Time to Reflect
A Reflection on Time from Canon Gregory
I’m getting used to it. We all are. We’re getting used to the sound of Lichfield Cathedral’s sonorous hourly chime. Thanks to Simon, I gather, it is spot-on. It can be slightly haunting, when sleep is illusive: hour-after-hour, the tyranny-of-time relentlessly tolls its message. But does time need to be a tyranny? Is time our messenger, or is it simply a helpful way marker?
On my recent vacation, with an unerring consistency, I found that I was one day ahead of myself. Greatly relaxing as it was, it didn’t seem to fly by like it usually does, vanishing like a dream. It felt different, in a gently radical way.
Psychologists, of course, would probably offer me countless rational theories to explain my perception. Personally, I think one rare blessing to have come from this season of COVID, lockdown, and social distancing, is a reappreciation of time. Schedules and routines - to which many of us have been unhealthily wedded - have been briskly cast away. Days have become longer, sometimes harder, but they have sometimes also become more free, more gentle, and somehow more spacious. My life has changed, as your life will have done too. We’ve all been enabled, or enforced (!), to reflect on how we live, and how we use time.
Time's Terror
As technology has compressed time, time’s terror has arguably increased, although it’s long been a literary theme. Shakespeare’s sonnets are peppered with temporal angst; the pressured threat of life’s end. But in recent years, with email, WhatsApp, and twenty-four hour working, we’ve become time’s servants. I wonder how many of us, rising from sleep, check first our clock, phone, or watch to see what the time might be? We talk about the threat of Artificial Intelligence in the future, but arguably it began with the invention of a mechanical clock. Before that accuracy, daily life involved a degree of latitude and leeway: minutes and seconds were relative to the sunrise and the sunset. Time had blurred edges, but now we are accurate to the second. W.H.Auden sums this up in his poem As I walked out one evening, a conversation between love and time. Look how ‘Time’ is capitalised; our undeniable master.
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer time.’
Hope Replaces Time
Our ultimate destination is not negotiable. We are finite beings, and so Auden is right. Time, movement, age; none cannot be fought against despite certain scientists’ Promethean claims. I read recently that, deep within our brains in the tiny hypothalmus (the fun bit!), lies what is known as the Super Chiasmic Nucleus. It is sometimes called the ‘body clock’, and it operates hormonal cycles. It is a reminder that we are finite, that time is part of how we live and who we are – at least in this present, fallen order. But that does not mean that time is not our Ultimate Reality. Living in two time zones – the temporal and the eternal – means that it is hope and not time that calls us forward.
Hope replaces time, and this hope is for a God who is genuinely outside and beyond the clock, for in God is both the end and the beginning (Rev 22.13) and our being ‘in him’ means that hope calls us out of the time-bound order into the beginnings of eternity:
‘thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth…
they shall perish, but thou shalt endure’ (Psalm 102.25-27).
Likewise, the Letter to the Hebrews talks of a God who is infinite and foundational ‘the same yesterday, today and forever’ (Heb 13.8) and this is the One in whom we are called in life, and through death.
Don't Worry About Tomorrow
To us, God is unfathomable – I guess that is the point – for he is beyond. Jesus tells us not to worry about this; and even reassures us that no one knows the exact timings of God. Instead, he suggests that we might radically rethink time instead: ‘do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today’ (Matt 6.34). Seek after God, Jesus suggests, participate in the eternity breaking in, but do not try and control it. This, of course, is one of the extraordinary things about our God-in-Man. The Timeless One breaks through into time.
Don’t worry if you’re feeling a little bamboozled. The deft and subtle mind of the great St Augustine found itself quite befuddled in the face of God’s eternity interrupting earthly time. Asking ‘What is time?’ in his Confessions, he goes on to write: ‘who can measure the past which does not now exist or the future, which does not yet exist?’ Eventually, he surrenders, his own mind seemingly ‘on fire to solve this intricate enigma’. The mystery of how eternity enters time in God is not one to be solved, but it does radically change the way we ought to live our life. Imagine how our perspective might change, if more often we viewed our relationships to others through the lens of eternity? We are called to live as though we shall live forever – not physically, but emotionally and spiritually. How might that affect our view of the environment, nationhood, and the sheer value of another created being. For one thing, it severs the mathematical link between time, speed, and distance, stopping us doing more and more, faster and faster, for no good reason. It breaks the fear of the finite, helping us instead to slow down and expand into The Infinite.
Mindfulness
The last few years has seen ‘mindfulness’ become very ‘on trend’, in part because of its perceived roots in Buddhism? Christianity, ironically, has long laid claim to a tradition of being ‘mindful’. Arguably, this is exactly what Jesus is suggesting when he tells us not to worry for tomorrow, but to absorb ourselves in the ‘now’ moment. This atomized, oddly paused and dislocated moment in our global life and local community requires that we put right our relationship to time, liberating ourselves from a deeply destructive grammar of ‘busyness’ and ‘productivity’. There is a whole movement dedicated to calming our frenzy, the Slow Movement (you’ll find the best account of it in Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slow). It is simply a call to live a slower, healthier, and absorbed way of living. In many ways it is a secularized version of the older wisdom of St Ignatius Loyola, who asked us to open all of our selves to find God in all things, at all times.
Time is Never the Master
The Benedictine tradition too, soaked into the DNA of our nation, understands the that time belongs to God and not the clock. The rule is known for its moderation, balancing work, with study, and prayer. Each must balance with the other, but the call to prayer is absolute. Time is never the Master. In chapter forty-three, Benedict writes: ‘on hearing the signal for an hour of the divine office, the monk will immediately set aside what he has in hand, and go …nothing is preferred to the work of God.’ Hoe, pan, pen – all are laid aside for God. It reminds the monk that as finite beings, we can never know when we will be called to our infinite end, to begin our journey into an eternal, timeless realm. They live not by the clock, but according to the Divine Will, and the Divine Hope. This is also our call.
Oddly, COVID has called us to look again at time, and live not by the clock, but according to God’s time, according to the divine hours. As we do so, we begin to realise that the clock is a reference point, only a way marker. To live purposefully, is to live according to God’s way. To see Him in all things; to see Him at all times. This requires us to slow down, breathe, and to live in God and not by time. It demands that we cease running simply to stand still. For since Christ has come as the God-Man: time is a thing of the past.
“Eternity shut in a span.
Summer in winter;
Day in night;
Heaven in earth;
God in man.’
In the Holy Nativity of Our Lord, Richard Crashaw