Cathedrals of Time

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2013/01/cathedrals-of-time.html

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2013/01/cathedrals-of-time.html

Posted on 1.02.2013

 

I hope you're enjoying the Christmas season. Yes, it's after the New Year, but your Christmas stuff should still be up. Because it's still Christmas! Christmastide lasts from the Feast of the Nativity (December 25) to the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6). These are the proverbial "Twelve Days of Christmas."

But I expect that most American Christians have already moved on from Christmas, having already gotten Christmas "put away" before the New Year.

As I wrote about last year on this topic, I think the biggest culprit in this truncating of Christmas is New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. Smack in the middle of Christmastide is this other "holiday." Though it isn't, in fact, a "holy day" at all.

So what we have here is a clashing of times, with liturgical time being trumped by secular time. As I wrote last year:

[The] problem with Christmas ending early due to New Year's Day is that we are allowing secular time to trump liturgical time. Which defeats the whole point of the liturgical calender. Our lives are governed by the clocks of the world--the punchclock, the appointment book, the federal "holidays." The whole point of the liturgical calender is to create a "sanctuary in time," similar to the Jewish observance of the Sabbath. 

To illustrate this, I went on to quote Abraham Heschel's description of how how Jews use the Sabbath to create "holiness in time," that the life of the spirit is less about the geography of place than the topography of time. We shouldn't go to holy places as much as create holy times:

The Bible is more concerned with time than with space. It sees the world in the dimension of time. It pays more attention to generations, to events, than to countries, to things; it is more concerned with history than with geography. To understand the teaching of the Bible, one must accept its premise that time has a meaning for life which is at least equal to that of space; that time has a significance and sovereignty of its own...

Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, qualitiless, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.

Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of the year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals...

The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things in space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.

The liturgical calander is the "great cathedral" of the Christian faith. So let's keep the celebration going for a few more days.
As I reminded you last year, it's still Christmas.