Time, Liturgy and Eternity

Entering into the life of Christ

Nothing says ‘time and eternity coming together’ like a rainbow over a chicken pen!

“Time is not time”

It’s a phrase that Lisa and I often say to each other on the homestead. She’ll say it after a ten minute walk resets her mind and heart, and the next three hours go better for her and our kids. I’ll say it after I write something in an hour of inspiration that I’ve been struggling with for the past month. There’s something decidedly non-linear about the work of homesteading. Some days, the hours pass slowly, and it feels like nothing is getting done. Other days, we process over a thousand dollars’ worth of food in a day. I suspect this is true for human labor in general. The more we move away from the industrial clock and begin to re-root ourselves in the rhythms and cycles of the natural world, the more we move away from a strictly linear sense of time.

“Time is not time”

On another level, our prayer life regularly drops us out of a bounded relationship with time. In my last post, I wrote about the practice of sabbath (and sabbatical) as a return to the wellspring of divine life. When we take time apart to orient our hearts to God alone, whether one year in every seven, one day of each week, one hour each day or even a few minutes in an hour, we tap into the Kairos or ‘eternal present’ time of the Realm of God. This contact, however brief, resets and re-orients our relationship with chronos time, the bounded, measurable, ordinary flow of time and cause-and-effect relationships in the material world. With regular contact with Kairos, our relationship with chronos is relativized. Our bodies and psyches are still bound in the world of chronos, yet we increasingly come to know another part of our own being, the part ‘hidden with Christ in God’, that remains in Kairos, pure, whole, and oriented in and towards that which is eternal.

Our rhythm of life at Metanoia is designed to support ourselves, our residents and guests in living into this dual relationship with time. We seek to honor and engage with both Kairos and chronos. At Metanoia, we typically have about an hour each day in common prayer spread out over six times of prayer, and up to an hour each day in private prayer. This is an enormous amount of time spent in prayer compared to a typical modern life. It is also less than ten percent of each day, and much less than a contemplative monastic community. From a materialistic perspective, though, it’s a shocking waste of time. Each adult ends up ‘losing’ ten to fifteen hours each week to doing ‘nothing’ that is visibly productive. Yet, it is this very ‘nothing’, or rather ‘no-thing-ness’ where we abide with God who is no thing, that provides the spirit, vitality and power that undergirds and animates everything fruitful in our life. The other hours of the week, spent in labor and study and human interaction, flourish when we’re able to carry them out in a spirit of prayer, and wither when that spirit is lacking.

This is a major part of the reason we homestead. Living close to our material needs means that a major portion of our days are spent in relatively simple manual labor – tending a fire and cooking, cleaning, hauling and splitting wood, tending to plants and animals. These tasks are more conducive to extending a sense of Kairos than the more technical, left-brain focused executive functioning that is required in much of modern life. We end up spending time doing these tasks, as well, but we strive to ensure that each resident or guest is spending as much of their work time as possible in embodied contact with physical reality. We find it is simply much easier to cultivate a dual awareness of the temporal and the eternal in physical labor, particularly in contact with the natural world.

The old Benedictine motto, ’ora et labora’ applies here. It’s not prayer alone (ora), or work alone (labora), but the combination of prayer and work that gradually builds a bridge within the human soul between the temporal and the eternal. In the Benedictine rhythm, prayer and work alternate many times each day, and this rhythm takes on a quality of breathing. Breathing in – we drop our labors and turn to God. Breathing out – we leave the sanctuary to attend to the needs of daily life. In and out, in and out, day after day, year after year. The sacred infuses the mundane, until daily life is saturated with awareness of the Realm of God. Our work, in this model, is less about getting things done as it is a participation in God’s creative power. We don’t work primarily to improve or change the nature of things, so much as to simply express the creative, ever-ancient and ever-new power of the Creator flowing through our bodies and souls. To maintain this awareness, it’s necessary to have many times each day where we turn away from the tasks at hand, to do ‘nothing’ but praise God and abide with God in prayer.

Liturgy and Eternity (at the beginning of Holy Week)

“Time is not time”

The ancient liturgies of the Church understand, and express, this non-linear aspect of time. From a historical perspective, I believe it’s no accident that the ancient churches (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, and others) are unanimous in understanding the Eucharist as a participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In the ancient understanding, each Eucharist is a dropping into an eternal reality, where chronos is dissolved and the Paschal mystery of Christ is always a present reality. We unite ourselves with Him, inwardly sharing in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as we take his Body and Blood into our own. The notion that Communion is a memorial that we enact now to remember what happened thousands of years ago arose only in the last 500 years, and only in the West. It is roughly contiguous with a sharp turn away from the supernatural and rise of rationalism and materialism in Western consciousness. Are we gratefully remembering what Jesus did, or are we participating in His life? Our answer to this question has profound effects in how we understand our relationship to Jesus Christ.

How do we understand the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, that we in the Western churches will soon celebrate? One common way in modern Christianity is to enter into the story as an opportunity to gratefully remember what Jesus once did for us, in order to win our salvation. There is, of course, truth and power in this remembrance. Yet, I believe it risks centering the locus of Christ’s activity ‘back then’, which has the psychic effect of bounding the great work of salvation in the past, in the realm of chronos. I’ve observed that when this attitude is predominant, Christians can end up being grateful for Jesus, but struggling to more fully follow him and allow our lives to be radically transformed by him.

Another way of viewing the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection is to understand it as a profound revelation of the nature of reality. In Jesus’ death and resurrection, we see the archetypal pattern of all life revealed. As with nature, everything that lives, dies, and yet from death comes new life. The Jesus’ story reveals to us the nature of life, and of death, and invites us to ponder the truths about life, death, and new life emerging from tragedy. Judas, Peter, Mary Magdalene, and Pontius Pilate all reveal archetypes of the human condition, and aspects of our inner self where we may be faithful or unfaithful to God. There is some truth and power in this perspective. It’s not wrong – but I believe it is limited. Christianity is not merely a philosophy, not even a deeply profound philosophy. It can give us wisdom about the nature of life, but I believe it calls us to much, much more.

To enter into the liturgy most fully, I believe we need to recover the ancient understanding of the mingling of time and eternity, of Kairos and chronos, of the natural and the supernatural. In this stance, we bring our human lives and sense of being into intimate relationship with the eternal God, through friendship with Christ who bridges the divide, being Himself both fully divine and fully human. As the ancient Maronite Eucharistic rite proclaims of Christ:

You have united your divinity with our humanity and our humanity with your divinity. You have assumed what is ours and have given us what is yours for our life and salvation.

In this encounter, what matters most is not that we remember with our minds what Jesus did. What matters most is not that we learn from Jesus’ example. What matters most is that we open our whole being, body, soul, and spirit, to enter into the reality of Christ. We allow our being to be intermingled with Him in His suffering, in His death, in His time in the tomb, and in His resurrection from the dead.

This saying is trustworthy: If we have died with him, we shall also live with him. -II Timothy 2:11

To fully enter into the liturgy and be blessed this Holy Week, we must seek to enter into the life of Christ, to be with Him as deeply as possible. Like Jesus when He walked the earth, we must seek to dwell (partially, incompletely) in both time and eternity, bonding our lives in time with the timeless presence of God.

If we suffer with him, we rise with him. Not simply Jesus saving us so we don’t have to die and rise, not simply Jesus teaching us the perennial wisdom of life, but Jesus uniting His divinity to our humanity and inviting us to unite our humanity to His divinity. Then, what is mortal in us is caught up with what is immortal in Him, and His life becomes our life.

I live now, no longer I, but Christ lives in me. -Galatians 2:20

How do we do this? It’s difficult, perhaps impossible to become perfectly receptive through our will and intention, but we can take deliberate action to open more fully to Christ this Holy Week. Here are a few practices I have found helpful:

• As much as possible, set aside time and space this week to shift your awareness from the mundane to the transcendent. Do less and expect less of yourself in the practical realms. This can require some planning and creativity. For example, Lisa and I can’t both take focused time simultaneously, but we can take turns with the kids and each have significant alone time.

• Take a ‘media fast’ for the week, taking a break from all current news to more deeply ponder the ancient story. You can put a sheet over the TV¹, put the cell phone on airplane mode, tape over a radio dial, etc. to physically mark this shift of intention. You might also consider using candles instead of electric lighting for a week, to allow your nervous system to settle and attune to the natural cycles of light and darkness.

• Travel to and from any church liturgies in silence. If driving, arrive at a church early enough to do some walking and land ‘in your body’ before entering the building. If you live close enough to walk to church, that’s ideal.

• Practice slow, prayerful reading of the scriptures of Holy Week in the style of Lectio divina before or after attending a public liturgy. When in church, listen to the scriptures as if they are being spoken directly from God to you, as if for the first time.

• Mark the Triduum (the time from the Holy Thursday liturgy through the Easter Sunday liturgy) as most set apart. As you are physically able, fast (either partially or completely) during this time.

• Mark the days of the Triduum with some deliberate physical actions – a special meal on Thursday, sitting in or by ashes on Saturday, renewing one’s baptismal commitments while jumping in outdoor water on Easter are all examples.

• It’s natural and good to celebrate Easter socially with others – but also cultivate intentional time for prayerful integration of the reality of the Resurrection on Easter Sunday.

Taken together, these small acts of intention, can add up to help enter more deeply into the mysteries present in the liturgies of Holy Week. I’m convinced that the biggest limit to the transformative power of the Holy Week liturgies lies within us - if we are not sufficiently present and emptied of distractions, we limit how deeply God can speak to us. On one level, the whole of Lent is but a preparation to more fully receive the grace of Holy Week.

“Time is not time”

and yet, as Jesus promises, “Now (Kairos) is the time of fulfillment. The Realm of God is at hand! Transform your hearts, and trust this good news!”² This week, let us allow our hearts to be transformed, and enter the sacred and eternal story anew.

1. Or better yet, throw it out!

2. Mark 1:15