SHAPED BY TIME

My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle. So says the prophet Job in his description of the human condition. There is no cessation of the passage of time. There are good days and bad ones, times of plenty and times of desperation, seasons of agony and seasons of delight. Eventually, we presume, the weaver runs out of thread, a sign that things are coming to an end. But in the meantime, the passage of time is relentless. It cannot be made to go more slowly. It will not pass any faster than it already does. It is impossible to tame it. Our only hope is to mark it, sanctify it, relax into it, enjoy it, and allow life to be shaped by the inevitability of its passage.

In our earliest records of ancient peoples, there is evidence of a strong sense of awareness with respect to the passage of time. A large part of this was rooted in the simple observation of natural phenomena. The daily rhythm of the sun's coming and going is hard to miss. The sun's "rising" brings light and warmth, makes work possible, and seems to energize the body and lift the spirit. The sun's "setting" steals the light and chills the air. It slows the body, pulls us toward rest, and tempts us with the fear of the unknown. The shadows come, they lengthen, they go, and, as if by promise, they return.

The light and darkness that come with the sun's rising and setting are shaped into seasons, and gradually the cold days will give way to warmer ones. In time, the gentle warmth of the morning will give way to the sweltering heat of the afternoon sun. But sooner or later the cold will come again. As time passes the rains come and the crops grow. In other years the rains come again, but this time in such abundance that floods destroy even the sturdiest plantings. If next year, or the year after, the rains do not come, there will be no water to drink. When everything is dry and everyone is thirsty, death lurks in the background. Days, night, weeks, months, seasons, cycles, years, feast, famine, flood, and drought—human beings have always been fascinated by the passage of time and all that it brings with it. Longing and hope, anticipation and expectation, so vital to human thriving, are anchored in time. Ecstasy and delight are experienced as moments in time. And when deep disappointment, profound grief, and excruciating pain are our companions, we comfort one another by saying that "time heals." Often it does; sometimes it doesn't.

As time unfolded, ancient peoples began to organize their thinking about its movement and organization. Some conceived of the passage of time as a cycle, visualized often by a circle. The relentless return of the sun and the moon, hot and cold, rain and dry, appeared to them as cyclical patterns with a certain consistency about them. In due course they began to conceive of larger blocks of time, and were often great observers of how these cycles of nature appeared to give a predictable, if uncontrollable, shape to their lives.

There were also the linear thinkers. They conceived of the movement of time more like points on a line, from one sunrise to the next, in endless succession. For many linear thinkers, time had no beginning and no end, just measurable moments in the meantime. What to others seemed like repetition, linear thinkers viewed as a never-ending procession of new moments relentlessly unfolding.

Naturally there were those for whom the previous two modes of organizing time were inadequate. Instead of limiting their mode of thinking to either the cyclical or the linear, they proposed a more spiral visualization of the progress of time, i.e., a line that gradually moves forward while at the same time constantly circling back upon itself, living constantly in the tension between renewing those things that constantly "return" to us (the cyclical), while reaching toward the promise of what is to come (the linear).

As time passes, it will require the capacity of each kind of thinking—the cyclical, the linear, and the spiral—to develop calendars based on days, weeks, lunar phases, and solar years. Keeping watch throughout the day and night by means of sundials, hourglasses, watchmen, and eventually mechanical (and now digital) timepieces, was the result of patterns of timekeeping that plotted the relentlessness of time's forward movement against the inevitable reoccurrence of observable patterns. However it was conceived, and by whatever means it was organized, it was an effort to gain some understanding, some control, of one of those things in life that was, and is, very much beyond human control: the passage of time.

The implications of this are many for people of faith. It's not just old Job who reflects a consciousness about time and God's role in it. The charter narrative of creation in the opening pages of Genesis is time-centered in the way it tells the story. The saga of Abraham and Sarah and the stories of the early ancestries of Israel are carefully set in time. The writers of lament use time as their principal point of reference. Nearly every psalm has a direct or oblique reference to God's work-in-time, and without a strong intuition about God's desire being wrought in time, the prophets' words would have made little sense.

The New Testament as well is replete with references to time. The annunciation and birth narratives in the gospels are careful to place the coming of Jesus in time. The reign of God that Jesus has come to inaugurate is expressed in relation to time: it is at once both here and not yet. A goodly portion of the content of Jesus' teaching is expressed in terms of time and eternity. The resurrection of Jesus causes a seismic shift in time because the future is no longer captive to the past: the way things have always been need not be the way they always will be. This "new age" is the gift of resurrection.

Time itself is neither holy nor unholy. Everyone who lives does so in time, whether or not they profess any faith convictions or claim any manner of religious affections. Even the most nonreligious person will be sensitive to the natural passages of time, to moments of grief and feasts of celebration, and surely to the inevitability of aging. The rate of time's passage is the same for...