Exploring the Contours of Time

How we ornament time reveals something…
…of the nature of time itself.

This is the surprising insight growing out of the penance of listening only to sacred music during Lent: to be Christian (i.e., to believe, know, and proclaim the Incarnation, the entrance of God’s only-begotten Son into the spatial and temporal realm as a man) is to see that time has several aspects.

One is the Linear aspect, that history, the progression of causes and effects, of events before, now, and after. I was created at a certain point on that line, in a certain place. I’ve grown and aged. There are events in this linear progression that I’ve experienced, and there are events I expect to transpire in the future.

Time, for the Christian, however, is not solely linear. There is also a Helical aspect, the Gyre. While we move along in linear progression, we go around and upward, circulating through seasons, year after year. Where W.B. Yeats in “The Second Coming” sees the Gyre as a progression of historical epochs flowing into one another (with a post-Christian era coming into being at the close of a Christian era), the Christian sees the Gyre as the time of God’s action in the world, through Creation, Prophecy, the Incarnation and earthly life and ministry of Jesus, and since the time of the Ascension, the continued action of the Church guided by the Holy Ghost. The Gyre spirals upward, narrowing from Creation until the Incarnation: Christ is the centerpoint, and with the establishment of the Church and the commissioning of the Apostles to go forth and make disciples of all nations, the Gyre once again widens until all is made complete and Christ comes again in glory at the end of time to judge the living and the dead.

Lastly, there is the Eternal. A common mistake we make is to view eternity as unending linear time—the boredom and dread found in the Inferno is a good