Two thoughts about time

  • poppiesAt this time of year with sea­sons chang­ing and Lent start­ing, I’ve had a cou­ple Ortho­dox insights I’ve heard bounc­ing around my head. The sub­ject is time and how we per­ceive its pas­sage.

    The same, but dif­fer­ent
    I can’t believe that we’re com­ing up on another Cheese­fare Sun­day. So here we go. This week: omelettes; crepes; mac and cheese; cheese and cheese; cheese, cheese, spam and cheese … oops, no spam. Next week: peanut but­ter and jelly sand­wiches; soy milk (blech!); spaghetti mari­nari and bean bur­ri­tos. The lenten recipes, litur­gi­cal CDs and Ortho­dox books come out, and it becomes Lent again. Time to count off Sun­days — Sun­day of Ortho­doxy, St. Gre­gory Pala­mas, Ven­er­a­tion of the Cross … — then count off Holy Week ser­vices — Bride­groom Mon­day, Bride­groom Tues­day, Holy Unc­tion, 12 Gospels … — then count off hours to Pascha, when every­thing is singing and cel­e­brat­ing, and then get ready to do it all again before you know it. Cycles of daily prayer hours, cycles of eight tones — a dif­fer­ent tone each Sun­day for two months. Cycles of church sea­sons, cycles of mov­ing and non-moving church feasts. In the Ortho­dox Church, we’re always either going some­place we’ve been before or approach­ing some­place that we feel like we’ve been before. Last Pascha, next Pascha; last Advent, next Advent. Do we do the same thing over and over?

    In some ways we do, and to our friends it might all sound kind of bor­ing. The world is so wea­ried of its own rest­less race against the clock that the cycli­cal aspects of life can seem point­lessly repet­i­tive. But it’s some­thing that you just can’t explain to peo­ple about church life, they have to just expe­ri­ence it. It turns out it’s the same, but different.

    Because last Pascha and next Pascha really aren’t the same, any­more than last sum­mer is exactly like next sum­mer. On a lec­ture by Fr. John Fin­ley about the church cal­en­dar, he said that though the cycli­cal cal­en­dar can seem to peo­ple like just two-dimensional cir­cles that come back around where they start, it’s actu­ally more three-dimensional — like a helix or a spi­ral stair­case. slinkyIf you think about tak­ing a Slinky and extend­ing it a lit­tle, you’ll get the pic­ture. Yes, a Slinky is cir­cu­lar when viewed from the top. But if you were to start at the top of the Slinky and run your fin­ger­tip around the inside, at the point where you started the cir­cle again, you would be at a dif­fer­ent depth than you started. Each rep­e­ti­tion would take you pro­gres­sively deeper. And even though from a dis­tance, it would look like you were going around and around, you would actu­ally be mak­ing a series of unique cir­cuits. And if you were a small enough thing to be mak­ing that jour­ney your­self, though the angle would be con­stant, the view as you pro­gressed would always be dif­fer­ent and you would always be going some­where. The church cal­en­dar is like that.

    Leav­ing time behind
    The sec­ond thought comes from “Begin­ning to Pray” by Arch­bishop Anthony Bloom. When I reviewed it here, I didn’t even men­tion that he’s got an entire chap­ter devoted to man­ag­ing time, because I could find no brief way to talk about it. Abp. Bloom includes the words about time man­age­ment as a pre­req­ui­site to an active prayer life, but I found that they were more impor­tant than that — it seemed to me more like a pre­req­ui­site to an active life of any kind. It’s been much on my mind as I re-enter an Anti­ochian church after some years away and try find my pac­ing and rhythm all over again.

    Abp. Bloom tells of a time dur­ing the Ger­man occu­pa­tion of France when he was with the resis­tance move­ment and was caught by the police. In that one intense instant, he felt like there was no such thing as the past and no such thing as the future — only that one moment in the present:

    It was then I dis­cov­ered that liv­ing in the past on the one hand and in the future on the other hand was sim­ply not pos­si­ble … I dis­cov­ered that I was pressed into the present moment and all my past, that is, all the things that could be, were con­densed in the present moment with an inten­sity, a col­or­ful­ness that was extremely exhil­a­rat­ing and which allowed me even­tu­ally to get away!

    Now as far as time is con­cerned, there are moments when one can per­ceive that the present moment is there, the past is irre­me­di­a­bly gone … and the future is irrel­e­vant because it may hap­pen or it may not … You dis­cover with great inter­est that you are in the now. You know the very, very thin plane which geom­e­try teaches us has no thick­ness. This geo­met­ric plane which has absolutely no thick­ness, which is ‘now’, moves along the lines of time, or rather time runs under it, and brings to you ‘now’ every­thing you will need in the future. This is the sit­u­a­tion we must learn, and we must learn it in a more peace­ful way. I think we must do exer­cises in stop­ping time and in stand­ing in the present, in this ‘now’ which is my present and which is also the inter­sec­tion of eter­nity with time.

    Mount AthosThis may sound too cere­bral an activ­ity for com­mon folk, but I think it’s pos­si­ble in small ways even for those of us who may not feel capa­ble of such things. At my new home­church, St. Basil the Great, I feel again the haunt­ing qual­ity of Byzan­tine chant that seems to always be in motion but never in a hurry. And the cra­dle Ortho­dox of St. Basil’s seem to be that way as well. Greet­ings, vis­its, com­ings and goings aren’t accord­ing to my Amer­i­can tim­ing — they take as long as they take. They hap­pen until they’re com­plete. And I know that such moments are always there; they needn’t depend on a par­tic­u­lar arch­dio­cese or musi­cal tra­di­tion. You just have to attend to them.

    After read­ing this chap­ter of “Begin­ning to Pray,” I decided to try to tune in to God’s tim­ing a lit­tle bit more (and yes, I wish there was a way to say that that didn’t sound like a bumper sticker). If I was in a huge rush and one thing after another got in my way, why not let loose of the idea of the future moment that wasn’t get­ting here fast enough? Why not for­get all the other moments and just trust God to deter­mine what was impor­tant and what wasn’t? I’ll just say from this small bit of anec­do­tal evi­dence from one poor weak­ling that I have never missed any­thing sig­nif­i­cant since then, and I have enjoyed many moments that had seemed like they would be hell-bent.


    Related posts:

    1. Thoughts about the Ortho­dox Church and cap­i­tal punishment
    2. The Daily Lives etc. Calendar
    3. Ah yes. Just like rid­ing a bicycle.
    4. Touchy Touch­stone
    5. St. Mary of Egypt

    February 27th, 2006 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Mimi 02.27.2006

    Wow! Grace, this is so spot on and well said. I am hum­bled and thankful.

  • Grace

    Yay! (about get­ting it right, not about you being humbled )

    As you can prob­a­bly tell, I’m just wing­ing it with things that seem inter­est­ing or insight­ful to me, so it’s great to hear when I’m not the only one. :-)

  • s-p

    Nice, very nice. I may steal this and hope­fully remem­ber where I got it when I use it some­where else! :)

  • This Side of Glory » Blog Archive » Going back in time

    […] So the link is HERE, and for those who like to cut to the chase, just read the third para­graph in the sec­tion called “The same but dif­fer­ent.” For those who want the bot­tom line even BEFORE they cut to the chase, the point is that no mat­ter how much you think your life might be a kind of rat race, run­ning round and round on the same track, you’re actu­ally on more of a Slinky. Which is a good thing. Con­fused yet? Read on. […]

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