Advent and Time

I'm impatient.

Standing in line or sitting in a waiting room (or, dare I say, waiting to see a doctor once you've made it to the exam room) can be excruciating at times. Sometimes I find myself mindlessly staring at my phone, realizing that I've already checked my e-mail and messages a dozen or more times already, hoping that it will find some other way to entertain me and relieve my boredom. 'Should I check YouTube?' 'Has someone posted something new on Facebook?' 'Maybe I should just look at the old stuff on Facebook...again.' 'I guess I could browse Amazon.'

Our culture has shifted our mode of thinking about time and our place in time. Time is a measured concept. It's less of a space that we inhabit, and more of a track that we proceed along. Our lives, including all of our needs and responsibilities, proceed according to schedules. We frequently speak of the "rhythm of life" as if it were piece of music, with beginning, middle and end. 

We've lost the fluidity and transcendence of both time and life. Older civilizations and generations once thought of time as simply divided into three parts: past, present and future. Then some philosophizing was required to to uncover the relationship between these three parts.

My favorite philosopher and theologian, Augustine of Hippo (354-430), once attempted to unravel this very relationship. In his Confessions, he asks,

For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who even in thought can comprehend it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning it? But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What, then, is time?

Time is paradoxical. It is everywhere around us and yet we cannot identify it. We can't put our finger on it. Time pervades our language (words such as "now," "then," "gradually," "first," "end," "eventually," etc.), and, as already mentioned, it dictates our lives, but, as Augustine asks, what is it?

He continues,

If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. Yet I say with confidence, that I know that if nothing passed away, there would not be past time; and if nothing were coming, there would not be future time; and if nothing were, there would not be present time.

We sense time. We know it when we "see" it. We know it because of the events which take place within it. Events are like signs on the highway or landmarks. We have some general sense if we've passed some certain sign or landmark or if we're approaching it. Tied up with the concept of "time" and "event," though, is memory. How could we understand time without memory?

At this point, Augustine's thought displays the complex, confusing character of attempting to discuss the nature of time:

Those two times, therefore, past and future, how are they, when even the past now is not; and the future is not as yet? But should the present be always present, and should it not pass into time past, time truly it could not be, but eternity. If, then, time present — if it be time — only comes into existence because it passes into time past, how do we say that even this is, whose cause of being is that it shall not be — namely, so that we cannot truly say that time is, unless because it tends not to be?

In short, the separation between past, present and future is razor thin. Or, as the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, "You never step in the same river twice." Each successive nanosecond binds us to the past as much as it carries us into the present and shooting forth into the future. Even while we're standing in the river of time, the river continues to flow, fresh water circulating from past to present to future.

And it is only when time ceases to be, at the end of all things, that this flow definitively ceases.

And so, when we talk about "waiting" at Advent, it becomes necessary to see that Augustine's philosophy of time explains this waiting better than our contemporary society. We are not waiting according to some specific timeline or chronology. Rather, the thing for which we are waiting - the coming of King Jesus - has already happened, is happening and will happen. All at once.

That's the mystery of Advent. That's the mystery of time. And that's the mystery of our Christian hope.