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The Passage of Time


This year has taken forever and at the same time has gone in the blink of an eye. I wonder if you feel the same way...  

Last March the prospect of a month’s lockdown seemed to be forever. Had we realized then that 10 months later we would be looking forward to another 10-12 months of COVID before the vaccines have reached everyone and we can begin to relax our precautions just a little, it would have felt like forever!

Time, however like religion , is a human construct, at least according to Christopher Hitchens. I remember seeing a television show where Hitchens explained how time doesn’t really exist. It is something that humans used to explain the disconnect between for example sunrise and sunset, or when you start on a walk and when you got to your destination. We have quantified that disconnect and used clocks and calendars to keep track of it. His point was that there is really only this moment right now, and what we are doing during it is really all that is. Sounds sort of like living in the moment doesn’t it!

Have you ever noticed that summer for example was much longer when you were a small child and now passes in the blink of an eye? I know I have. I have heard the explanation that the reason time is slower when we are young is because each experience is new and for that reason time seems to slow down. Then as we get older and things become familiar they speed by because we no longer pay them as much attention. So the first months of lockdown went very slowly, but as we became accustomed to that way of living the days have sped up!  Amazing, eh? And if we go back to Hitchens' concept of time, we can see that once it isn’t new to us, we stop living in the moment.  Religion tries to explain how humans have experienced the Other, the Holy, or as Tillich put it, ‘the ground of all being’. But as with time that speeds by when we are familiar with what is going on around us, making it difficult to stay in the moment, so religion, once we become familiar with it, tends to lose that experience of the Holy. 

Familiarity breeds contempt or if not contempt then stagnation. We need to be on the alert at all times for the entry of the Holy into our lives. And that my friends is what Advent is all about!

Comments

  1. Judy ImrieDecember 15, 2020 at 10:07 PM

    Very interesting, Lynn. I remember some of those moments of brushing against The Holy as a child...walking home alone from the Sunday School Concert practice... in the dark...unthinkable now! Home was full of younger siblings and there was something about that moment of solitude that has never left my memory...turning the corner at the old Livery Stable and suddenly seeing the huge Christmas Tree glowing in front of the Spinner's Factory hovering above 'the falls'. "Joy inexpressible and full of glory" flooded my soul...O Holy Night...O Come All Ye Faithful...O Little Town of Bethlehem...O... For a moment I was standing on Holy Ground .

    At home, all was as I had left it in the wonderful pre-Christmas chaos but Something or Someone altogether lovely still surrounded me. The Tree, the rambling old house, the atmosphere of family
    in that first moment of walking into the warmth out of that still December night were all the same but somehow different. The holiness of the season had descended and blended all that is beautiful together. I don't remember hearing the word Advent, growing up in the Salvation Army but as I slowly became an Anglican, I already knew its meaning.."the entry of the Holy into our lives".

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