by Kate Keefe Originally published 19 October 2023, The Tablet
In our hall, we have a grandfather clock, which my father inherited many years ago from a grateful patient. The clock itself is not particularly old; it was made in Germany some time last century, and I don’t know anything more about its history than that. I love it dearly. I remember it arriving in our house when I was young, and then it was the background sound track of family life forever after, with its slightly wonky chime and a very distinctive chain-rattle when my father wound it every week. My husband remembers it always chiming during our phone calls in the university holidays (this was in the time before mobiles, and the only phone in the house was in the hall with the clock). My children remember it as a fixture of their grandparents’ house when they visited. Now it is in our house, and I wind it every week, thinking of my father. If Margaret gets home late, she says it feels like being welcomed home when it bongs. It means much more than, “What time is it?” It makes me think about what time is for.
The British are famous for talking all the time about weather, but I’ve been surprised to notice how much they also talk about time. Of course, if we were French, or Italian, we could use the same word for both. I don’t mean the counting hours sort of time, which would be a different word in French or Italian anyway, but the whole idea of the time within which we live and move, and how we choose what to do with it.
How we talk about time has a great impact on how we feel generally, whether our mood is positive or negative. There’s only a small difference between “swimming takes me a long time” and “I take my time when I swim”, but they indicate two radically different approaches and two radically different ways to feel after doing something. Maybe we have time, or we panic because we don’t have any; we take time, we spend time, we waste time, we run out of time, we gain time. We are in time for something, on time for something else; or we may be out of time. We can save time, spare time, or kill it. We talk about it like a currency, but we also think of it as an infinite resource under our control. We feel obscurely that we don’t value it enough; but we know it’s the most precious thing that we can give to someone else. We have absolutely no idea how much of it we have.
There is something magical about the idea of time, I think partly because of its essential paradox: something infinite and unknown can be measured by tiny machines on our wrists or mantelpiece. This is why so many stories start with “once upon a time”; may involve bending time, clocks striking thirteen or going backwards; and eventually lead to endings which go on beyond the reach of time, “for ever and a day”, “for ever and ever”, “happily ever after”. John once told me a story which started “Once there was a ponatime, and then there were two ponatimes!” (he was nearly three).
Time is all about choice. Tolkien’s wisdom here must have been hardly won. He was born at that unenviable time which made him an adult through two World Wars, so it’s worth listening to what he says about it. Frodo says, “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” and Gandalf agrees with him. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us” (Fellowship of the Ring, chapter 2, The Shadow of the Past). The time we are given to deal with can be difficult, but at least it’s limited.
It is also a gift (as the cliché goes, that’s why it’s called the present), and that’s why it works so well in Men In Black 3 when it turns out that the little aliens in the luggage locker regard Agent K as God, because he has given them both light and time (he’s left his digital watch with them). God has given us our time, this time, the here and now, and it’s up to us what we do with it. Time well-spent is the dream, and of course it’s different for each person. That’s also why the speed at which you do something is not the point (slow running, slow reading, slow cooking, slow swimming). Nobody ever talks about slow loving or slow parenting, but taking (your) time over those is the only thing that works.
It’s fascinating to watch how the Church juggles time in its liturgy through the year. Across the course of a single year, we try to cover the whole of Jesus’ life, so of course there is quite a lot of sleight of hand, and it’s impressive how it doesn’t usually snag our attention. Time necessarily becomes elastic. From the abbreviated pregnancy of Advent to the sudden appearance of the Lord as a grown man at his baptism only a few weeks later, the only way to deal with it each Sunday is to concentrate on the minutes or days we are being told about in the Gospel and the other readings, not wonder how we can have arrived here from where we were last week. Sometimes the sequence is straightforward; but very often not.
Similarly Lent sometimes telescopes and sometimes elongates the run-up to the Crucifixion. Lent itself is longer than Advent, which only seems odd if you think of it in narrowly-defined temporal terms. We are currently running through Sundays in Ordinary Time, an expression which offends some people, but which is at least honest in its recognition of there being too much narrative to fit into the time available. There have to be some spare Sundays at both the beginning and end of the Church’s year, to allow for the vagaries of the actual calendar, the fact that Christmas (and, quaintly, the Annunciation) are fixed dates but Easter isn’t. As the hymn says, we are dwellers all in time and space; but there’s more than one sort of time.
Things are simpler in the Old Testament, where the time tends to be either now, an acute present (for example the Psalms, the prophets, Song of Solomon), story-time (Genesis, Exodus, Esther, Ruth, Job), or history-time, measured in large stretches (forty years of wandering, centuries of slavery and oppression), but the sweep is far greater. In the New Testament, we are working in traceable modern time, written about by people who were there for at least some of it, which explains some of the difference in tone. Jesus is very aware of time, either the time being right for something (e.g. Mark 6:35f) or not yet ready (e.g. John 7:6), and this must reflect his awareness of how soon and how likely he was to be suppressed because of his revolutionary message. God is beyond time, but Jesus is exactly rooted in it, even if we get the actual date of his birth wrong, as some people still insist.
Time seems to accelerate as you get older, because the inevitable repetition tends to telescope our awareness. But this is just a habit of thought, and we can easily reach beyond it by concentrating on what is happening instead of making so many assumptions based on similar past experiences. There’s always something different going on, something unexpected, which can give you a new angle and make you think, the way a poem can. Mindfulness is mainly about paying attention.
Hymns don’t talk about time as much as you might expect, unless you count all the forever references, because, like the Psalms, they tend to be in the present moment. But there are a couple of exceptions. “O God our help in ages past” is based on Psalm 89/90, and is a reflection on time which is truly impressive in what it crams into six short four-line stanzas. The first verse alone covers ages past, future hopes, current predicament and final timeless destination. A later one plays with tenses in the same way as the Hebrew original (“Before the hills […] stood, […] thou art”, cf. Ps. 89/90 v.2). The psalm is referenced (and trumped) by Jesus himself: “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58).
The other hymn I particularly like in this area is the one I already quoted earlier. “Praise my soul the King of heaven” is also based on a psalm, this time 102/103, and I like it particularly because it took a while before I realised what it meant in that last verse. I used to think that the angels were adoring along with the sun and moon, and then I realised that “dwellers all in time and space” is actually a description of the limitations of the sun and moon, contrasted with the angels (and God, of course) who are already beyond. This was a mind-opening thought, because beyond is where we’re heading.
One of the Church’s most precious abilities is to take us even momentarily out of time, to give us a glimpse of timelessness. A secular equivalent, for me, is to stand by the sea and to watch the actual moment when the tide changes, which is almost impossible…and yet I keep trying. This is what the moment of consecration is, like a shaft of light suddenly shooting up through our church roof out into space and beyond, linking our altar, as the liturgy says, to God’s altar in heaven. Time stops, or is completely irrelevant; – but, for us, this only lasts a moment, before we crash back to earth. The other regular time when time is suspended for me is my Adoration hour (my church has Exposition with a roster, three or four mornings a week). I’m not talking about mystical experience, or being rapt like the great saints; but for one hour in my week I step off the moving cogwheels of time and space (someone else is responsible for time-keeping, so I can let (the) time go), and just sit and look at God looking back at me. That is eternity, and it can happen right here.
© Kate Keefe 2023
