Spring Forward, Fall Back – Stand Still AUDIO version

It’s no fun anymore. Remember the nervous tension of wondering whether someone in the house would “turn back the clocks”?  Or failing to do so, the foolish feeling upon arriving in the church parking lot that was either empty (Fall) or starting to empty out (Spring)?  Our technological devices have eliminated the fear of failure and taken all the drama out of Daylight Savings Time.  

That got me thinking (always a dangerous moment).  Time is certainly arbitrary if we can just move it forward and backward like a chiropractic adjustment.

In fact, we are fascinated by the concept of breaking out of its constraints.  Think “The Time Machine” – 1960 version for you Boomers and 2002 for Millennials; “Kate & Leopold” – my wife’s genre; “Source Code – my genre, although I had to watch it twice to confirm that I didn’t understand it the first time”; and “Back to the Future” times three, because we just can’t get enough of this stuff!

But here’s the kicker.  It turns out that God Himself has no time for it (exhale the required pun-generated groan).  The second letter of Peter, chapter 3, verse 8 says: But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day.  And who could forget the answer to Question #165 of the Baltimore Catechism: “God had no beginning; He always was and He always will be”.

Isn’t that what we mean when we pray: “Glory be to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.  As it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever?” 

Then there’s those two words at the end of the Apostle’s Creed when we say: I believe in…life everlasting.  Do you?  Do you really believe that there is no time once we leave this earth?

My father died in 1992 after a long battle with prostate cancer. When I got the call, I packed a few things and started the drive back to my childhood home in Cleveland.  As I passed landmarks and places we had been together, it suddenly occurred to me: “Time has just stopped for my dad!”  He’ll never see these things again.  It was such a strange concept.  Time had absolutely no place in my dad’s life anymore.

For those of us who remain on this earth, though, time marches on.  Seconds, minutes, and hours track our individual activities: from the optimum number of minutes on the grill to produce a medium rare strip steak to the recommended number of hours required for a restorative night’s sleep to the seconds needed to respond to the texts from your boss during the weeks prior to your annual performance review.

The view from space offers a simpler perspective.  With each rotation of earth as it simultaneously orbits the sun, another page on the calendar turns.  Days and nights follow their predictable and reliable rhythm.

Yet as the earth turns, it is always daytime somewhere on the planet.  The sun never sets. God never sleeps. As it says in the First Letter of John, “… God is light and in him there is no darkness at all (1:5b).” And Psalm 90 confirms that “… a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night (v. 4).”

A quick recap: God has no beginning and has no end; we all had a beginning and will all have an end – after which we have no end.  Right.

This might be a little unsettling if it weren’t for one more term in the Bible to help us – the Lord’s Day.  An indication that His Day is distinct from our days.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) cites Psalm 118: 24 to describe it.  “’This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.’  For Christians it has become the first of all days, the first of all feasts, the Lord’s Day, Sunday.”   

It is a way of saying that the Lord is the Day!  There is only one day in the Lord because He is the light, and “in him there is no darkness at all (ibid).”

St. Justin Martyr confirms the practice of the Church in the second century A.D. to celebrate the Lord’s Day:  “We all gather on the day of the sun, for it is the first day (after the Jewish sabbath, but also the first day) when God separating matter from darkness, made the world; and on this same day Jesus Christ our Savior rose from the dead.”

Stay with me now.  When we celebrate the Lord’s Day, and receive the Lord Himself in the Eucharist, we are touching the Eternal One for a time, and the Eternal One is touching us.  It’s way better than a Time Machine to the past or a futuristic Portal.  It’s leaving time behind and entering the only Day that exists.

Just as it is always daytime somewhere around the world, so too, a mass is always being offered somewhere in every nation on earth, constituting a continuous Eucharistic Sacrifice offered to the Father. It may have been Jesus’ last meal on earth, but it was the first feast in the Kingdom of God that will never end. A feast in which we participate every time we celebrate the Eucharist. It’s as if we are present at the Last Supper.  Is that even possible?

Bishop Robert Barron’s homily for the Second Sunday of Lent last week talked about the Transfiguration as the three disciples getting access to the eternal realm for a moment.  He said that St. Thomas Aquinas emphasized eternity not as endless time, but being beyond time, outside of time.  Eternity is inclusive of all time. 

Our daily life is always “stuck in the present”.  But in eternity we are lifted up to all space and time.  That’s how Moses and Elijah spoke to Jesus as contemporaries on the mountain.  That’s what the creed means by the “communion of saints”.  We can have communion with them here and now.  How much more can we have communion with Jesus at his Last Supper!

St. Ambrose wrote to the third century Christian community: “You can at the same time be here and present to the Lord…We must take refuge from this world in that place where there is peace, where there is rest from toil, where we can celebrate the great sabbath…To rest in the Lord and to see his joy is like a banquet, and full of gladness and tranquility.”  In order to access the joy and peace of eternity while still on our pilgrimage home, we must observe a sabbath rest and go up the mountain to pray, to listen, to receive.

By now, most everyone has become familiar with the Serenity Prayer attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr (1926):

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things
I cannot change,
Courage to change the
things I can, and the
wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardship as the
pathway to peace.
Taking, as He did, this
sinful world as it is,
not as I would have it.
Trusting that He will make
all things right if I
surrender to His Will;

That I may be reasonably happy
in this life, and supremely
happy with Him forever in
the next.
Amen

When we truly pray to live one day at a time, we mean we will live each of our days by entering the One Day, the Only Day, the Light of Christ that is never extinguished, never dims.  God is always now; always in the present; he has neither past nor future; he has no yesterdays or tomorrows.  He just “is” as Moses learned when he said to God in Exodus 3: 13-14  ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you”, and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’ ¹⁴ God said to Moses, ‘I am who I am.”

“One day at a time” is not just a motto for persons in recovery from addiction.  It’s our access to the portal to Eternity.  It’s When Time Stands Still.

The next time it’s time to “spring forward” or “fall back”, take the time to step into the only Daylight that is worth saving.