OK, this is more of a personal lesson from the Feast, as I was talking to someone who was very nice but announced suddenly, “I am a calendar.” OK, given his accent, I thought maybe I misunderstood him, so I asked him about it. “Oh? You haven’t heard that some dispute the calendar?” Well, actually, I have, but certainly my expressing of it in English would be quite a bit different.
According to Wikipedia:
A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, religious, commercial, or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, weeks, months, and years. The name given to each day is known as a date. Periods in a calendar (such as years and months) are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon. Many civilizations and societies have devised a calendar, usually derived from other calendars on which they model their systems, suited to their particular needs.
A calendar is also a physical device (often paper). This is the most common usage of the word. Other similar types of calendars can include computerized systems, which can be set to remind the user of upcoming events and appointments.
As a subset, calendar is also used to denote a list of particular set of planned events (for example, court calendar).
~ Calendar. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar.
Boil it down, distill it and condense it, and what do you get? A calendar is a device used to ensure people do the same thing at the same time.
It’s ironic, then, that the calendar has become such a big deal in COG circles that people are doing different things on different days.
I think a lot of the controversy centers on forgetting why a calendar exists in the first place.
As far as why God seemed to leave such a large gray area in the first place, well, that’s a different article.