Introduction

When I began researching and writing this book, I was more than usually concerned with questions of time and how it passes.

Like many people in midlife, I found myself burdened with multiple responsibilities to my job, family, and community. In spite of good intentions, I never seemed to have enough time to devote to any of them. I found myself spread thin, and the many supposedly time-saving gadgets of the modern world (computers, answering and fax machines, microwave ovens, e-mail) did not help. Every moment was overfilled, and there never seemed to be enough time to do the things I had to do, much less the things I wanted to do.

It was not a question of "time management." I knew all the usual tricks. Not only had I taken time management workshops, I had actually taught them. I was clustering my phone calls and e-mail, handling papers only once, using all the most efficient technology, yet I still could not keep up with the flow. I needed a thirty-hour day.

What was happening? Was I just getting older? Is survival in this hyperspeed world a younger person's game, I wondered, or is there something about the way we live today that is significantly different from the way people lived in the past? Why is it that there seems to be no breathing space anymore?

With these questions in mind, I started working on this project. It was shortly after my forty-fifth birthday. This was a significant time for me because my father had died quite suddenly just before his own forty-fifth birthday. I realized I had grown older than my father. That was oddly unsettling. The rattling of "time's winged chariot" seemed somehow more insistent; thoughts of death and immortality and questions of ultimate meaning pressed themselves on me. I realized that for a long while I had not thought about these things. Why? Like everyone else, I simply had not had time. The events of this world demanded attention, while eternity seemed to make no demands at all. Eternity could wait. But could it?

After writing a book about the loss of sacred space in our lives, I realized that we have lost a sense of sacred time as well. Sacred time is time devoted to the heart, to the self, to others, to eternity. Sacred time is not measured in minutes, hours, or days. Sacred time, like sacred space, is necessary to our well-being, but sacred time has grown increasingly difficult to find.

The modern world runs strictly by the clock. From the moment the alarm sounds in the morning, we are immersed in the quick flow of social time. The computers we work with all day measure our lives in nanoseconds. Bulging daily planners and personal digital assistants make sure we keep every waking second filled with activities. We are booked and double-booked from dawn until we turn off the television or shut down our home computer at night. Why this manic pace? Why do we rarely, if ever, step outside time's flow to examine the fast-paced lives we are leading? Why can't we look at our lives sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of eternity, as others have done before us?

Perhaps, I thought, we modern folk have grown afraid of those quiet times our ancestors took for granted, those moments in the dark, without external stimuli, when human beings looked inside themselves and examined the slower rhythms of their existence. That has always been the path to wisdom, but we seem to have abandoned it in recent years. Or at least we seem to have lost the time needed to follow that road.

Then I began to wonder what happens to us, individually and as a society, when we cease to visit those "eternal" places within ourselves on a regular basis. The answer, of course, quickly became clear. We end up with the frantic, fragmented, fast-paced life we experience on the commercial strip or read about in the daily news or log on to in cyberspace. It is a world without permanence, a world in which the only constant is change, a world untouched by anything we might call eternity. Yet, without regularly touching eternity, we live in a world without cohesion and depth, a world in which "time flies" in an ever-accelerating rhythm until we want to shout, in the words of the old Broadway show title, "Stop the World, I Want to Get Off!"

I seemed to understand the problem, but there seemed to be no way to solve it. The momentum of the world around me seemed too great. The Sabbath, a regular day of rest, had disappeared as a cultural institution from the secular world I lived in. We let it slip from our fingers sometime in the past thirty years or so. Our hurry-up, twenty-four-hour-a-day lives will not allow Sabbaths, or spiritual resting places, and so time seems to fly ever faster, and we constantly feel we have less and less of it. A permanent sense of lost or wasted time seems to haunt us, no matter how successful we are. "If only I had the time" becomes a constant refrain.

Ironically, this sense of being hungry for more time comes in an age when we live longer than humans ever have, in a time when we pride ourselves on our time-saving devices. Yet we are scant of breath and pant for more time. Surprisingly, we don't find this phenomenon in, say, the European Middle Ages. Then the vast majority of people had short and uncomfortable lives, yet they seemed to luxuriate in time and to maintain the capacity for celebrating life's abundance, for they believed that this brief bodily existence was but a fraction of an eternal life possessed by every living creature. Where and when did we lose our sense of participation in endless, sacred time? Can that sense be got back again in the midst of our machine-made, speed-mad world?

As all of these questions buzzed in my head, I decided to take advantage of the academic tradition of the sabbatical, a time out of time, based on the Hebrew Scriptures' recommendation of a fallow period every seven years to allow the fields to return to fertility. For one year I let go of my responsibilities at Aquinas College, where I have taught literature and humanities for over twenty years. For a full year, I endured the taunts of my jealous colleagues and neighbors who accused me of being on vacation or just plain lazy. I traveled to Italy for a month with my wife and son, I wrote a novel and some short stories, and I read about time. I pondered works by authors both ancient and modern.

I admit there were moments of vertigo during my sabbatical year, times when I felt events were passing me by, when I feared I was falling behind in some race everyone else seemed to be running. Gradually, however, I got used to my newer, slower rhythm. During my so-called fallow year, I wrote, I read, I reflected. I returned to a meditation practice I had never completely abandoned but had "not had time for" for several years. I pondered my Catholic upbringing, and, in Rome and Ravenna, I meditated on the history of fallen empires. For the first time in a long time, I lived with an eye regularly turned toward eternity.

As my sabbatical drew to a close, I wrote much of the first draft of this book as a way of preserving for myself a reminder that the hectic stream of time I was about to reenter was not the only way to be. As I began my research and reflection, it seemed that sacred time was the great white whale of topics. It was everywhere and nowhere, monstrous and uncatchable, but always tantalizing and tempting one further. Gradually, I realized that sacred time, eternity, is not remote or "out there." Rather, it is always with us. It is the steady underpinning of our lives and is always and everywhere only a thought away. Time-tested methods of prayer and meditation from many traditions exist to take us there whenever we wish. Only we have lost faith in their power to deliver us from time's quick flow.

The following pages attempt to pull together some thoughts on these questions in an age that believes it has no time to give to them. This book is partly an essay on time and partly a record of a personal journey to find, or refind, sacred time in the contemporary world. Though I have referred to the work of many scholars, this is not a scholarly tome. Rather, in the tradition of essayists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and Michel de Montaigne, it is an attempt by an educated layperson to take a point of view on a contemporary problem in a literate and, I hope, enlightening way. My method has been like Henry David Thoreau's definition of walking: I set out to find sacred time and then let way lead on to way, rather careless of getting anywhere in particular, fiercely guarding the freedom to change routes and directions, keeping the goal always in front of me. From my initial inquiries into timekeeping and spiritual experience, I traveled from the Paleolithic era to the present, from the pre-Socratics through Augustine and on to a rereading of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin after a lapse of more than twenty years. I set aside time for Zen meditation, prayer, and participation in the liturgical year of the Catholic Church.

The result was a deepened understanding of the relationship between time and eternity. And so I ask the reader to join me in the spirit of an interesting walk or after-dinner conversation, or any of the other desultory and "sacred" activities that enrich our lives immeasurably but that we don't often take time for in our too-busy world. I can only hope that the thoughts that follow can enrich some other reader's life as the ideas and experiences recounted here have enriched mine.