Enrich the New Year with sacred time

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 timeline that moves from one income producing holiday or season to another with businesses promoting a sense of time that works to their benefit. But 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 breaking of light into the darkness and our daily journeys through the valleys and to the peaks.

In Laudato Si, Pope Francis writes, “The ear of the heart must be free of noise in order to hear the 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.

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 once offered a reflection on the need to give prayer the time it needs. He explained that the contemporary perception and use of time 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…

“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 seasons of the liturgical year, our lives remain connected to and unified with the life of Christ, God’s love and mercy, and our opportunities to bring that love to our neighbors.

In this new year, on every new day, we should allow ourselves, as often as possible, to enter into the rhythm of life, to experience the transition from morning to evening to night, to feel the heartbeat of the seasons without measuring any of it with a clock or a schedule. Balance linear time with sacred time, time as God created it, so we may begin to regain a sense of peace and bring that peace to others.

And remember the words of American poet, Carl Sandburg: “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.”