Time is not King

In the Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair, Eustace Scrubb and Jill Pole have escaped from the land of the giants before the Autumn Feast, at which they and Puddleglum the marsh-wiggle were to have been special delicacies of the feast, along with some of the Narnian talking animals. Following signs told them by Aslan in a dream, they find themselves in a dark underworld. As they are led through one passageway after another they pass a crypt in which a very, very old man lies sleeping. One of them asks who it is and is told, "That is old Father Time, who was once a King in Overland. Now he has sunk down into the Deep Realm and lies dreaming of all the things that are done in the upper world. Many sink down and few return to the sunlit lands. They say he will wake at the end of the world."    

When the Navy moved us from Washington, DC to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1976, we bought a “grandfather clock” to go in our new house. The shop owner was a commander in the U. S. Naval Reserve, whose avocation in life was UFOs, and he invested a lot of time in that pursuit, which he enjoyed talking about. Looking at me, probably staring openmouthed at him, he said, “And you thought I was just some poor soul trying to eke out a living selling clocks!”

The floor clock he sold us is a tall, handsome fellow that livened our home round the clock for many years. It has three chime settings, four actually counting mute. It’s an eight-day clock in which the weights have to be raised every week to keep it ticking. Now thirty-five years old, it’s stopped and only Joe seems to be able to keep it running; so it’s his if or when he wants it. In the meantime the electronic age has dawned on us, and we pretty much don’t rely on clocks as essential anymore anyway. Even my wristwatch was retired to the dresser drawer upon my retirement from full time parish ministry in 1998, my watch and my calendar. But the cell phone replaces watch and calendar, plus camera, phone and GOK what else.  

At the moment of writing, it’s the first early wee hours of 2012, so wee that I may take a treadmill walk then a nap, as clock and calendar no longer mind me, nor I them. Though space and time be scientific concepts, our system for measuring time is purely a human construct, a perception. The second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, century and millennium are notions that we have thought up for our own convenience, they are not real. God, for example, in answering prayer, never seems to be rushed by time. Some will recall that before 2000 there was alarm about Y2K, computers being fouled because of their dating systems. At the same time, religious kooks were predicting the end of the world, as though a human construct for keeping track of time controlled the destiny of the universe. The total arrogance of mindless ignorance. A year with three zeros means nada, nil, nix, naught, zilch, zip in the solar system, galaxy and universe -- as Emily Webb says to George Gibbs in Thorton Wilder's Our Town, "... the mind of God." 

Clock and calendar are convenient, but they are not in control of anything, including Time -- except rushed folks who submit to them. Which is just as well, seeing that our grandfather clock has been either dead or sleeping for a decade and more. Wake up, Grandfather. It’s time.

TW+ in +Time