I don’t have time! How often
do we hear that? How often do we say
that?
Everything about our lives occurs in time, is marked according to
time, and requires time. Time is a
limited resource that, once spent, cannot be regained or repeated.
Our
creator God is eternal, but does not cling to His privileged liberty from the
constraints of time; rather, in Christ Jesus He comes to dwell among us, in
time. The moment of His incarnation,
that is, the instant in time he took flesh in His mother’s womb, is the point
where time is kissed by eternity. As
such, that time, and all time, is changed forever.
God’s
self-revelation happens in time, our salvation happens in time, and our
encounter with Jesus happens in time. Time
is no longer something alien from the eternal God, but the very condition of
our experience of Him.
For
that reason, certain times are holy because of what God has done in them, and
with them. The most obvious of these is
Christmas; as we mark our own dates of birth and the birthdates of people
important to us, so we recognize the holiness of the day Christ was born. It is this holiness that compels us to treat
the day differently than other days.
Other
days also have been changed forever by what God has done with them. The Lord’s Day, Sunday, the Eighth Day of the
week, is the day of the resurrection of the Lord. It takes the place of the
Sabbath, which had been made holy by God’s resting after the creation, because
it marks the end of His resting in the tomb to initiate the re-creation of the
world. Now it is the day we keep holy,
that is, we set apart among the seven of each week.
This
sanctification of time is not something that terminated long ago. It is not something the God does only through
the heroic works of someone special and different from us. No, God continues even now to make holy this
very time that we ourselves inhabit.
He
does this by the work of His Church in the world, and by our work of worship. God changes the moments and the hours in
which our lives unfold by what He does in our world and in our life, and He
makes our time holy. When we enter into the
divine worship, when we participate in the sacraments by which God makes
Himself present and active here and now, divine eternity kisses our time-bound
present.
One
of the gifts God showers freely upon us is this sanctification of the time that
would otherwise be only our prison and master. His touch of a moment opens to us a door into
freedom and joy.
The
day of the conception of the immaculate Mother of God, the Sundays of Advent,
and the day of Christ’s birth have all been transformed by the divine touch into
portals between history and eternity; when we keep them holy by entering into
sacramental worship, they open our days into glory. You tell me, is that an obligation, or an
opportunity?
These
days, these times are holy, made holy for us, and renewed in holiness by our
free and worshipful response to God’s timely touch. We will never truly “have” time, but with and
in Christ, our loving Father makes it possible for us to possess eternity.
Monsignor Smith
