Fifth Sunday

I read recently an article about how messy it gets when men try to apply human time concepts to physical reality. Natural time cycles such as the daily rotation of the earth, the (approximately) monthly revolution of the moon around the earth, and the annual revolution of the earth around the sun just don’t come out in nice even numbers no matter what you pick for a reference. Scientists, popes, and politicians have wrestled with the problem for millenia and have inserted days and months, deleted days, and even most recently (December 31, 2005 at 0:00 GMT) we were treated to an extra second to keep us in sync with some cosmological constant.

People have proposed 360 day calendars with 5 or 6 extra days each year. The 360 days could easily be split into 12 thirty-day months. Or we could have 13 twenty-eight day months so that each month always started with a Sunday and ended on Saturday. This 364 day year would have to be augmented by one or two days each year that wouldn’t fall within a month or even a weekday. It would be a “free” day, whatever that would mean.

Personally, I like the seeming randomness that our current calendar throws at us. Unless you’re a calendar savant, you can’t say for sure which day of the week your birthday comes on next year or whether Christmas will be on a 3 or 4 day holiday weekend. And I really like the “fifths”, the extra days that have to be scheduled differently. Like we always have board meetings on the “third Thursday” or the second Sunday. But no one ever has something planned for “the fifth Tuesday” because it’s so irregular. They occur “about” every three months but can’t be counted on.

I say no one and immediately have to correct myself. Our bishop this year has decided that since we have some ward committee or other scheduled for the first, second, third, and fourth Sundays, that we should take off the fifth Sunday whenever it comes around. We'll just have the general congregational meetings. I slept in this morning feeling not at all guilty. And I’ll be able to do that again in April, July, and October. Thanks, Bishop.