Enriching our spiritual lives with an investment in sacred time
July 29, 2019 at 12:37 p.m.
Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. ~ Carl Sandburg
On a recent visit to the local convenience store, I turned from the cash register and came face to face with a large display of chocolate Easter eggs. I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. Didn’t I just start taking Christmas decorations off my front porch? Isn’t my Christmas tree still up and happily lit in my family room?
It seemed we had just rocketed from the Birth of Jesus to his Death and Resurrection in the speed of light, a move only possible when we view time as linear.
Sadly, our culture has us positioned on a time line that moves from one income producing holiday or season to another. It looks something like this: New Year’s Eve, Easter, summer, Fourth of July, Christmas prequel, Back to School, Halloween, the now minor feast of Thanksgiving, Christmas proper … repeat.
Businesses continue to promote a sense of time that works to their benefit, and when we buy into that experience we are allowing commerce and culture to hijack our faith and our spiritual nature.
What we need is the resolve to take back time, and to make it meaningful, not just useful.
For me, as the child of an Irishman who embraced the spiritual view of both his Celtic ancestors and his Christian faith, time has always reflected the ebb and flow of nature as a system created by God for our benefit. Life has its seasons, as does nature, and humanity has always found ways to honor these life cycles with times of rituals, prayer and worship.
Time is not meant simply for filling up our day planner, for charging full steam ahead on the doing, but requires space for the being, the opportunity to become, to grow through prayer and reflection. Our spiritual health requires that we are attentive to the rhythms of time, the movement of night into day, the breaking of light into the darkness and our daily journeys through the valleys and to the peaks.
The psalmist reminds us, “The Heaven’s declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day pours out the word to day, and night to night imparts knowledge.” In Laudato Si, Pope Francis comments on this verse, writing, “The ear of the heart must be free of noise in order to hear this divine voice echoing in the universe. Along with revelation properly so-called, contained in Sacred Scripture, there is a divine manifestation in the blaze of the sun and the fall of night. Nature too, in a certain sense, is ‘the book of God.”
When I was growing up, the Church still celebrated Rogation and Ember Days, times of petition and thanksgiving which were focused on the harvest and the changes of the seasons, keeping us mindful that the work of our hands is to be elevated to God, whose handiwork is seen in all of creation.
It seems to me that as we move away from an intimacy with the earth, and are swept up into a commercial and technological ideology, we are losing touch with the meaning of time which God has placed in our hearts. We have become, as Thomas Merton once said, “sharecroppers of time.”
The Trappist monk was giving a talk in California in the Cistercian monastery, Our Lady of the Redwoods, in 1968, and offered a reflection on the need to give prayer the time it needs. He explained that the contemporary perception and use of time (even as far back as 1968) was detrimental to the spiritual life. He shared an experience of going to the hermitage where, “one of the best things for me … was being attentive to the times of the day: when the birds began to sing, and the deer came out of the morning fog, and the sun came up – while in the monastery, summer or winter, Lauds is at the same hour.
“The reason why we don’t take time is a feeling that we have to keep moving. This is a real sickness. Today time is commodity, and for each one of us time is mortgaged. We experience time as unlimited indebtedness. We are sharecroppers of time. We are threatened by a chain reaction: overwork–overstimulation–overcompensation–overkill.”
Fortunately, through all the noise and din of a linear timeline of holidays and secular seasons, the wisdom of the Church’s liturgical calendar provides the opportunity to reclaim our sense of kairos – God’s time. Within the six seasons of the liturgical year, our lives remain connected to and unified with the life of Christ and to all that he taught us about God’s love and mercy, and our need to bring that love to our neighbors.
As we struggle daily to negotiate the demands of secular time, and to recapture the holiness of each moment, we can be encouraged by the words of St. John Paul II: “Weekly attendance at the Sunday Eucharist and the cycle of the liturgical year make it possible to give a rhythm to Christian life and to sanctify time …”
Mary Morrell is an award-winning writer, editor and educator working at Wellspring Communications. She can be reached at [email protected], and read at her blog,’ God Talk and Tea.’
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Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. ~ Carl Sandburg
On a recent visit to the local convenience store, I turned from the cash register and came face to face with a large display of chocolate Easter eggs. I paused for a moment to collect my thoughts. Didn’t I just start taking Christmas decorations off my front porch? Isn’t my Christmas tree still up and happily lit in my family room?
It seemed we had just rocketed from the Birth of Jesus to his Death and Resurrection in the speed of light, a move only possible when we view time as linear.
Sadly, our culture has us positioned on a time line that moves from one income producing holiday or season to another. It looks something like this: New Year’s Eve, Easter, summer, Fourth of July, Christmas prequel, Back to School, Halloween, the now minor feast of Thanksgiving, Christmas proper … repeat.
Businesses continue to promote a sense of time that works to their benefit, and when we buy into that experience we are allowing commerce and culture to hijack our faith and our spiritual nature.
What we need is the resolve to take back time, and to make it meaningful, not just useful.
For me, as the child of an Irishman who embraced the spiritual view of both his Celtic ancestors and his Christian faith, time has always reflected the ebb and flow of nature as a system created by God for our benefit. Life has its seasons, as does nature, and humanity has always found ways to honor these life cycles with times of rituals, prayer and worship.
Time is not meant simply for filling up our day planner, for charging full steam ahead on the doing, but requires space for the being, the opportunity to become, to grow through prayer and reflection. Our spiritual health requires that we are attentive to the rhythms of time, the movement of night into day, the breaking of light into the darkness and our daily journeys through the valleys and to the peaks.
The psalmist reminds us, “The Heaven’s declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day pours out the word to day, and night to night imparts knowledge.” In Laudato Si, Pope Francis comments on this verse, writing, “The ear of the heart must be free of noise in order to hear this divine voice echoing in the universe. Along with revelation properly so-called, contained in Sacred Scripture, there is a divine manifestation in the blaze of the sun and the fall of night. Nature too, in a certain sense, is ‘the book of God.”
When I was growing up, the Church still celebrated Rogation and Ember Days, times of petition and thanksgiving which were focused on the harvest and the changes of the seasons, keeping us mindful that the work of our hands is to be elevated to God, whose handiwork is seen in all of creation.
It seems to me that as we move away from an intimacy with the earth, and are swept up into a commercial and technological ideology, we are losing touch with the meaning of time which God has placed in our hearts. We have become, as Thomas Merton once said, “sharecroppers of time.”
The Trappist monk was giving a talk in California in the Cistercian monastery, Our Lady of the Redwoods, in 1968, and offered a reflection on the need to give prayer the time it needs. He explained that the contemporary perception and use of time (even as far back as 1968) was detrimental to the spiritual life. He shared an experience of going to the hermitage where, “one of the best things for me … was being attentive to the times of the day: when the birds began to sing, and the deer came out of the morning fog, and the sun came up – while in the monastery, summer or winter, Lauds is at the same hour.
“The reason why we don’t take time is a feeling that we have to keep moving. This is a real sickness. Today time is commodity, and for each one of us time is mortgaged. We experience time as unlimited indebtedness. We are sharecroppers of time. We are threatened by a chain reaction: overwork–overstimulation–overcompensation–overkill.”
Fortunately, through all the noise and din of a linear timeline of holidays and secular seasons, the wisdom of the Church’s liturgical calendar provides the opportunity to reclaim our sense of kairos – God’s time. Within the six seasons of the liturgical year, our lives remain connected to and unified with the life of Christ and to all that he taught us about God’s love and mercy, and our need to bring that love to our neighbors.
As we struggle daily to negotiate the demands of secular time, and to recapture the holiness of each moment, we can be encouraged by the words of St. John Paul II: “Weekly attendance at the Sunday Eucharist and the cycle of the liturgical year make it possible to give a rhythm to Christian life and to sanctify time …”
Mary Morrell is an award-winning writer, editor and educator working at Wellspring Communications. She can be reached at [email protected], and read at her blog,’ God Talk and Tea.’
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