Keeping Time: Letter from the Editor

Having been the daughter of perpetually late parents, I’ve long been avowed to punctuality. But I’ve made a recent discovery, which I mean here as a confession: I have the habit of arriving late. I used to think it an occasional delinquency to be blamed on children or traffic, but as I’ve gotten honest about the six or seven, sometimes fifteen minutes I chronically run behind, I’ve had to admit that my lateness is now more rule than exception—a practised vanity of cherishing my time more than my neighbour’s.

If I plead busyness, there will be knowing, sympathetic nods. Despite the computers in our pockets, we all seem to know time less by its supply and more by its scarcity. Time has not multiplied for us (as was once feared by the legislators who’d worried over the future surplus of leisure hours) but instead, diminished. Time cinches our lives, and we are breathless.

But let me not pretend that time is a modern preoccupation. As this issue sets out to explore, it’s as old (and older) than St. Augustine, the 4th-century North African bishop. In his article, “What Then Is Time?” physicist Mike Reppert wonders, along with Augustine, about the nature of time, raising questions that have interested both scientists and theologians across the centuries. Several writers examine habits and practices that slow time, allowing them to inhabit it without the frenetic hurry with which we’re all too familiar. In Katrina Togeretz’s piece, “A City in Transit,” we see how Toronto has contended with change; and in a deeply theological reflection, Patience Omokhodion reveals the God of the Bible to be the only constant. Admittedly, the mood of the issue does occasionally turn sombre, but I suppose that is inevitable. To think of time is to consider the brevity of our lives. 

In one of my favourite psalms, Psalm 90, Moses articulates this mortal apprehension about time. “We bring our years to an end like a sigh. The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.” Still, Moses speaks—almost impossibly—of joy. “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.” Confronted with the reality of ebbing, withering life, Moses grounds an other-worldly confidence in this: “From everlasting to everlasting, you are God.” 

This is the essence of Christian hope, a hope rooted in the events of history: the eternal God willed himself as small as a baby, and Jesus Christ entered the suffering of time, even death itself. His resurrection on the third day makes an emphatic claim about time. We are marching toward a day when the world will be restored to its former glory, when humanity will finally be reconciled to God, when ephemerality and death will be no more. 

The sun will rise on that day, never to set.

— Jen Michel