The Things We Can Do: Hallowing the Time

A helpless despair lays upon the land. I see, read, and hear of a resignation that affects people of all classes, all political persuasions, all religious beliefs, all walks of life. It is a despair I do not share, that I refuse to share, though I completely understand.

A well-heeled woman and a farmer start talking at the grocery store in the lane beside me, and the farmer points up to the ceiling. “You can’t tell me after sixty years outside those are contrails.” She agrees more vigorously than I expect. Three or four others start joining in with emphatic agreement (I manage to restrain myself, dear reader). The talk ends with two cashiers saying “Well let’s not worry, congress will be sure we’re blown to bits soon. That’s what they’re there for.”

Outside the skies are blue (with a few wisps of cirrus). It is what has become my favorite time of year, the eleven days between All Hallow’s Day and Martinmas. I’ve seen it as the All Hallow’s octave, the days from All Soul’s to Martinmas (though that’s 9 days by my counting).

Our culture mass produces horror movies and has turned Halloween into something tacky, loud, vicious, and simultaneously over-patrolled. A joyless festivus of overstimulation. Frightening indeed.

But true change is taking place, a real shift between the sun and the stars. Both hemispheres experience this as the planet tilts, passing back and forth between veils, between tilting towards the sun and tilting towards the outer cosmos. Most of the Earth’s landmass is in the Northern Hemisphere, so it makes some sense that the rhythms developed here serve as common reference points, though that’s another topic.

November light here is warm with long shadows and the oak trees still bear their browning leaves when all others have succumbed to the winds. The mornings are foggy and indeed the veils seem thin. But if we can still recognize these changes despite the monotony of 24/7 electric box store time, can we read them rightly?

“Stockholm at Twilight” by Arthur Bianchini

“Mas” is a suffix missing from our special days. We probably shouldn’t call the rotating box store displays “Holy days.” Our calendars do not mark the Mystery of the Incarnation, the marriage of Time and Space. They exist not for Man, but for quarterly profits as gained through the selling of factory plastics, rainbow-flag everything, and vegetable seed oil shadows of chocolate. Those who labor to bring us this joy do so in dehumanizing conditions.

To me, this must not be. Our calendars tell us who we are. This calendar is joyless and leads to despair. But God made us to rejoice always, and it is my glad, mysterious duty to find Him and rejoice in Him at particular times in particular spaces.

For this reason I wanted to share with readers some thoughts on time, why this should keep us from despair, and why we should take on the risk of vulnerability to enter into a new relationship with what time and space we do have.

“Time is greater than space”

Without an ability to know and trust in Meaning, and that is exactly what we have collectively lost, the past and future become disconnected. Mankind is trapped in a terrible present. It is a 24/7 universe, and 24/7 is no time at all. Tourism, replacing pilgrimage, renders all places (reduced to “destinations”) into a series of visits to hotel lobbies, airports, and approved bucket list places, all while attempting to keep away from the out-of-sight unwanted people.

The cultural triumphs of speed have attempted to render time meaningless. Anything you want all at once is the promise - and it helps to explain the misery, anger, and confusion of billions. Because to want anything anytime for any reason is to want nothing for its own sake at all. It’s one more consequence of the meaninglessness of matter, which haunts Christian and non-believer alike.

Whatever remains of the past is reduced to a mine where the aggrieved gather pain to wield for power. And without faith in the rhythms and promises of time, we abandon the capacity to use moral imagination to see a world held together not by force but by communion. Caught in the tyranny of now, our capacity to work slowly, to imagine differently, and even to rejoice fade as we try to keep our head down in the overstimulating noise.

Our broken relationship to time can be seen in our confusing of novelty for rhythm. We should be seeing time as a spiral, an in-breathing out-breathing process of slow change with roots in the earth and eyes on the transcendent and still heavens.

Instead we see change as something that means progress and has nothing to do with the past. It’s reached the point of not even being a linear line, but fractured and broken snippets, unrelated, overstimulating and exhausting. It’s no longer change, it’s just loud.

In EVANGELII GAUDIUM, Pope Francis shared an extraordinary statement that “Time is greater than space.”

222. A constant tension exists between fullness and limitation. Fullness evokes the desire for complete possession, while limitation is a wall set before us. Broadly speaking, “time” has to do with fullness as an expression of the horizon which constantly opens before us, while each individual moment has to do with limitation as an expression of enclosure. People live poised between each individual moment and the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as the final cause which draws us to itself. Here we see a first principle for progress in building a people: time is greater than space.

223. This principle enables us to work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results. It helps us patiently to endure difficult and adverse situations, or inevitable changes in our plans. It invites us to accept the tension between fullness and limitation, and to give a priority to time. One of the faults which we occasionally observe in sociopolitical activity is that spaces and power are preferred to time and processes. Giving priority to space means madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion; it is to crystallize processes and presume to hold them back. Giving priority to time means being concerned about initiating processes rather than possessing spaces. Time governs spaces, illumines them and makes them links in a constantly expanding chain, with no possibility of return. What we need, then, is to give priority to actions which generate new processes in society and engage other persons and groups who can develop them to the point where they bear fruit in significant historical events. Without anxiety, but with clear convictions and tenacity.

224. Sometimes I wonder if there are people in today’s world who are really concerned about generating processes of people-building, as opposed to obtaining immediate results which yield easy, quick short-term political gains, but do not enhance human fullness. History will perhaps judge the latter with the criterion set forth by Romano Guardini: “The only measure for properly evaluating an age is to ask to what extent it fosters the development and attainment of a full and authentically meaningful human existence, in accordance with the peculiar character and the capacities of that age”.

Time is where we accept the limitations of our humanity, and crucially it is also where we carry out our faith in God. God’s time is not our time, but He has asked us to keep communion with His creations. By following His time here, by marking what we know of the seasons, by worshipping the Holy Spirit, we hallow islands of matter in the terrible tidal wave of meaninglessness. We say, “this particular day matters. This street matters. This neighbor matters. This parking lot matters, and I’m going to throw out the litter here, because it will be a little less ugliness for the next person.”

Particularities resist activism and sweeping narratives of Manichean dualism. To be in time is to be with the people near you; not the shadow-image of a person or cause, but the flesh and blood one with you. Time is where we meet our neighbor; the digital void is where we label and discard others and eventually ourselves as mere simulacrums.

“Procession of Souls” by Louis Welden Hawkins

“Rhythm replaces strength”

The 20th century saw the great abandonment of most of the liturgical year by the Christian churches. Overwhelmed by Americanism, the reason to do most things came to seem a pretentious archaism, something celebrated by the few with leisure, or the even fewer who were weirder enough to care regardless of the cost.

But before the iconoclasm of the great world wars there was Rudolf Steiner, who saw the crumbling of the old ways and worked at every minute to find how they could be re-approached in a world about to be overwhelmed with a technological revolution it could not begin to understand. He lectured tirelessly on the need to restore the liturgical way before the Church had even thrown so much of it away, and to do so in a way in which we fully entered the Mystery of the Incarnation.

Steiner worked for this for the adults who would soon be caught in the advertising-driven replacement of the liturgical year, and he worked for it for the children who would be coming into an era of unimaginable overstimulation. He wrote that “Rhythm replaces strength,” and this is something all who feel helpless should meditate on.

For rhythm does replace strength. Habit is more powerful than many things, and the habits we chose are particularly powerful. They are not just the routines of the child who accepts the rotation of activities without question, but these freely chosen routines become the incarnation of rejoicing from one who prays to be transformed by Christ.

In a wearying feature from Catholic Herald entitled “Heretic of the Week,” a writer at least pays tribute to the anthroposophic focus on time: “[I]t should be noted that [Waldorf schools] do – in keeping with Steiner’s love of Western culture, if not the faith that created it – centre their education around the liturgical calendar in a way that puts us to shame.”

Other quibbles aside, it is true that for a long time the Waldorf schools did put the liturgical calendar at the center of school life. Michaelmas, Martinmas, Candlemas, Whitsunday are unfamiliar names to most Americans, but they lived on in Waldorf schools. Like all Western institutions the Waldorf traditions are under heavy attack. But as terrible as what we are all experiencing in the disorienting acid-washing of culture, what we choose to save and hallow right now is a witness to Christ and a profound gift. Whatever happens in various churches or schools, the words of Pope Francis and Steiner point us back to Christ.

Hallowing the Time

This Hallowed octave, from All Saints’ Day to Martinmas is as good a time as any to begin to think about time, to let it shape us as the light falls. Advent is a few weeks away, then the New Year. I like to sketch out loose shapes and plans for the months and years, associations I want to consider more deeply, memories that I treasure and want to meditate on, traditions to pass on to my children. And I want to think about how our prayers will mark the time, how they will look for the Holy Spirit, and how they will uplift the dead.

Martinmas, or St. Martin’s Day, is on November 11. It’s long been a day of significance, a blend of the modern and the ancient. For it is Remembrance Day, or Armistice Day, or Veteran’s Day as well as Martinmas. It all comes in November, the Month of Holy Souls. The dead fill our minds.

“Gibson Bayou Anthology” by Carroll Cloar

Remembrance Day is my preferred name for it, for in addition to the sacrifice of soldiers it seems peculiarly apt to remember the passing of Western Christendom. For that is what The Great War killed off. It had been dying for hundreds of years, but with the carnage of those years the West came to a crisis from which Christianity would be relegated to back corners.

I do not mean to tell Christians that Christendom is dead forever; what I mean is, if there is to be a renewal, the “new” part will not be an afterthought. Not a repetition but a true renewal. The poppies bloomed so bright in Flanders field in those springs of the Great War because the seeds had lain dormant for many decades, bereft of light. It took the ravaging of the soil to bring the light which would reawaken them, but they had always been there.

So Remembrance Day is a good day to come after the meditation and prayers for the dead which we have been performing since All Hallow’s Day. Something now has died and is gone, and it had much bad about it but also much good, and it is important to pray for it and connect it to the future and the Resurrection.

The bonfires of Martinmas have fallen into the great forgetting, but the Waldorf schools have renewed the custom of children carrying lanterns in procession. On these quick-darkening nights, the lamps shine out our hope. St. Martin gave half his cloak to the trembling beggar, and that beggar was Christ. We are now to give our hope to our neighbors, to the poor, to the dead, to those with no one to pray for them.

So where does one begin, how does one celebrate a seemingly-dead holy day?

By remembering the source of all holiness in our own heart. If it’s there it’s not dead. On St. Martin’s Day, on Remembrance Day we’ll walk around the block with our little luminaries. A few years ago my friend the Sophiologist Michael Martin said every Twelfth Night his family actual went a-wassailing and poured apple cider round the apple trees. It felt a little silly, but we went outside with the children in the snow and did it just as he said, and it was lovely and wonderful and it didn’t matter a whit if no one else in the world was doing it at all. Because we love our apple tree, because we love the world God made, and because we love the Twelve Days of Christmas, and that’s reason enough.

So let us not despair but hallow the time. Hallow it with a procession, hallow it with a lighted candle, hallow it with a memorial to the beloved dead. Hallow it by gathering the harvest of God’s creation and bringing it inside for the cold winter. Hallow it by learning to see, by slowing down to make things, to draw things, to pay attention. Hallow it by prayer. Hallow it by gentleness with tired and confused strangers. Hallow it by turning off the artificial lights and letting the rhythms of natural light and darkness affect you. Hallow it by picking up a heavy dust book and hearing the thoughts of those long gone. Hallow it by praying, praying, praying.

And if we do all those things, maybe we will be transformed enough to make space for the redemption of the brokenness of Man found all too starkly under those fluorescent lights, in our digital avatars, in our wars and wickedness. Then we will no longer despair, but with wonder rejoice in the mystery that God has given us so much good work to do.

“Bozy Rok” by Piotr Stachiewicz (tr. “God’s Year / Holy Year”)