watching a big ball drop and champagne and getting drunk and all those things, romantic dinners. I mean, you can just go with it forever. And then Advent. The start of the Christian year is absolutely nothing. It starts in complete silence, yeah, and it's like, wait a second, What? What? What do you mean? The Christian year starts in silence, and basically all we do is sit in the dark for four weeks and light candles. That's exactly how I feel this year as well, sitting in the dark and lighting candles, but there's no big party what? But what happens during those four weeks is you begin to hear questions. And the questions are like, what are you hoping for? What's your heart longing for? Why is the world in such a mess? You know? I mean, there's these soft questions that begin to build in a consciousness, what kind of world do you want to be part of and then what will what will make that happen? Will God help us? And of course, Advent then leads to Christmas, where you where you go from the silence and the four weeks lighting candles in the darkness, and all of a sudden, angels sing, peace on earth, goodwill toward all between on those who on God has favor, which is everybody you have this glorious 12 Day celebration that's just like the big blowout. The secular New Year falls within the 12 Days of Christmas, which is kind of intriguing. So the secular New Year does match, in that sense, the merriment of the 12 Days of Christmas, but, yeah, it comes from a completely different source. So what a weird thing to think. You know, here's the here's a new year that doesn't start with, you know, the blasting of a trumpet, but it's, it's a new year that starts with this soft, wintry silence

Joshua Johnson: 30:00

that's also very I mean, you know, it's counter cultural, because I mean our our world is very loud and noisy. And I mean we live today primarily in an attention economy that people are vying for attention constantly, and like who could speak the most and the loudest will get the attention and will get the the authority and the control that they're after they're seeking. How then does living in the that the darkness and the silence and the waiting and the lighting of candles then then help us move from this attention economy into a space of centering and grounding us in who we really are.

Diana Butler Bass: 30:45

Yeah, in some ways I love Advent the most because it is the most counter cultural right now. The way in which consumerist culture works is that, functionally, consumerist Advent begins on Black Friday. And so you get the that Friday after Thanksgiving, when all of a sudden, no hole is barred, every sale on buy your presents, be ready in four weeks. Look what's coming. And you have to have the perfect house, the perfect invitations to the perfect parties. And you have to be able to cook the perfect meals, have perfect cookies, have the perfect gifts, and have the perfect Christmas presents ready for your perfect children. And that's what our that's what our culture is selling us, and that if you do all of that, and you do it perfectly well, good for you, that's when you might get your reward. Usually what's what the reward is. Now, if you watch a lot of Hallmark movies, is that you'll get to marry a true prince who will somehow come in the midst of the madness and will find you, and you'll fall in love, and then you'll have the perfect relationship on top of all the other perfection, and so this, and it's that that we're selling as the message of Christmas. And honestly, I like having a beautifully decorated house, and I love cooking, and I love the baking and all those things around Christmas. It's. It's full of memories and wonder and all the things that it's full of, but the way that it's been packaged by that calendar and by our culture is ugly, and so what we have to do is we have to figure out, how much do I want to go down that road, how much of that can I embrace and keep my heart and how much do I need to choose to also be at the same time on a path of silence, of listening for those deep questions and of lighting those candles in the dark? So in effect, we have to pick and you can pick both, but you you're not going to fulfill the vision of perfection that the secular calendar wants you to you're going to be a failure. If you take the Christian calendar seriously. You're going to be a failure at the secular calendar in some way, shape or form, and you're just going to have to adjust to that. It's very hard. It's very hard for especially some women, especially, I think white middle class women, to recognize that, yeah, you have to, you have to pick here. And so that's what I do. Every Advent. I try to figure out, what am I going to do, what am I not going to do, and how am I going to adjust secular Advent, secular Christmas, to these, the deeper meanings and the real story of what Christmas is

Joshua Johnson: 33:45

in the secular calendar, you're looking at things in terms of consumerism, imperialism, militarism, and we're celebrating violence and, you know, hoarding money and control and power and colonialism, all these things that we're celebrating, but this Christian calendar can start to reframe our thinking. And I know it's not in your book, but you've talked recently about November 11, which really celebrates militarism, right? The Armistice Day, so the end of World War One, but it's also Veterans Day in America. It's my birthday and so on November 11, and so it's really something where I've always had an A weird, uneasy feeling that my birthday falls on this day of celebrating violence and war, and I just never liked it, but in a Christian feast day, there's a different celebration that's there. Can you tell us what that celebration is and how it actually then subverts some of the things that we celebrate in the secular calendar?

Diana Butler Bass: 34:55

Yeah, what we know now as armistice, Armistice Day, or Veterans Day, or Remembrance Day. The Armistice Day turn into remembrance in most of the Commonwealth countries in the English speaking world, but they all still celebrate same thing. The end of World War One, the victory of one set of empires over another set of Empires was basically what we're celebrating. And we're also, of course, recognizing the heroism that does go along with military service, the sacrifice that comes with that. And those are real things. And so I don't want to demean or diminish those because that is is cruel in some ways, to the survivors of the families of those who lost their lives. And so I do want to recognize the importance of them, but they ultimately do celebrate militarism, and they do sell they they do extol violence as heroism. Now, the tradition across so most of the centuries of Western European Christianity was not that. Instead, November 11 was the day of a very important saint, St Martin. And St Martin is a fascinating guy. He lived in the very early century when Christianity was was young, young, young. And he grew up in a family where his father was a Roman military officer. And Martin got exposed to Christianity and was interested in it even when he was pretty young. But he grew into adulthood, he took on the vocation of his father, which is very typical in the ancient Roman world, as you just did what your dad did. And so he embarked on a path of being a military officer. And the legend that accompanies Martin's life, and it speaks to, I think, the reality of him as well is he did become a catechumenate, which is a fancy Latin word for a learner of the Christian faith. And this was a step that was before conversion. It was people who were interested in Christianity, but were sort of exploring it. It's the seeker stage. And what you would do is, you would you would sit with a congregation or with a bishop or a minister in the in the faith, and you would learn it. You would learn the stories of Jesus. You would go through the practices and what it was supposed to be like. And this could last a very long time. Could last years to be a catechumenate. So Martin's interest in Christianity, he's also. So a soldier, and that's a problem, right there. Most Christians now don't realize that there are no, we have no records at all of any person serving the Roman army who was a Christian before the year 170 so essentially, for 150 to almost 200 years. At the beginning of the Christian tradition, we don't know of one person who was any of any importance, of any rank at all, who was a Christian and a soldier, and that was because the early church said you couldn't be and that was just it. Pacifism was the expected way of life. And if you became Christian, you were expected to resign from the military, because the military was wielding the sword of Caesar, and usually that sword was being wielded against the church. You had to choose. And so Martin, he's a catechumenate, and this is the legend that I think is beautiful. The legend is he's going down a road on his horse, dressed in his full military regalia, and he sees a beggar on the side of the road. And he remembers the stories of Jesus, remembers the story about taking care of the poor, the Good Samaritan story, and he gets down off of his horse, and he takes off his Roman cloak. Can you imagine what those military cloaks look like? They look like, what they look like in the movies. It's such a sign of status and privilege and power. He takes that cloak off and he puts it around. The beggar goes back to camp, and that night, this, this is how the legend goes, he had a dream, and Jesus appears to him and says, Martin, this is the way. And Martin wakes up and resigns his military commission. His father is appalled, but he gives up his all of his privilege as an officer in the Roman army, and he decides to follow Jesus, and he becomes a monk. And he then learns you know more, and begins preaching and serving the poor, and eventually, from his that humble position. People in the surrounding neighborhoods hear of his holiness, and they want to make him a bishop, and they do. And so in the early church, being a bishop was not really a status symbol of anything other than the fact that you were giving your life up to serve the least of these and that if the Romans came, you'd be the first one to be killed. That was what meant to be a bishop, and that was Martin's story. And so for centuries, on November 11, Christians in the West, which was most people, celebrated St Martin's Day. And it wasn't a celebration of violence. It was a celebration of the surrender of violence in favor of a life of total peace, and not just total peace, but the service to the poor, and part of its celebration would be the giving away of alms to the poor, taking care of the least of these and really just living in a sort of expressive, joyful way to serve people who were in need.

Joshua Johnson: 40:43

It's a beautiful story and a celebration of peace for so long then turns into a different type of celebration. Let's bring it back into your Hallmark stories of Christmas.

Diana Butler Bass: 40:55

Well, can I say real quickly though, happy birthday. Oh, thank you.

Joshua Johnson: 41:00

Thank you very much. It's a much better birthday story, much better birthday story, and it makes me feel good. Is like because I assume violence. I don't I don't want it. I want peace on earth. And you know, back in your Hallmark story, what people are yearning for is a prince to basically save them, and say, I am going to be saved by this prince. But in Christmas, then the Prince of Peace comes in, right? And he is the one who is for all people, and he's the light of the world. And we start to then bring in some light. And after then Advent and then Chris, Mimic, we when we get into epiphany, you write in the your reflection on Candlemas. This is at the end of this section. I want to read this because I love this. It says, We wake up the Earth. We birth new life. We've journeyed from waiting to receiving, to following, to join, joining the great procession of love and justice in and through the world. We are the light. So how does following, then this Christian calendar, not only help us remember the story, but then start to embody the story. I. Of Jesus.

Diana Butler Bass: 42:19

For me, it's sort of a natural progression. The more seriously I took the calendar and how it unfolded, the more seriously I began to act in my own life on the stories that I was hearing. And so that whole arc for me, of the the winters, the winter part of the calendar from Advent to epiphany. Advent to Christmas to epiphany. That's my favorite part of the calendar, which I think is kind of obvious when you read the book, because it's like, I couldn't stop writing about it. I had to edit so much down out of that section. It was painful, but that and the and the high point does come on February 2, where you read that selection from a holiday that most Protestants don't know, called Candlemas, where medieval folks used to bring their candles to church and priests would bless them, and then they go on these processions out into the world with the lit candles, and usually was read that text. You are the light of the world. And so how do we bring light? And as a writer, that's what I'm always trying to do. I'm trying to bring a new story to the world so that we are shedding light into very shadowy places. I don't like the language of violence at all. It's very hard to avoid it sometimes. You know, I know you're in the middle part of the country and that I don't know how your listeners are, your friends at your podcast, a lot of people who have had sympathy with Trumpism or with Christian nationalism, and yet I I live in a place where I'm pretty well known, and also a place that has been very resistant to that. I'm in the United States. And so people ask me all the time, you know, how can we fight How can we fight Maga? How can we fight Christian nationalism? And my answer is, well, I don't want to fight it. And I don't, because as soon as you walk toward that, the form of Christianity that's at the base of these political movements that are so strong in the United States right now is the idea of warrior Christianity, or warrior Jesus. Essentially, Jesus is the new Caesar, and that love translates into imperialism. And as soon as you give this the language of the story of war, you're basically affirming that story. And so what I usually argue is I'm not trying to fight it, I'm trying to burrow under it. The only way I can figure out how to do that is to burrow under it with stories of love and stories about community and stories about the Prince of Peace, who calls everybody his friends. And and doesn't pick up a sword when a sword is called for. I mean, most of us, if somebody, if the Roman soldiers were coming for us, and you know, one of Jesus friends actually did pick up a sword and try to attack the Roman soldiers and cut off an ear of one of the folks who's arresting Jesus, and Jesus said, No, that's not the way. And instead, Jesus walked right into the heart of Imperial violence, and it was Imperial violence that killed him. So that seems like it would be a tragedy, but in the Christian year, that's the main point. And then the question is, for Christians, how do we echo that in our own lives? Are we willing to not fight violence for violence, not pick up the sword when the sword is even cast at us, but instead walk into the Imperium, walk into the Empire, and just keep telling a different story. And that's what Jesus did over and over and over again. And he the Romans beat up on him pretty bad for it in the hours before he died. But then after, and this is the Christian story as well, after he dies. And this that, that that the silence of Holy Saturday, which is an empty silence, not the silence of waiting, like the silence of Advent, but the silence of heartbreak, the silence of mourning, the silence of grief. That silence takes over for a very short period of time, and then the resurrection story. And the resurrection, you know, some people think of it just as like, well. That means everything's going to be well in the end, you know, whatever. But what it really means is it's God's no to Empire. God says no the Empire. Serial violence, even a violence that kills my son will not have the last word and that this is it. I'm going to do something so dramatic, I'm going to change the narrative itself, the narrative of death. And that's been the main threat that empire has against almost has against all of us, is that if we don't go along with its plans, it will kill us. Well, guess what? We Christians follow a God who already dealt with that. And so that's those are the realities. If we shift to the story and we see, oh my gosh, Imperial violence is already defeated. Now, how do we live and and that actually is the end of the story, because in the Christian narrative, that whole dramatic scene of the death and resurrection and God's no to Imperial violence that happens in the middle of the story. That's not the end of the story. The next six months on the Christian calendar, my favorite season, my second favorite season of the year is what's called ordinary time. An ordinary time is literally just a time about us as the people who follow the way of Jesus, and whether or not we're going to take him seriously. And every week, there's some new story about something Jesus taught, or healing of Jesus or or a way of life story and an exchange between Jesus and one of his followers, that also winds up being a kind of a teaching as well, but is a little different than just Jesus getting up in a classroom on the side of a mountain and telling people blessed are the poor, you know? So it's something it's something more relational. So you have these kinds of and then at the as we read through those stories, it's like, well, wait a second. I can do that, or wait a second, I'm called to be the Good Samaritan, or I'm called to not be the judging older brother when the prodigal son returns and all those kinds of things. So the second half of the story is about us and how well we do with following Jesus and living into God's no to imperialism.

Joshua Johnson: 49:44

Yeah, that's beautiful. And I love how you do in Ordinary Time as you walk through this. And in a beautiful year, you're talking the parables, which are the stories of Jesus that he's saying, and you're walking us through some practices to help root us and actually follow the way of Jesus and body that. But then I mean, as you're explaining that this no to imperialism, talk about a beautiful year, talk about what, what beauty that is of this no to imperialism. This, this yes to peace in Shalom and a way of saying enough. And we could tell a story and a story of love,

Unknown: 50:28

what is really briefly, because we don't have a lot of time left, but really briefly, what's the story of love that is carrying you right now? Oh, one of the stories that's carrying me. I want to relate one from the book, just because that's what our conversation is primarily about. I've been in a I've been in a mood this year.

Diana Butler Bass: 50:50

I don't know there's something that happens. I'm now in my mid 60s, and a whole different way of being in the world begins to develop, if you're sensitive to it, in that decade. And I've been thinking lots about my parents, especially since my dad died when he was 62 and my mom died when she was 72 so I'm very much between the death of my two parents. So I've been thinking a lot about my parents. And there are a number of stories about my parents in this book. And the way that I tell the stories about the Christian year is that I do talk about specific theological things, and I try to always bring up kind of quirky interpretations of Bible passages, but it's not pedantic and it's not dogmatic, and I'm not telling anybody this is the way you must believe about these particular things that Jesus did instead, I as a writer, as a teacher, I'm always searching for these very homey, ordinary examples that unfold some mystery that is larger than who we are. So there's a story in the Advent section about my dad, and it is a story about beauty, and it's a story about the mystery of time, and it's also a story about some sadness, because part of a beautiful year is being able to unfold grief, I think, and sadness, and all the whole range of. Human emotion into a narrative that gives life. And so the story about my dad, December, 22 21st or 22nd is in the western in the Northern Hemisphere, the longest night of the year, and the it falls always falls at the end of at the end of Advent. And a lot of churches in recent years, recent decades, have adopted doing something that's pretty interesting. It's called a Blue Christmas service, because with the darkness and with the holiday combined and all that pressure to be perfect, a lot of people in our worlds are, Christmas is hard, and it can especially if you lose someone, or you've been confused and doubting or depressed during the year. You're sick, you got a bad illness, you know, bad diagnosis. I mean, lots of terrible things happen in life. And so churches, seeing that decided that on the longest night they'd start having Longest Night services, and they're often referred to as Blue Christmas. And it's a time when you open up a church building, it's usually candles and Healing Music and poetry and just a recognition of the other side of Christmas. And so there's an essay in the Advent section that is called Blue Christmas. And I tell this story about my parents, how every year when I was a little kid, same thing happened over and over and over again. It was a ritual at my house. My dad was a florist, and I grew up in this very artsy kind of house, and my my mother hated my dad's taste around Christmas time because my dad thought the most beautiful thing in the world were Blue Christmas lights. He loved Blue Christmas lights, and my mother absolutely hated them, and every year they'd have a big fight about the Christmas lights. And my mother and I, like I said, I can remember the whole thing, my mother would say that she wanted the house to have white lights, because white lights were what the rich people had, and that was classy. I grew up in this very working class family, and so my mom was always in this pursuit of classiness, and so white lights were classy, and blue lights, you know, who has blue lights? And so, so she would, she would be on this crusade, and then she decided to change her crusade one year, because white lights wasn't working with my dad. And so she changed it to colored lights because they're more cheerful for children. But my dad wouldn't relent, blue lights. And so this one year, I was probably about seven years old, I remember being outside, and while he was putting up the lights, and I was ostensibly helping him, you know, and as we put up the lights, and I just watched him such he was so dedicated to this work and making the house beautiful, these lights outlining everything in blue, and it was so crisp and cold. And we lived. We lived in Baltimore City. And it just so happened that as he finished, it started snowing, and I remember asking him, Dad, why do we have Blue Christmas lights? And he took my hand, and we stood there with just this very light snow falling, and he said, because they're pretty when it snows. And that was my reflection for Blue Christmas, and that takes us to a different place. Instead of remembering my parents conflict and how that shaped my childhood in so many ways, I remember my dad and holding my hand in the snow. And you know what? He was, right? It was beautiful when it snowed.

Joshua Johnson: 56:24

Well, that Diana is a beautiful place to end this conversation, which was fantastic. A beautiful year is out as we're recording it on November 4, which is release day for a beautiful year. It's out anywhere books are sold, and it is a fabulous, fabulous read. This is something where you know, as you know, I go through it and I want to read as I'm interviewing people. I really didn't want to read all of it. I wanted to savor the book. I wanted to say I just wanted, like, read it over the year and savor it. It's so beautiful. And I'm going to, and this will be my, my Book of the Year. And so thank you, Diana, for this beautiful work that you put out that you're helping us root ourselves in the story of God, into an alternative story that the that Imperial. Realism and militarism and consumerism wants to tell us that we could actually live inside the empire in a way where many Christians for centuries have been able to do and root herself in a time that is circular and not linear, that it emanates from God, from love, and we could tell better story and a story of love, and not a story of hate and violence and corruption in this world. So Diana, this is wonderful. Is there anywhere you'd like to point people to? How could they connect with you? Anywhere you want them to get the book?

Diana Butler Bass: 57:53

My publishers paid my publisher this time around, new publisher for me as Macmillan Publishing, they list the book, and then they have a whole bunch of potential buying options. And I know a lot of people have very strong feelings about where they're buying books these days. And if you are one of those, people find an option that you like, not one that you hate, and try to figure out how to support not empire, as you buy the book and always, you know, go to your local library or ask your local bookseller to order it for you.

Joshua Johnson: 58:31

Yeah, you can connect with Diana a few ways. Her sub stack, the cottage is one of my favorites to read. So it's great. So you should go and subscribe there as well. Diana, thank you for this conversation. It was a it was honored to talk with you. So thank you so

Diana Butler Bass: 58:46

much. Great. Let's shift culture together. Amen. Amen. You you.