At this time of year with seasons changing and Lent starting, I’ve had a couple Orthodox insights I’ve heard bouncing around my head. The subject is time and how we perceive its passage.

The same, but different
I can’t believe that we’re coming up on another Cheesefare Sunday. So here we go. This week: omelettes; crepes; mac and cheese; cheese and cheese; cheese, cheese, spam and cheese … oops, no spam. Next week: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; soy milk (blech!); spaghetti marinari and bean burritos. The lenten recipes, liturgical CDs and Orthodox books come out, and it becomes Lent again. Time to count off Sundays — Sunday of Orthodoxy, St. Gregory Palamas, Veneration of the Cross … — then count off Holy Week services — Bridegroom Monday, Bridegroom Tuesday, Holy Unction, 12 Gospels … — then count off hours to Pascha, when everything is singing and celebrating, and then get ready to do it all again before you know it. Cycles of daily prayer hours, cycles of eight tones — a different tone each Sunday for two months. Cycles of church seasons, cycles of moving and non-moving church feasts. In the Orthodox Church, we’re always either going someplace we’ve been before or approaching someplace that we feel like we’ve been before. Last Pascha, next Pascha; last Advent, next Advent. Do we do the same thing over and over?

In some ways we do, and to our friends it might all sound kind of boring. The world is so wearied of its own restless race against the clock that the cyclical aspects of life can seem pointlessly repetitive. But it’s something that you just can’t explain to people about church life, they have to just experience it. It turns out it’s the same, but different.

Because last Pascha and next Pascha really aren’t the same, anymore than last summer is exactly like next summer. On a lecture by Fr. John Finley about the church calendar, he said that though the cyclical calendar can seem to people like just two-dimensional circles that come back around where they start, it’s actually more three-dimensional — like a helix or a spiral staircase. If you think about taking a Slinky and extending it a little, you’ll get the picture. Yes, a Slinky is circular when viewed from the top. But if you were to start at the top of the Slinky and run your fingertip around the inside, at the point where you started the circle again, you would be at a different depth than you started. Each repetition would take you progressively deeper. And even though from a distance, it would look like you were going around and around, you would actually be making a series of unique circuits. And if you were a small enough thing to be making that journey yourself, though the angle would be constant, the view as you progressed would always be different and you would always be going somewhere. The church calendar is like that.

Leaving time behind
The second thought comes from “Beginning to Pray” by Archbishop Anthony Bloom. When I reviewed it here, I didn’t even mention that he’s got an entire chapter devoted to managing time, because I could find no brief way to talk about it. Abp. Bloom includes the words about time management as a prerequisite to an active prayer life, but I found that they were more important than that — it seemed to me more like a prerequisite to an active life of any kind. It’s been much on my mind as I re-enter an Antiochian church after some years away and try find my pacing and rhythm all over again.

Abp. Bloom tells of a time during the German occupation of France when he was with the resistance movement and was caught by the police. In that one intense instant, he felt like there was no such thing as the past and no such thing as the future — only that one moment in the present:

It was then I discovered that living in the past on the one hand and in the future on the other hand was simply not possible … I discovered that I was pressed into the present moment and all my past, that is, all the things that could be, were condensed in the present moment with an intensity, a colorfulness that was extremely exhilarating and which allowed me eventually to get away!

Now as far as time is concerned, there are moments when one can perceive that the present moment is there, the past is irremediably gone … and the future is irrelevant because it may happen or it may not … You discover with great interest that you are in the now. You know the very, very thin plane which geometry teaches us has no thickness. This geometric plane which has absolutely no thickness, which is ‘now’, moves along the lines of time, or rather time runs under it, and brings to you ‘now’ everything you will need in the future. This is the situation we must learn, and we must learn it in a more peaceful way. I think we must do exercises in stopping time and in standing in the present, in this ‘now’ which is my present and which is also the intersection of eternity with time.

This may sound too cerebral an activity for common folk, but I think it’s possible in small ways even for those of us who may not feel capable of such things. At my new homechurch, St. Basil the Great, I feel again the haunting quality of Byzantine chant that seems to always be in motion but never in a hurry. And the cradle Orthodox of St. Basil’s seem to be that way as well. Greetings, visits, comings and goings aren’t according to my American timing — they take as long as they take. They happen until they’re complete. And I know that such moments are always there; they needn’t depend on a particular archdiocese or musical tradition. You just have to attend to them.

After reading this chapter of “Beginning to Pray,” I decided to try to tune in to God’s timing a little bit more (and yes, I wish there was a way to say that that didn’t sound like a bumper sticker). If I was in a huge rush and one thing after another got in my way, why not let loose of the idea of the future moment that wasn’t getting here fast enough? Why not forget all the other moments and just trust God to determine what was important and what wasn’t? I’ll just say from this small bit of anecdotal evidence from one poor weakling that I have never missed anything significant since then, and I have enjoyed many moments that had seemed like they would be hell-bent.