The Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans
Sunday, February 26, 2012
This week is February 29, Leap Year Day 2012. It’s an unusual date, one we only see on our calendars every four years, and so the Worship Team and I thought we’d do something a little unusual for this service, mixing up elements of our usual Order of Service. I heard through the Unitarian Universalist ministers’ grapevine that other UU churches are experimenting this morning, doing things in an unusual way to celebrate Leap Year. Several churches are, like us, scrambling their regular order of service. One of my colleagues has inserted a small circular disk marked “2-IT” into today’s bulletin, telling his congregation that today is the day they could finally get “around to it.”
A very old childhood memory rhyme explains the “what,” but not the “why” of Leap Year Days:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one
Excepting February alone:
Which hath but twenty-eight in fine,
Til leap year gives it twenty-nine.
A brief lesson in both history and astronomy might be in order. A year is what we call the period of time it takes for the earth to complete its orbit around the sun. Well, we call it a year, but the scientific truth is, it doesn’t take 365 days for the earth to go around the sun – it actually takes 365 whole days and 1/4 of another day. That means, every four years, we have to do something about that extra day that piles up.
Back in ancient Roman times, the folks who put calendars together (in those days it was religious leaders, which is why our months are named after Roman gods and goddesses, such as Jan-uary for Janus the two-faced god of entranceways, and May for the eternally young goddess of love and beauty) fixed the problem by adding in an extra month of 22 days every several years. But this actually made the situation worse, as the seasons of the year floated through the calendar and were never in the same months two years in a row.
Julius Caesar, by all accounts a bossy but very sensible person, eliminated the extra month, made some months 31 days, some 30, and added an extra day every 3 years, thus creating the Julian calendar. His successor, his nephew Octavian later styled Caesar Augustus, changed the name of one of the months to July to honor Julius and another to August to honor himself, which is why October, the original 8th month, as its name indicates, is now the 10th, and December, the 10th month, is now the 12th.
In the year 8 of the Common Era (to recognize that the whole world is not Christian, it is more honoring of diversity to say “Common Era” or CE instead of Anno Domini or AD, which means “year of our Lord” and “Before the Common Era” or BCE instead of Before Christ), a 4th change occurred when some monks in Europe discovered that the Julian calendar still didn’t completely cover the time gap, so they made Leap Year every four years instead of every three.
But there was one more change to come. In the Renaissance, using what was then highly advanced equipment to scan the sky, astronomers found that the earth’s orbit was actually short by 11 minutes from 365 and 1/4 days. To make up for this difference, Pope Gregory XIII made the final change: thus the calendar we use today is called Gregorian. Pope Gregory declared in 1582 that Leap Days could occur in any year divisible by 4, but NOT 100, except when the year is divisible by 400. (Are you confused yet?) Anyway, that’s why we have Leap Years in the first place, and why both 2000 and 2004 both had Leap Days, but there won’t be one in 2100.
Interestingly, the Gregorian calendar is not perfect either, but it will take more than 3,000 years for the margin of error to catch up and force us to add another day to the year. No word yet on what that day might be called when it arrives sometime around 4582, but I don’t think we have to worry about it yet.
Over 4 million Leap Year babies are born each year world-wide, leaving that many people celebrating their actual birthday every four years. Oddly, different countries have passed different legislation to denote what day will be a Leap Baby’s legal birthday; some nations have chosen February 28 and others March 1.
Since it is “time out of time,” traditions have sprung up around Leap Year Day – in Ireland and Scotland, it is thought to be the only time an unmarried woman can propose to an unmarried man. (Leap Day is not to be confused with Sadie Hawkins Day, invented by American cartoonist Al Capp in his strip “Li’l Abner” and which fell in early November.) In some cultures, Leap Day is thought to be good luck and in others, bad luck.
Time out of time. For those of us who celebrate it, Carnival is time out of time, a round of days where the normal is suspended and happenings that would be weird and strange and even unwanted are thought of as acceptable and desirable. Spend hours waiting for and watching a parade? Pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for outrageous outfits and silly unusable items that will be given away to people you don’t know? Begging for hand-outs of those same items from those same strangers? It’s all perfectly normal, but only during Mardi Gras, that very special time out of time.
Time out of time. In almost all religions, worship is considered time out of time, time taken out the mundane and the secular, time set aside in the week to be special, holy, extraordinary. Not just an hour or so to be gotten through, but time sacralized by intention and action. In that time out of time, we are given the gift of reflection and prayer and challenge and the comfort of music and the companionship of like-minded others.
Time out of time. What should you do with a day that only comes once every four years? Lots of people consider that a day not usually on the calendar is a good day to do things you don’t usually do, to do things you like but don’t normally have time for, or to do things that you’ve been putting off – thus my colleague’s handing out “round 2-its” to his congregation this morning. Since it is literally out of the ordinary, Leap Day is a good time to consider the ordinary routine of our lives, to reflect intentionally on why we do what we do, and to think on whether or not we want to make changes or alterations in that normal round of living. Leap Day is an “extra” day in our lives – so what will we do with it?
Of course, another way of thinking is that Leap Day is nothing special at all, just another day, just like last Tuesday was just Tuesday in most places, even though it was Mardi Gras, the day of days, here in New Orleans. Looked at in that way, we have to admit that every single day we wake up is a new opportunity to take stock, to rethink what we do and how we do it, to wonder if our lives fit with what we say we believe. Or, as the Mardi Gras Indians say, “Jockomo feenanay – chaque a mois fin année – each day is the end of the year.”
We don’t really need a Leap Day to do this kind of reassessment – we need instead a leap of our minds and hearts, to go beyond our regular routine, to stretch ourselves beyond what is normal for us, to be fully awake and aware of our actions and intentions and of our habits of mind.
That’s what we hope to achieve with this topsy-turvy service – a leap of our minds, a leap of our hearts, to jump beyond the ordinary routine of our days, to make us think and make us smile, to consider what time out of time means for us. Whatever we decide to do with February 29 – or any other day in our lives – may it turn out to be time well spent. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
