Keeping Sacred Time

Why do Anglicans gather and worship as we do? What meanings ground our ways of baptising, blessing, and burying? What do our regular rhythms of prayer and annual rhythms of celebration give to the day, the week, and the year? For some months, my Wednesday afternoons were spent drinking tea in the sunroom of his coastal cottage, the dappled shadows from an overhanging grapevine dancing on the windowsills, while he condensed a lifetime of theological reflection and pastoral experience into a series of rich conversations. I learnt much and was greatly appreciative, gratitude which I expressed on our final session by thanking him for his time. “Well now,” he replied, “you know, there’s no such thing as my time.”

It was the simplest of replies, but it stayed with me, and came to symbolise a deeply felt desire that has persisted for me: to be radically formed in a Christian sense of time. I was newly ordained when this conversation took place; I was starting to grapple with the complexities of partially-stipended ministry in age where church decline and the death of voluntarism seem to place impossible demands on ministers of the Church. Invariably, I felt that the hours I was working and the responsibilities I was taking on outweighed the level of renumeration, and the pressures on our household because of this meant endless potential for resentment. I was also newly a mother, with fresh anxieties about how my days should be spent. It seemed time was tied up with the problem of limitless obligation to others, with never enough time to give anyone what they really needed, and never enough of my own time.

Something of the spirit with which my tutor declared that “there is no such thing as my time” arrested me. There was a generosity and serenity that spoke to me of the kind of minister I would like to be. There was joy here too—a spark of humour—which told me that this perspective was somehow inextricably related to an experience of being human that I wanted to be on the inside of. I wanted to reach old age with that kind of joy: with much to give, and the freedom of spirit to give it; with thanksgiving for what has been, and the grace to face each day’s new challenges.

This conversation woke me up to some of the ways I was already formed in my experience—assumptions I had about the nature of time and what it is for which frequently surfaced in my language and expressed themselves in my sense of entitlement, or in moments of voicing resentment or stress. I was jealous for my time, guilty about wasting it, grieving the loss of it, fretful about the future. And so, I became curious about the alternatives to all of this—the Christian alternatives. Now that I thought about it, it seemed obvious that many of my ways of framing time were significantly at odds with how God commanded his people to live, or with what Jesus invited of his disciples. The people of the Exodus, wandering in the desert, are given bread from heaven, enough for each day, from the hand of the one who gives each day as a gift (Exodus 16). The prophet Isaiah is commanded to go out and meet King Ahaz with a message not to be anxious for his nation under threat, for the empires that surround Judah are Yahweh’s possession and they are passing away (see Isaiah 7). Jesus asks his disciples “which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” We are to look at the birds, who neither store nor reap, but who eat from God’s hand. We are to look at the flowers, which are here for a day and are gone tomorrow, but which are clothed in beauty that surpasses all of Solomon’s finery (see Matthew 6:25-34). These teachings and commands are not only about how to order our relationship with material realities. They are about hope, trust, confidence, patience: the ordering of our lives as creatures in time. I wanted to inhabit these ways of being in the world.

It has taken me a while to fully appreciate a connection between my original questions about our ways of gathering, worshiping, and celebrating—that is, the shape of our liturgy—and my longing for a kind of counter-formation. But I have come to realise that in fact the forms of worship and the rhythms of celebration which we have inherited from the ancient church are profoundly concerned with how we live within time. Our liturgies and rhythms were born out of a Christian understanding of temporality—an understanding which is steeped in the Scriptures of Israel and the life of the early church, and which is responsive to what this church had witnessed in the life of Jesus Christ. Our forms of worship are saturated with meaning, such that they have a unique and enduring power to shape our perspectives, to form and counter-form, and to gather us corporately into a shared experience of reality.

Here, I want to offer an account of some of the ways that liturgy, and particularly our observance of sacred time, can shape our perception and experience. And, given I have alluded to this shaping process as one of counter-formation, I’ll also offer some exploration of the ways we (as moderns) are already formed in our experience of time. Culturally, in the West at least, we have never been further removed from Christian ways of thinking about or inhabiting time; and this makes the problem of counter-formation both urgent and exciting. But before I enter into a discussion of these things, it’s fitting to draw attention to some of the essential features of a Christian perspective on time.

The gift of time

One way into this is to consider how we think about the questions “Why is there time?”, and “What is time for?” Our starting point must be the affirmation that time is God’s creation. In the ancient world, various philosophies and belief systems included a view of matter as eternal. Responding to these beliefs, the church fathers were strident in their insistence that material existence had a beginning, that creation was entirely the work of God, and that the creation of time was simultaneous with the creation of matter. Most notable in this regard is Augustine in Book XI of Confessions, which begins with an extended meditation on the first words of Genesis (“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”). Augustine conceives of time as relating to change, and thus the existence of time presupposes the existence of things that are subject to change. For Augustine, creation is subject to change and variation in a way that God, by definition, is not. To conceive of God at all we must purge our thinking of time-bound categories. There can be no time before creation, he asserts, and it therefore makes no sense to ask, as many do, “What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?”, for this is to remain fixated on the realm where things have a past and future—the realm of created life.¹

To say that time is God’s creation, and that matter and time were simultaneously created may seem straightforward. There are certainly reasons we as moderns may find the relation between time and matter intuitive. But this affirmation has wide-reaching theological implications. If the creation of time relates to the creation of material existence, then the questions “Why is there time?” and “Why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?” must be considered together.² And here we plunge headlong into some of the most liberating things we can say about the nature of our own existence. When we profess that world was created out of nothing—that is ex nihilo—we are professing that nothing about creation is necessary.

Before the creation of matter and therefore time, there was only God, existing in eternal self-sufficiency. God does not need anything beyond himself to exist, nor does God require anything besides himself in order to create. This allows us to rule out a number of ways we could potentially conceive of God’s motivation in creating the universe, some of which would imply a perverse relationship between God and creation. As David Fagerberg puts it,

Creation neither fulfils a need in God (like he was lonely), nor is it the product of a natural process in him (like cells dividing), nor was he pressured into creating (there was no battle in the heavens, as some myths say), nor did he need help creating (it was a free act).³

What could motivate God’s act of creation, if not lack, necessity or external compulsion? Christians dare to declare that God simply wills the existence of something other than himself: that is, creation is the product of God’s free decision, an act of sheer delight and love. It is the result of, and is entirely consistent with God’s triune being, which is divine love in an eternal pattern of giving and receiving.

Time then, with the rest of creation, is God’s loving gift. And as with all other gifts, it is given as the means by which we can grow into the relationship which God has established, the means by which we may freely respond to God in love and thanksgiving.

There are a few threads to tease out here. First, our creaturely lives are the very medium through which God shares his life with us, they are “God taking time for us” as Karl Barth has memorably put it.⁴ Time is a gift for knowing and enjoying God. In fact, as Alexander Schmemann has argued elegantly in his book For the Life of the World, there is a degree to which this can be said of the created world in general, which has been given to us as a means for communion. God’s gifts—the things we hunger and thirst for, and on which we depend for our existence—were never intended to be consumed or enjoyed in and of themselves merely for their own sake. Rather they are signs which point beyond themselves, toward the giver. We enter into relationship with the giver—transforming the material of existence into communion—when we receive the world with gratitude, and offer it back.⁵ Our mortal lives themselves are to be received with thanksgiving, blessed, and given back to God, in a process that some refer to as the “sanctification of time”.⁶

The fact that God has established a relationship with us which unfolds and deepens across a lifespan speaks of a second important aspect of this gift: time is given as a means for our growth. Human beings are unfinished, always under development. And time is the arena in which ever-changing circumstances present us with opportunities to be formed into God’s likeness, for that is our great potential. God has made us in his image to share in God’s own life, and has given us time in which to freely cooperate with his purpose as we daily receive what God puts before us. Our lives within time thus reveal something of God’s great delight in genuine relationship, which some theologians have characterised as a playful kind of patience. As Romano Guardini writes:

That God desired earthly life is a revelation of his patience, for only through patience can it thrive. God sees living creatures play, disport themselves, loiter, make digressions of all kinds, waste material, energy and ideas. He sees all the delightful “accidental happenings,” all the sweet “follies,” and gives them scope… God’s love does not desire in a short time what can be realized only in a long one.⁷

Time is given to us for the process of our transfiguration, a process in which God delights.

But to speak of our potential, as well as our freedom to cooperate with God’s purpose in creating us, is to arrive at one further aspect of the gift of time. In light of sin—that is, our digression from our created purpose, manifest in our tendency to treat created things as goods in and of themselves, rather than as opportunities for communion with our creator—time must serve another purpose.⁸ The story of God’s dealings with his people shows us that time has become a gift for our redemption. This is true both for the history of the world, which God has entered and transformed, and for our own histories, which, in the wake of this saving event, now stand open to God’s redemptive work. To speak of these things is to speak of salvation history and the work of Christ.

Salvation history and its culmination in Christ

There are different ways of viewing history. We may think of it in terms of the unstoppable march of progress, or in terms of inexorable entropy. We may view history as a blank slate, a state of flux without underlying meaning, direction or purpose: just one thing after another in an endless succession, like a chain of dominoes. But these ways of thinking are antithetical to Christian faith, which witnesses to God’s activity in and through the history of the world. This activity reveals God’s immovable commitment to our time and our future. In salvation history, God shows himself supremely as the one who—when all possibilities for life seem foreclosed—is there, opening a way. “When we needed healing,” writes Fagerberg, “the solution God chose was to initiate a redemptive act that would unfold within time. He does not ignore time, or take us out of time, or retreat to his timeless sanctuary in eternity. God enters time himself.”⁹

In his life on earth, Christ was the supreme expression of God’s intention for our life within time. His consummate work was to restore us in relationship to the Father, to remake us in our capacity for communion and praise. And the world stands or falls according to its response to this one in whom “the life of the world was gathered”.¹⁰ There is therefore an important sense in which the rejection of Christ meant the death of this world; the world condemned itself. Christians witness to this death, which spells the assured failure of all our attempts at progress or self-improvement. But our faith also witnesses to a fresh hope, birthed at the very moment of deepest darkness.¹¹ God’s commitment to this world has not been exhausted by the worst we can do, and the resurrection stands as a sign of this.

History therefore has a very particular shape in Christian thought: the old is passing away, the new has been ushered in. Something definitive for our redemption has been accomplished, and the work that Christ has set in motion will ultimately triumph. Christ stands at the very heart of all of this, which is why the Church speaks of Christ as the centre of history, the “Lord of Time”, the Alpha and Omega, in whom all things are made and all things fulfilled.

All this has consequences for how we view our lives as the people of God. As John Paul II reminded the Church in his encyclical at the turn of the Millenium, we must understand ourselves to be inhabiting the “last days” (Heb 1.2), or the “last hour” (1 John 2.18), for this is what the arrival of Christ has brought about.¹² The Church throughout the ages is called to exist in a state of hopeful expectancy (1 Peter 1:3-9; Romans 8:22-25), and to labour patiently and in joyful expectation (1 Thessalonians 1:3) knowing that our labour is not in vain (1 Corinthians 15:58).

But as well as these postures, we are to live our lives soberly against the horizon of Christ’s final judgement of this world, when sin, death and the powers of darkness will be destroyed. The coming of this judgement remains good news and a cause for joy: who, after all, does not long for an end to suffering, separation, injustice, and oppression? But it is not unfitting for us to feel some trepidation in the face of these realities. One of the biblical words used for final judgement is apocalypse, which literally refers to the stripping (apo) of masks (kalyptein).¹³ And as Rowan Williams has pointed out, it ought to remain a source of some discomfort to us that when we meet Christ face to face—whether on the other side of our own deaths, or in his second coming—our “usual strategies of hiding from ourselves and the rest of reality” will no longer be available to us. We all exist within webs of deception and self-deception, which help us to cope with our failures and fears, but when we stand before Christ we will do so without the props. Such knowledge surely transforms our perception of our mortal lives, for in these lives we are given a singular opportunity to become accustomed to Christ and his truth (to be clothed in Christ’s life, as the Apostle Paul describes it). This grace is given to us so that we may “survive the terror of meeting truth face to face”.¹⁴ It is not then overstating things to say, as Isaac of Nineveh did, that “This life has been given to you for repentance.”¹⁵

The Strasbourg Clock and the modern experience of time

Time is God’s creation, given to us for relationship, growth, and redemption. It is for patient labour, for repentance, and its end is communion with our creator. We have covered some significant ground in exploring these themes, and it may be helpful at this point to offer an image which draws these threads together. The image I would like to offer, following Ephraim Radner, is that of a famous clock, housed in Strasbourg Cathedral.¹⁶ This enormous clock was first unveiled for the people of Strasbourg in 1574,¹⁷ and was an astonishing invention for its time. Its many intricate features of measurement, each representing a different aspect of temporality, are built up in several coordinated mechanical layers, with each time-keeping device set within a decorative scheme featuring Christian iconography. The overall effect, as Radner describes it, is to testify “to the single, if textured, way that all time, and with it human life, is given and held by God.”¹⁸

The foundational layer features a globe depicting the heavenly sphere, which rotates to show the movement of the stars. This stands in front of a twenty-four-hour clock, ringed by a calendar showing the days of the year. The centre of this clock has a map of the Northern Hemisphere, and the face is then set within depictions of the “Four Great Empires”. Human history is thus juxtaposed with the movement of the heavens, and it unfolds within “a limited and dwindling round of days”.¹⁹

The next clock face, a twelve-hour clock, is upheld by iconography of creation, fall, redemption and judgement. Mechanised cherubs on either side of this clock cheerfully strike each quarter hour, and at the end of each hour one of them turns over an hour glass. This coordinates with a movement at the sixth level, where moving figures representing the four stages of human life (childhood, youth, adulthood and old age) appear at each quarter hour. Death presides above these, ringing his bell as the full hour strikes.

The fourth layer of the clock, tracing the movement of the planets in a year, is set within paintings depicting both the four seasons and the four stages of human life. A year thus signifies both the cyclic repetition of nature—in which our rhythms of labour and harvest repeat themselves—and our slow maturation and decline into old age.

Yet above all of this—above ages, empires, angels, the stars and planets in their courses, and death itself—a final drama takes place. Here Jesus stands as triumphant judge, holding the banner of the cross. At noon, figures of the twelve apostles stand in turn before him, and he greets them, while a rooster crows three times, in a moment which encompasses “betrayal, passion, and the new day.”²⁰ After this, Jesus gives a final blessing to the crowd watching in the cathedral below.

The Strasbourg Clock clearly illustrates a number of themes in the Christian perspective on time. But for us who stand on this side of the scientific revolution, in the wake of secularization and other processes which have shaped Western thought and culture, this clock represents something else as well. For this is simply not how most of us conceive of time, and we can only approach this elaborate timepiece as a relic, symbolic of an experience that is for the most part foreign to us.

Consider, for example, the way that the sacred (God, his eternity, his providence and final judgement) relates to ordinary, profane time in the Strasbourg example. Not only does the sacred form the context for the ordinary. It also punctuates it—interrupting and interpreting it—so that the sacred orders our temporality, gathering it into a meaningful whole. The Strasbourg clock is in this way an expression of a distinctive sense of the architecture of time which pre-modern Christians took for granted.²¹ As Charles Taylor explains it in his justly celebrated work on the character of secular culture, in the pre-modern era “higher times”—times of worship, celebration, or festival, which stood in vertical relation to things eternal—provided the “organising field” for “secular time” (time in the ordinary sense of day to day events occurring consecutively). The effect was that the passage of time could be experienced as warped or knotted. Through the interruption of higher times, events which were far apart in history could be experienced as closely connected. Good Friday in any given year could feel closer to the original day than did the previous summer.²²

Contrast this with a modern conception of minutes, hours, days. We may gain an impression of this conception by closing our eyes for a moment and listening to a clock tick, or by reflecting on the process by which we organise our daily schedules, or by considering what goes through our minds as we check the time upon waking, or by recalling a New Year’s countdown, as one year clocks over into the next. Walter Benjamin famously used the words “homogenous, empty time” to describe the modern experience, in which time is reduced to its flattened, horizontal aspect. Moderns conceive of time as a continuous linear sequence stretching indefinitely into the future. Every unit of time is measurable, consistent and uniform.²³ As Taylor puts it, “time like space has become a container, indifferent to what fills it.”²⁴

Many complex factors have contributed to this monumental shift in perspective. Taylor emphasises two in particular. Perhaps most significantly, we have come to view ourselves as being “included in a universe” (an almost unfathomably vast entity governed by scientific laws, which are indifferent to our existence), rather than living in a cosmos (an ordered whole in which the order is “humanly meaningful”, or arranged for our benefit).²⁵ Within a universe it is less than self-evident that God or eternity ultimately provide the context for human life, since the universe runs according to principles of order which do not obviously point beyond themselves.

But the disciplines of modern civilized order have also played their part in shaping how we view time, by demanding the tightly regulated use of time, which has come to be seen a resource not to be wasted.²⁶ We have become preoccupied with measuring our time, dividing it and allocating it according to standards of efficiency. Here we can see connections with problems I posed at the outset of this discussion, in particular my own possessiveness around time, and my fixation on the question of who it belongs to. All of this has roots in the commodification of time.

One further angle on this cultural reorientation is suggested by Radner in his exploration of the moral and theological implications of “demographic transition”. This refers to the demographic phenomenon in which countries, as they develop, experience a drop in mortality rates and a corresponding drop in birthrates: as life spans have increased we have tended to have fewer and fewer children.²⁷ In the modern era, due to a range of factors including improvements in nutrition, medicine, and public health, many countries experienced unprecedented increases to life expectancy of the population on average, for example “from around thirty-three years in 1800 in Europe to almost eighty in the year 2000.”²⁸ Radner refers to this as the “Great Transition”, drawing attention to its unparalleled quality, and he contends that this transition has greatly altered our sense of the shape of creaturely life, including our awareness of our own mortality.²⁹ We now experience much lower infant mortality, and as life spans have increased we have also tended to outsource care of the elderly to non-family institutions. These kinds of patterns constitute a kind of “marginalization of death”, since our experience of other people’s deaths becomes “primarily located amongst the elderly”. Consequently, according to Radner, “death itself has been integrated into quotidian self-understanding with greater and greater difficulty. Until later old age, death is a kind of surd, and hence is often faced as such even when finally encountered.”³⁰ It is not difficult to see the implications of this for a Christian understanding of time, since our consciousness of life as a gift, and our sense of the inevitability of judgement, have always been tied up with our awareness of mortality and the fragility of human life.

Such processes of cultural and intellectual change are intractable and irreversible. They have emerged alongside (and sometimes as a result of) scientific and medical advances which we would not wish away. It would be naïve to contemplate—or indeed to desire—any simple return to pre-modern consciousness.³¹ Nevertheless Christians cannot be indifferent to the losses that this shift in consciousness has involved, and we must continue to grapple with the need to be formed in a proper sense of our creaturely life before God and the vocation this implies. How might we continue to receive the gift of time in the spirit with which it is given? How can we learn, within the possibilities and constraints of our own cultural age, to inhabit time well? I believe that the Church’s liturgy—its forms of worship and rhythms of celebration—remain crucial for us in grappling with these important questions.

Keeping Sacred Time

One reason to be convinced of this is that it has always been so: when God established his people as his people he gave them celebrations which would transform their lives within time. Abraham Joshua Heschel writes of the distinctiveness of Israel’s experience of time, bought about through its transformation of agricultural festivals into commemorations of historical events in which God had moved. Spring festivities became Passover, commemorating the birth of a people through the saving work of God. This equated to a shift of emphasis from the material (sustenance, survival and prosperity) to the “unembodied and unimaginable”: a God who manifests himself and communes with his people in time.³² In the same vein, the Sabbath is the first thing in Scripture to be called “holy” (qadosh), rather than any object or sacred place. It is given as a set-apart day in which to meet with God. And this is not to deny the importance of the material world. In fact the very opposite is true. Through celebrating the Sabbath, Israel learnt to view creation as creation, that is, as a good gift rather than a world of resources to be plundered.³³  To pause and leave room for eternity is to let eternity shape our perspective on everything else. We return to ordinary time and the stuff of life with newfound gratitude and wonder, ready to offer our lives back to the giver. This is why Heschel celebrates Judaism as “a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time.”³⁴

The Church has inherited sacred time from Israel, but with a Christological emphasis which locates us in a history transformed by Christ’s work. The Church’s set-apart day is Sunday, the day of the resurrection. And while this day signifies the goodness of creation in the much the same way as does the Jewish Sabbath, the focus is on new Creation and new Exodus. Sunday is the first day of the week. But for early Christians it was also the “Eighth Day”, the day of new time, orienting us toward a fresh work of renewal that God is bringing about, even as the old order passes away. Furthermore, Christians have always referred to Sunday as the “Lord’s Day” recalling the great affirmation that in Christ the “day of the Lord” has arrived, a day of salvation and redemption, of “God’s triumph over His enemies”.³⁵ The history we now stand in belongs to Jesus and is open to both his saving work and his judgement. To set this day apart, to gather and to celebrate it, is not to deny time or to escape it. It is rather to discover that all time has been transformed.

Of the “Christian year”, the same can be said. The seasons and festivals that make up our calendar were not given to us in order to provide an esoteric religious experience for enthusiasts, though where we have encountered a certain fastidiousness in the manner of their observance, coupled with an absence of real joy, or a lack grounding in the theological significance of the observances themselves, we may be forgiven for forming such an impression! On the contrary, the seasons and feasts exist so that the Church might understand the character of its own hope and its own joy, and bear witness to these realities in the world.³⁶

Schmemann’s treatment of the Christian year gives a beautiful explanation of how this is so. He argues that through treating our feasts as commemorations of past events, or as “audio-visual aids to religious education”, we have obscured their true relationship to time, and diminished their significance as “the very heart of the Church’s life and mission.”³⁷ Christianity arose within a culture which took the relationship between feasts and ordinary time for granted: the feast was not a break in time, but gave justification and meaning to time itself. This applied even to the “pagan” festivals, where feasts were organically related to the natural cycles of time, giving the life of hard work its rationale and goal. Christianity accepted this relationship between the feast and the whole framework of human life. But it also took the concept of the feast through a kind of baptism.³⁸ As has been said in our discussion of salvation history and its culmination in Christ, Christianity witnesses to a kind of “death of the world”—the death of human aspiration and the frustration of natural joy through our alienation from the source of joy itself. At the same time Christianity announces the eruption of joy into the world, coming from outside of ourselves, as a result of pure grace.³⁹ Accordingly, just as Israel had taken up the natural feasts of Spring and harvest and transformed their meaning, so Christians took up and transformed the Jewish feasts of Passover and Pentecost. The natural festivals, and the festivals of Israel were now understood always to have been the anticipation and announcement of a joy that is fulfilled in Christ. In Easter, and in Pentecost as the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, the ultimate meaning of all feasting is given. Christian feasts, in short, are eschatological in character: they affirm the human aspiration and longing for joy, and they point toward the final consummation of this longing in the presence of Jesus, who was, and is, and is still to come. When we gather for our great feasts, we rejoice in the advent of Christ. And this, far from alienating us from the world, brings us into a proper relationship with it. As we re-enter ordinary time, all of our natural, ordinary joys become what they ought always to have been: marks or signposts, pointing beyond themselves to the source of joy itself. ⁴⁰

I find such accounts of sacred time inspiring. But I am all the more convinced of the efficacy of our rhythms of sacred time because these rhythms have shaped me. Since my first observance of a full Holy Week—a downright exhausting week-long pilgrimage through the harrowing events of Christ’s arrest and death, culminating in a resplendent midnight resurrection vigil—I have been unable to do without the Christian calendar. Sometimes the liturgy takes hold of me, drawing me into more costly worship, like the experience of seeing the faithful prostrate themselves before the cross on Good Friday, an act of adoration which is accompanied by speechless silence in the church. Sometimes some new aspect of my own creatureliness comes to light, as when a lapse in my Lenten resolve points up something as-yet-undiscovered about my own fragility, and forces me to turn and accept again my utter dependency on grace. Sometimes the pure joy of declaration lifts me up and sets me on new ground. It is always a highlight of my year, when I get to do it, to hold a newly lit three-foot high candle, representing the resurrected Christ, aloft at our Easter Vigil, and to declare with the congregation that “All time belongs to him, and all ages!” This is all the more meaningful against the backdrop of international conflicts, economic crises, climate disasters and rumours of AI apocalypse: realities that daily pervade our news-feeds, and which go to work on our fears. As a children’s minister, I am often surrounded by children at this point in the service. They gather around, wide-eyed at the size of the candle, and I am struck by the realisation that in such an age, the hope of that declaration is the best gift we, as the Church, can give to them.

But perhaps the constant thread, the thing I notice year to year, is the quiet way in which the observance of sacred time stirs up my longing, and kindles my hope. There is a certain point in the lead up to Christmas, when the world begins to peddle its superficial, commercialised parody of celebration, speaking unconvincingly over the noise of its own pain, where I begin to feel that only Advent will do. Only Advent—with its fearless acknowledgement of all that is awry, and its fierce joy in the imminence of Christ’s presence and judgement—will answer the questions posed by a world struggling under such burdens. And it is this capacity to meet the world in its full reality, and to hold out radical hope, which gives our seasons and festivals their great power. To gently instruct us, over a lifetime, in hope, joy, patience, our own vulnerability and the corresponding knowledge of God’s great love for his timeful, fallible creatures: this is the purpose of sacred time. And this is all so that we may embody these truths for others, giving glory to our maker. For there is no such thing as your time or mine, and from him and through him and to him are all things.

¹ Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, translated by Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 228.
² This is the perspective offered by David Fagerberg in The Meaning of Christian Time (London: The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 2006), 7-8.
³ Fagerberg, 9. I am very indebted in what follows to Fagerberg for his comprehensive and accessible treatment of the Christian meaning of time, which can be found in his very brief booklet on the subject. Among other things this booklet introduces the reader to a host of other theological resources on the subject. Where I have drawn on these resources, I have tried to cite directly from the source.
⁴ Karl Barth, cited in Ephraim Radner, Keeping Time (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2016), 11.
⁵ Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998), see especially the first chapter.
⁶ E.g. Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 8; Pope John Paul II, Tertio Millenio Advieniette, para 10; cf. Fagerberg, 23.
⁷ Romano Guardini, The Faith and Modern Man, translated by Charlotte E. Forsyth (New York: Pantheon, 1952), 18.
⁸ Fagerberg, 13.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Schmemann, 23.
¹¹ Ibid., 23-24.
¹² Pope John Paul II, Tertio Millenio Advieniette, para 10.
¹³ Fagerberg, 56.
¹⁴ Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust (London: Canterbury Press Norwich, 2007), 145.
¹⁵ Isaac of Nineveh cited in Fagerberg, 55.
¹⁶ My own connection to which is tenuous—I once stood a hundred metres away from it but would not part with the euros to see it up close. For this description I rely on Ephraim Radner’s interpretation in A Time to Keep, as well as photographic images of the clock.
¹⁷ There have been additions and renovations of the clock over time, and the version that stands in the cathedral today is a complete refabrication, installed in 1843.
¹⁸ Radner, 1.
¹⁹ Ibid., 2.
²⁰ Ibid., 3-4.
²¹ I believe the phrase “architecture in time” originates with Abraham Joshua Heschel. See Heschel, 8.
²² Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2007), 54-55.
²³ Cited in Taylor, 58.
²⁴ Taylor, 58.
²⁵ Ibid., 60.
²⁶ Ibid., 59.
²⁷ Radner, 21.
²⁸ Ibid., 24.
²⁹ Ibid., 23-25.
³⁰ Ibid., 29.
³¹ In particular, I agree with Taylor that we must “rethink Biblical religion within the universe”, for this is where we find ourselves. See Taylor, 61.
³² Heschel, 7-8.
³³ Ibid., 16.
³⁴ Ibid., 8.
³⁵ Schmemann, 50. Cf. also Fagerberg, 39-40.
³⁶ Schmemann, 55.
³⁷ Ibid., 52-53.
³⁸ Ibid., 54.
³⁹ Ibid., 54-55.
⁴⁰ Ibid., 56-58.