Measurement of Time
FROM THE RECTOR
Over the years, I have met a handful of people who were born on Leap Day. Hannah, our children’s first babysitter, and Stuart, a member of our youth group, were born four years apart on February 29. When their “real” birthday comes around, I enjoy thinking of them and hoping that they might be enjoying an even fuller celebration than they might experience in other years. At St. Paul’s, we have at least one Leap-Day birthday (Happy birthday, Campbell!) and two Leap-Day anniversaries (Happy anniversary, Jacqui and Doug, Connie and Timothy!)
Sometimes we refer to our birthdays as “another trip around the sun,” and we know that, although those born on a Leap Day may only see February 29 once every four years, they make the same annual orbit that we do. Still, the imprecision with which we measure a year, which manifests itself in the addition of an extra day to the calendar to compensate, fascinates me. Although the time of the earth’s revolution around the sun changes slightly depending on interactions with other planetary bodies, one orbit takes around 365.2422 days, resulting approximately 24 extra hours worth of revolution accumulated every four years, hence the observance of a Leap Day.
Yet, even with the addition of a Leap Day, the numbers do not quite add up. When the Julian Calendar was instituted in 45 BC, it standardized the addition of one extra day every four years, but, by the sixteenth century, the 0.008 days that were being ignored, which in other applications might be considered a rounding error, added up to 10 days of mistake. In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new calendar that skipped those 10 days in October of that year and that called for Leap Day to be omitted every 100 years except in centuries that are also divisible by 400. For that reason, we omitted February 29 in 1800 and 1900 but not in 2000. The Gregorian Calendar has served us well ever since, but, as you would guess, even that correction results in some imprecision that presumably will accumulate over the millennia.
What is true about time? The ability to mark the passage of time is itself a gift of God. Although God first spoke light into being and separated the light from the darkness on the first day of Creation, we read in Genesis 1:14-19 that, on the fourth day, still two days before human beings were made in God’s image, God placed the lights in the dome of the sky to mark seasons, days, and years. As our spiritual ancestors recalled the story of the universe’s foundation, they read into its beauty a fundamental time-bound order—a basic temporal identity that exceeds our own instinctive desire to measure, regulate, control, and master it. In other words, even before we were able to count the number of sunrises each year, the stars in the night sky returned to their places every 365.2422 days, just as the one who made them had appointed.
In her book, The Fullness of Time, Kara Slade argues that humanity’s idolatrous obsession with a purely secular notion of time has resulted in an understanding of the universe that tends to align us with death instead of life. The ease with which we believe that progress is indistinguishable from the passage of time, she writes, leads to such evil propositions as colonialism and eugenics. When we buy into the belief that our fundamental identity is expressed through time not as a divinely created gift but as a human-centered, human-experienced reality, we quickly and inevitably ignore our limitations, recasting what God has done in the universe with our own finite and flawed approximations, resulting in disastrous consequences.
Although days, weeks, months, and years are an important measure of our lives, our primary identity is better expressed through God’s sense of time—through moments that are both historical and ahistorical, like Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection, and Apokatastasis. God has given us time and the ability to live in time and to celebrate its passing, and we must not forget the nature of that gift.
Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and other traditions that are pinned to certain days on the calendar are wonderful opportunities to express love and gratitude. They help us remember moments from the past and anticipate new moments of celebration in the future. Marking the seasons of our lives and the changes that they bring help us grow and mature in ways more significant than the mere passage of time. But there is no way for us to measure or experience time that can place us outside the infinite goodness of God.
We must remember that God meets us both within the construct of time and outside its limitations. We experience God’s love again with each sunrise. As we read in Lamentations, God’s mercies are new every morning. Yet, even if our experience of that love is mediated primarily through time, we cannot restrict that love to our understanding of time. We must acknowledge that we belong to God who exists beyond the parameters of time and yet, for our sake, made us and meets us within them.
On Leap Day, when we celebrate again the imprecision with which we mark the passage of time, we remember God’s inestimable love and our place within God’s infinite goodness. Even if time itself were to cease to exist, God’s love will endure forever. Our inability to remove ourselves from the inexorable unfolding of time is not a reason to bind God up in our temporal limitations. How pitiful our faith in God would be if our God only coincided with our expectations and understandings!
Yours Faithfully,
Evan D. Garner