Living in Liturgical Time
The Liturgy of the Hours
Modern time is flat and quantified. All days are alike in weight and importance, with time measured in quantitative, but not qualitative, units. And yet, amidst this modern flattened and quantified time, we find other overlapping modes of temporality, usually within various religious traditions. In most religions, time is not flat, because there are certain times that are intensified, in which our temporality shifts because of its increased proximity to the eternal. In other articles for GenMod, I have tried to articulate some ways of understanding what Christian genealogical thinking might entail. My basic claim is that the Christian sense of time is fundamentally different from the secular senses of time. To understand what anyone thinks about history requires that we uncover how they think about time. Fundamentally, for the Christian, time is not immanent alone but is a kind of incarnation of the eternal. To see this, I want to look at how Christians live out time during the seasons of a year. In so doing, I will largely be focused on Catholic practices, many of which overlap with the Anglican and Orthodox traditions. It is also important to note that other religions also have rich layers of temporal meaning. In fact, Christians have much to learn on this front, especially from Islam.
Christians do not live in either a flattened or quantified time. There are seasons in which time is more intense because at certain times God, who is ever present, is even more present. We see this first at the daily level. The central prayer of the church each day—offered up by clerics, sisters, monks, and lay people—is the Liturgy of the Hours. In praying the Hours, moments of the day are marked out as times to pause and pray the psalms. Even when these hours are quantified, they still bear qualitative differences. Terce (the third hour) is centered on the Holy Spirit who descended in the third hour. None is centered on Christ’s passion, for Christ died at 3pm. Notably, Catholics are rarely content with one layer of temporal practices. So atop of the Liturgy of the Hours, we have the Angelus prayers, with their distinctive bell tones rung at 6am, noon, and 6pm.
In more important (and more generally practiced way), we see the shaping of time in the week, specifically in the Christian Sabbath. All days belong to God, and yet Sunday is the Lord’s day. We see this emphasized in other languages: Spanish domingo, Romanian duminică, or Gaelic Dé Domhnaigh. Its holiness sanctifies the other days, because on this day God dwells among us. This is why Sunday is not meant to be a day of work. The other days are set aside for our work; Sunday is set aside by God for God’s work. God’s work for us is leisure in the form of prayer, community, and festivity. The consecration of the six days by the seventh day means that these other days take on their own meanings and practices. The different mysteries of the rosary are meant to be prayed on certain days. Friday is a day of penance; Saturday is our Lady’s day. The week is not just a series of days; it is a microcosm of salvation history itself.
Beyond the day and the week, the year is itself reoriented by Christian temporality by holy days, liturgical seasons, and saints’ days. In the secular calendar, January 6 is roughly the same as June 6. They carry the same weight. Sure, the weather might shift, but the day is just a day. But for Christians, January 6 is not just a day. It is the Epiphany, the day on which God reveals Godself on three occasions: the Magi arriving in Bethlehem, the Baptism at the Jordan, and the Wedding Feast of Cana. January 6 is three days within one day, in which we delight in God’s proximity to us through an act of remembrance that makes present what is recalled. It is from this day that the feast days of the rest of the year are pegged; on this day that the Church formally announces the dates for the moveable feasts of the year. The intensity of the day is such that, as the Cherry Tree Carol goes, “the stars and the elements will tremble with glee.” Time cannot be flat if there are certain days when the celestial bodies and the atoms of all creation shake with delight!
Christian holidays have such an impact on time that they create a temporal ripple outward. Each of the highest holidays carries with them octaves, season, and related feasts. Consider Easter. The Resurrection day creates such a booming temporal resonance that it shapes a whole constellation of days around it. Prior to Easter, we ascend through the long journey of Lent, with its forty days of fasting, praying, and giving. This is intensified in the Triduum and then bursts through on Easter when our “mourning is turned into dancing” (Psalm 30:11). But Easter cannot last one day; it overflows into an octave of days and then into fifty days ending with the Pentecost. And yet even here its time-shaping force keeps spilling over. After Pentecost, the Resurrection echoes into Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi, and Sacred Heart. Easter, and its surrounding season, ends up taking up 120 days of the year. The whole year, even Ordinary time, is shaped by these liturgical seasons which recollect the life of Christ (from conception to Ascension). Since nothing about Christian time is straightforward, on top of the liturgical enactment of Jesus’ life, are the feasts of Mary Overlaying this memory of Jesus, the liturgy also traces the life of Mary (from conception to Assumption) as well as the wide array of saint’s days.
Giotto, “The Last Judgment”, Cappella Scrovegni in Padua (1306)
The current liturgical season of Advent is perhaps best encapsulated by the Christian sense of time. For Catholics, and many other Christians, the year is not a series of 365 days that begins on January 1. Rather, the year begins on the First Sunday of Advent (a day whose date shifts around each year). Though there is nothing that unusual about having a beginning to a year, it is here where Advent gets a little strange. At the beginning of Advent, the commencement of the year, the liturgy centers on the end times. The first few weeks of Advent remind us that Jesus will come again to raise the living and the dead. At the very origin of the year, we yearn for the consummation of time. The beginning is all about the end.
The word Advent is from the Latin for arrival. The season begins with prayers for Jesus’ second arrival. As the season progresses, we increasingly turn our attention toward Jesus’ first arrival. The season centers on two advents, two moments when Jesus arrives in time. One might think that our relationship towards one is marked by expectation and the other by remembrance. In truth, our expectation in Advent is towards both, as we eagerly await the eschaton and the nativity. Our remembrance is towards both as well. For we remember that Jesus was born in a manger and we remember he is coming again.
Katerhna Kuziv Nativity (for more on this contemporary iconographer: Kateryna Kuziv (company.site))
We live in this past-oriented expectation and future-oriented remembrance. Christians live within Advent’s between status. The philosopher William Desmond has detailed at length the idea that the status of beings is that of being between. To apply this to a theological register is to see that Advent is this between as sacralized temporality. The between, in both Desmond’s sense and the theological sense, is a teeming, overflowing place. For Desmond, the between is filled with hyperboles of being, moments and spaces of transcendence in immanence. This is particularly true of Advent in which we find the eternal in Christ arriving in each moment. In this between-time, we live in another Advent, the Advent in which we pray and hope for Jesus to enter the between now. He who will come at the end because he had come in the past is coming into the expectant and remembering hearts in this moment. The three modes of temporality (future, past, and present) are lived in the three arrivals of Christ.
To speak of the arrivals of Christ in future, past, and present is to speak of the inbreaking of the eternal into time. The heart of Christian temporality is not time by itself but the arrivals of the eternal in time within each mode of time. W. H. Auden, reflecting on this, asks of the Nativity, “How could the Eternal do a temporal act, / The Infinite become a finite fact?” These inbreakings reveal that time is never without the eternal. This is not to collapse time into the eternal but to disclose that time receives itself from the eternal. These outlandish realities—the eternal doing a temporal act and the infinite becoming finite—are the reason why Catholic liturgical time cannot be flattened or quantified. We live in the peaks and valleys of these arrivals. These advents leave no time untouched by the eternal, but they also mean that some times are more touched by the arrival of the eternal.
Hans Memling Scenes of Advent and the Triumph of Christ
If the Christian sense of time is markedly different than secular time, this should affect the way we think of genealogical work. Genealogical work is always dealing, implicitly or explicitly, with some philosophy of time. If we approach our genealogical work with a sense that time is flat—merely a series of successive events and causal connections—then we will approach history itself as flat. If time is only contingencies, then Christians will lose their way in time. But if time is a place in which the eternal emerges, then there is a path for Christian thinking within a liturgical life. Our work as Christian thinkers is to look for the traces of the eternal in history. We find them not primarily in theoretical exercises but in lived experiences and communal practices. For Christian time is not flat; there are intensities, inflection points, eras of particular importance. Time is the arena of divine arrivals, so we need to think of historical work as tracking these arrivals. Such arrivals come in various shapes: saints, church councils, foundings of religious orders, encounters with other religious traditions, new theological developments, periods of persecution, and periods of schism and heresy. These are the center of Christian reflections on history. In a sense, Christian genealogists are detectives, ever looking in time for the hyperbolic moments of the eternal, for the season of the Spirit, for the traces of God, and for the unexpected but hoped for arrivals of Christ. If we are to avoid falling into a flattened account of history, we will need to ground our genealogical thinking not only in theories and research but in the living flow of time across days, weeks, holidays, and seasons.
