Time, gentlemen

The darkness of the holiday season opens a window onto divine contemplation of sacred time

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

These are the longest nights of the year. Elsewhere in Canada, snow and ice challenge the darkness with reflected light. In Vancouver, pavement and grass swallow the glow while clouds conceal the moon and stars.

For many, the gloom is compounded by a psychological darkness. Rather than ushering in a celebration of hope, the season heralds for them an epiphany of despair. The promise of rebirth, of salvation, is betrayed by the cruelties of the human condition, by poverty and loneliness, by sickness and the spiritual butcheries of family dysfunction. This raises a question of some importance: can the holidays be worthwhile even if they can’t be happy?
This question may seem absurd. In the modern age we tend to see happiness as an indispensable ingredient of the holidays. This wasn’t the case in the pre-modern era. During the many millennia of the agrarian age, when human societies were organized around the recurrent cycles of nature rather than the linear dynamics of industrial progress, holidays were above all else occasions when people tried to peel away the veil of mundane time in order to see the infinite depths of sacred time beneath. While the holidays were often joyous, they didn’t need to be. Happiness was considered secondary to the experience of sacred time.

Whereas mundane time marks the passing of transitory phenomena, sacred time deals in the unchanging features of the human condition, the features that structure our lives. Mundane time is concerned with occurrences; sacred time is concerned with our basic dispositions, the potentials that underlie occurrences. For example, an individual’s death occurs in mundane time, but death itself exists in sacred time. Similarly, an individual may find salvation from a particular problem in mundane time, but the potential for salvation from problems rests in sacred time. What we are resides in sacred time; it’s only what we do and what happens to us that exists in mundane time.

Sacred time reaches beyond the human into the cosmic. Whatever occurs in the universe can occur only because there’s a potential for its occurrence. Without the underlying potential, no occurrence is possible. Without the potential for stars, there could be no stars; without the potential for life, there could be no life; without the potential for consciousness, there could be no consciousness. Even if every star, every life, and every moment of consciousness was suddenly extinguished, so long as the potential remained, stars, life, and consciousness would continue to exist as dispositions in sacred time. It’s this realm of potentiality that truly deserves to be called “divine,” and in which we may find our fundamental being.

In the agrarian age, holidays reminded people to look below the surface, and in doing so to look beyond their own lives to the inscrutable source of all life, however that source was understood. The emotion that best corresponds to this experience isn’t happiness but rather ecstasy, a term that originally referred to being transported outside oneself. When we yearn for ecstasy, we’re yearning to experience sacred time. Ecstasy is typically triggered by extreme emotions, regardless of whether those emotions are life-affirming or destructive. The fear, hatred, and loyalty aroused by war, for instance, are common triggers for ecstasy—a fact that helps account for our addiction to collective bloodshed, as well as the mythologies we create to justify it. In contrast to war, holidays ritualized and guided ecstasy in ways that were intended to nurture rather than destroy the human spirit.

To do this, holiday rituals made use of images representing life-affirming human potentials. The argument can be made that Christmas, for example, is essentially an extrapolation of Nativity imagery, in which a cherished newborn, representing the potential for love and regeneration, rests in a manger among animals representing our bestial mortality. In contemplating the image, Christians feel ecstasy: in the experience of sacred time, they’re reminded of their mortality as well as their potential for love and rebirth. Every religion has holidays and holiday imagery that fulfill the same purpose.

It’s hard for modern people to grasp the distinction between these two orders of time. That’s because we live in an environment undergoing constant change and exponentially increasing complexity, and because our technology lets us isolate ourselves from natural cycles. This creates the illusion of unstoppable random metamorphosis in all aspects of our lives, obscuring the deeper patterns and potentials guiding these transformations. We forget the depths of existence as its surface becomes ever-more bewildering: the more turbulent the waves, the more opaque the ocean appears. Despite this, we still need to experience sacred time. We still need to know ourselves.

Though the world may pass away, sacred time will remain. As long as people live, it will be possible to find the path to sacred time, even though that path may be harder to see than it once was, and even though our sojourn in the blessed realm may be briefer than before. Perhaps it’s easier to find the path when shadows and suffering obscure the external world of mundane time, directing consciousness back in upon itself in search of the light. In the darkness of this holiday season, I hope we can all find the way.

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