Path and Road and Time

Andrew Shamy is a writer, teacher, and learning experience designer. A graduate of Regent College, Vancouver, he was a Senior Teaching Fellow at Venn from 2013 to 2024. To read more of his writing and essays, check out his substack, Imagining Otherwise—Ed.

All effort has been made to guarantee its precise, even, regular counting of seconds, minutes, and hours for millennia: a dry desert climate; an insulated mountain home that stays a consistent 13 degrees Celsius, regardless of day or night, summer or winter; parts engineered from marine-grade steel; ceramic bearings to counter the tendency of different metals in contact to corrode.

It is a clock designed to resist time—which is to say, it is a symbol of modern understandings of time. Wendell Berry once observed the difference between a path and a road. A path, he writes, “is the perfect adaptation, through experience and familiarity, of movement to place; it obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.” A road, in contrast, “embodies a resistance against landscape… it seeks as far as possible to go over the country, rather than through it.” Paths are made by feet; roads by heavy machines and precision explosives. Berry’s distinction is helpful for understanding our relationship to space—to landscape—but here I want to use it for a different purpose: to explore our relationship to time. Time may be thought of as a type of terrain—a timescape—since it is a dimension of reality through which we move. My argument is that a clock is like a road, a road through time that bears little relation to the country through which it passes. To the extent that our existence in time, our sense and feel for time, is shaped only by the clock, we exist in a kind of resistance to time’s actual landscape.

With timescape and clock-road in mind, I want to suggest the design of Bezos’s clock expresses a number of particularly modern assumptions about time. Time can be measured precisely, thin-sliced into seconds, minutes, and hours. Time is undifferentiated. No one moment is seen as different or more significant than any other, because the sense of time is disconnected from wider frames of meaning—natural seasonal rhythms or significant festivals that give particular times a feeling of thickness or importance. Bezos’s clock face aspires only to mark the endless repetition of discrete moments. And even when the desert clock has worn down and its timing strayed, and there is no one left to observe it, time—so the assumption goes—will continue in the same way for near-endless days, until, in some far distant future, the heat death of the universe.

To accurately mark time so understood, it makes sense to build a clock in a desert mountain, untouched by seasons, guarded against time’s grinding forces of wear and decay, far from the disruptive energies of human civilisation. A clock against time. But in Christian thinking, time is not undifferentiated, not a featureless landscape extending endlessly into the future. Instead, the Christian timescape is a varied topography with peaks and valleys, seasons and thresholds. The Scriptures are full of this sense. “Now is the acceptable hour”; “Behold, now is the day of salvation”; “the appointed time”; “the fullness of time”; “the Day of the Lord”; “the Year of the Lord’s favour”; the “age to come.” And, perhaps most famously, in Ecclesiastes 3:

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance.

And on and on, until the whole glitter and noise, coming and going, beauty and pain, growth and decay of human life finds its place in time. All to say, the Christian timescape is a diverse topography. And it has a number of notable contours or defining features.

In Christian thinking, creaturely time is open to eternity—it is porous. Realities we experience in time—among them beauty, goodness, and love—derive from God’s own being: his beauty, his goodness, his love. The red beauty of an autumn maple tree, the goodness of moral courage, the love between a child and a parent—these are moments of eternity ingressing into time, texturing the terrain, the regular procession of one moment to the next. “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”, in time as it is in eternity.

Time also cycles. Seasons come and go. The maple leaves fall, compost through the wet winter, and provide cover for new seedlings that push up through the soft spring soil. We are born, grow, age, and die, just as our ancestors did. And we see this pattern writ large in history, in civilisations and ideas that spring up out of the soil of time and have their moment in the sun before falling back to earth—quietly or with much noise—where they slumber until picked up again.

The Christian timescape, then, is open to eternity and is cyclical. It is also braided—a weave of past, present, and future. In particular, the future ingresses into the present.  “When you stir your rice pudding,” the young Thomasina observes to her tutor, Septimus, in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, “the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backward, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before.” Thomasina is right, as far as it goes. Time’s arrow heads in one direction, as much for Christians as for anyone else. But this is not the only truth of time. Time has a direction, yes; but it leads not to the dissipation of energies—a spreading of jam in pudding—but to a good future created and secured by God. And this future at times bleeds into the present, echoes back like waves bouncing off a pool wall: most significantly in the resurrection, when Christ’s risen body became a foretaste of the new creation; but also in those smaller resurrection moments where goodness, beauty, and love are made present in our lives.

The past, too, is present in the now. Our moment in time has been shaped by earlier moments in time: by the promises made and kept—or not kept—by the good done or not done, by the choosing of paths, by the venturing and failing or succeeding of ourselves or of others. The past, present, and future are not discrete unrelated moments unfolding in perpetuity; the world is a history: it has a beginning and an end, a story shape. It is both propelled and drawn by a promise—“all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” as the 14^th-century English mystic Julian of Norwich saw.

A Christian, therefore, surveying their moment in time should see a varied topography, a timescape sculpted by the flows, falls, uplifts, and pressures of eternity, seasonal and historical cycles, and the braided temporal currents of past, present, and future. And yet most of us do not experience time this way. Why? Because, with our modern eyes, we primarily measure time as clock-time, and a clock is a road through time that bears little relation to the country through which it passes. To travel the timescape only by the clock is to miss much of what’s actually true of time, and this has real consequences for the shape and quality of our lives. Berry names the form of the road as “the form of speed, dissatisfaction, and anxiety.” Again, Berry is thinking about landscape and paths and roads. But his descriptions of “road-life” might just as easily apply to our experience of life measured by clock time.

Early ways of measuring time were largely seasonal and imprecise. In contrast, modern clocks strive for precision. The most precise timepiece in the world—a Strontium Optical Lattice Clock—is so accurate that if it had been running since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, it would have strayed by no more than one second. Such precision has made possible our busy, hyper-scheduled, over-filled lives—the speed at which we live. Time passes and is gone, without pause or end, and we feel pressure to maximise our use of time. We fear not only lost years or days but wasted hours, minutes, and seconds.

It makes sense, then, that some experience clock-time as thin—disconnected from larger community, cultural or natural and seasonal frames of meaning, just one damn thing after another, as the saying goes. We eat not when we’re hungry, but when the clock prompts us; we go to bed not when tired, or when the sun goes down, but seven or eight hours before we know we’ll be woken by the shrill cry of our alarms; we rest not with the wintering world of nature but when the schedule allows. Clock-time is ultimately merely human time—it takes its meaning from our projects and plans alone. And for many of us, this thin time is dissatisfying because it does not embed us more deeply into the world or our communities.

This, finally, is what generates the anxiety Berry has helped me to name. Time as measured by the clock marches on, and waits for no one. It is up to us to fill our days and hours with meaning. The future has no shape except what we make of it. As such, it’s a situation conducive to considerable anxiety. We are confronted, then, by a question. If the clock is a road that bears little relation to the country through which it passes, is there a better way to move through time?

• • •

Time, I’ve said, is a varied landscape. But we can say more. Time is a creature.

This is not, historically speaking, such an unusual claim. The ouroboros, the ancient image of a serpent devouring its own tail, depicts time in its cyclical or devouring guise—time’s great grinding gears, wearing down mountains, sweeping them out to the sea. In Norse mythology, the serpent Jörmungandr encircles the earth; when it releases its tail, Ragnarök, the terrible doom of the world, begins. In J M Barrie’s Peter Pan, the crocodile who swallowed a clock and can be heard ticking as he hunts Captain Hook is a modern version. But these images of time relate mainly to death—they are the fleshy counterparts to the second law of thermodynamics, the universal clock slowly winding down, the jam disappearing into the pudding.

In calling time a creature I mean something rather different. Think instead of Great A’Tuin, the giant star turtle who carries Discworld through space in Terry Pratchett’s novels. Or perhaps more helpfully, think of the planetary spheres, the luminous intelligences of the medieval cosmos. These are creatures that are far greater than us, given form and purpose by God, within which we in some sense live and which shape us. Time is such a creature: not a devourer, but a habitation. And it is a creature because it was created: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light…. God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’ And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day” (Genesis 1:3-5).  Time does not precede creation; it is part of it, though not in the same way as a maple leaf or a crocodile or jam are part of creation, but as a condition of all other creaturely life—we inhabit space and time.

Here we reach the nub. If time is a creature, it has a particular shape and purpose given it by God, a shape and purpose that, just as time encompasses most of the rest of the creation, encompasses my life. Therefore, the choice between travelling a road that resists time or walking a path that “obeys the natural contours” of time is not morally neutral, not the same as choosing between the quick or scenic routes. Something significant is at stake. As creatures, God calls us to shape our lives to the type of creatures we are, in the type of world—and timescape—in which we live. Berry’s use of the word “obey” is interesting. The timescape makes a claim on us to which we are called to respond. To resist, to live only by clock-time, has its costs—as I’ve noted, dissatisfaction and anxiety—but it also represents a failure to be the type of creatures we were created to be.

So how then do we walk a path through time? All this does not mean, I think, that there is no place for clock-time. We are not called to burn our calendars or refuse to keep appointments. The clock, like the road, has its uses; we need roads. But we need to remember that the road is not the country. To walk a path through time is to cultivate certain dispositions—postures that fit the actual shape of the timescape. Against Berry’s speed, dissatisfaction, and anxiety of the road, I suggest the virtues of the path: patience, presence, and hope.

Patience. Clock-time is impatient by design: it measures loss, the seconds ticking away; it imagines the future as created and secured only through our own actions. “Impatience,” Oliver O’Donvoan observes, “refuses to wait on God’s time for the opportunity.” It demands speed. Patience is the practice of inhabiting time differently—trusting that the present moment, however unremarkable, is the appointed time for God’s good purposes; that seeds germinate in their own season; that not everything can or should be made to happen now.

Presence. Clock-time is often dissatisfying—experienced as thin—because it absences us from the actual rhythms and variations of the timescape through which we move—its seasons and cycles, its braided history. To walk a path through time is, by contrast, to be present to time as it is, attentive to its given form: to the natural seasons of the year; but also to the seasons of a life, the seasons of growth and the seasons of consolidation, of speaking and of silence, of striving and of letting go—to crib the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. Being present to the varied topography of time is satisfying for the type of creatures we are because it embeds us into wider natural and cultural realities which give our lives shape and meaning.

Hope. Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock. To imagine clock-time is to induce a type of anxiety. Time rushes past us, falls away, never to be lived again. And clock-time has no intrinsic future—only more of the same, until the end of time. But Christian time has a future that is a destination: the fullness of time, the age to come. Hope is the orientation of a creature who knows that time has a shape, and that the shape is good. Hope is what allows us to walk the path of time without fleeing it, without taking to the road. We are, in this sense, pilgrims moving unhurriedly through a given landscape toward a promised end, attentive to the terrain, trusting the way.

Berry writes that a path “obeys the natural contours” of the landscape. This is what it looks like to live well in time. Not to resist its terrain, not to flatten it into a featureless plain of seconds and minutes, but to move through it with attention and care—learning its rises and its hollows, its seasons and its thresholds, its appointed hours. The timescape is not our own invention. It was given to us, and it is good.

• • •

One final encouragement. The clock is a road through time resistant to time. Is there a technology to help us walk a path through time? One answer the church has found, and practised for centuries, is the liturgical calendar—the Christian Year. The liturgical calendar does not flatten time into an undifferentiated sequence of hours and days. It frames the year through the story of Jesus, naming seasons of waiting and of joy, of penitence and of celebration. It structures our days and weeks by habits of prayer and Scripture, and it locates the significant moments of a human life—birth and baptism, marriage and burial—within a larger communion: the church past, present, and future, the great company of those who have walked this way before. Where Bezos builds a clock to resist time, the liturgical calendar teaches us to receive it well. It is a path through time. A Christian technology of time. And, like time itself, a gift.