Lane Denton, blogger, retired Episcopal priest living in Nashville, TN, says it well in his piece today:
"We have three old clocks, the wind-up, pocketa-pocketa kind. I have an obsession about them that in spite of their age they simply must keep reasonably accurate time. Not Naval Observatory time like we needed when we flew over the Pacific, though that would be nice, but close enough so that the two that chime, chime within seconds of each other, preferably simultaneously.
"Maybe it's New Year's Eve that brings this to mind. For this is the worldwide grand moment of timekeeping when the entire planet takes notice of clocks and calendars. Only a few years ago on Y2K there was universal angst that we'd maybe never be able to do it again.
"Perhaps one of our vocations as human beings is so that time never has to stop until we do. Time is not really running out, it's just that we are. For that mater, time has really never in for it never was off stage, waiting for an entrance. If our notion of the Big Bag amounts to anything, that was its cue.
"Maybe the universe is one big clock, but so far as we know we may be the only ones who know it, but I doubt it. We keep time as if we think we'll never have to give it away. We are the town criers. And the cosmos very patiently lets us think it's important that we are. 'Wait for me,' we shouted as soon as we could talk.
"One of my handy word book crutches says that time comes from ti, meaning to stretch, meaning also more or less, the fit time, hence, the good time, prosperity, as in Let the good times roll. The early word for everyday time was tide, like Yuletide, glad tidings, high tide, low tide, and laundry soap. It took the Greeks to find kairos as fat time and chronos as thin time, the one always full of it, the other just sort of bammin' along, again, waiting for something to happen. Chronos waits for kairos. Guy Lombardo's band's yard-wide termolo forever once brought in the new year in with Auld Lang Syne, 'times gone by.' for which we all drank a cup of kindness yet, and then started up the violence again the next day in the bowl games.
"Mañana is really the rule of the day and especially of New Year's Day. Iraq? Mañana. The environment? Mañana. Our international reputation? Mañana. The busted up church ignoring Jesus' prayer that we all be one? Mañana.
"Mañana? If there is one, it is us".
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