Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 453​

There is an appointed time for everything,

and a time for every thing under the heavens.

A time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to uproot the plant.

"There's twenty minutes I'll never get back again!" a friend of mine said after a protracted, tedious phone call. We are indeed creatures caught in time, watching it pass and unable to stop or slow it. The best and the worst moments in life pass by, leaving their memories of delight and trauma, but irretrievably gone in any case. Accomplishments will never be repeated; mistakes and sins cannot be undone. What I should have said, what I meant to say, it doesn't matter now. 

The God who abides in eternity gives us time. Sometimes it sits on our hands; sometimes it races by. We often wish we could get those "twenty minutes" back and use them for something else. 

The Church honors time with our liturgical calendar, built on the cycles of the sun and moon, which are inconveniently non-synchronous. A lunar year is eleven days different than a solar year, but a solar year is a quarter-day off every year. Despite that awkwardness we try to force these cycles into a pattern of predictability. With limited success. 

Our Liturgy of the Hours, with five prayers for each day, marks the passage of time, giving it substance and grace. The longest of the prayers, the Office of Readings, can take twenty minutes, or longer in community; night prayer, about five minutes unless you pause over the Examination of Conscience. Morning, midday and evening prayers may take fifteen minutes. I celebrate the hospital Mass in less than thirty minutes. The length of time is not as important as the attention given to each word in God's presence. The Word is God, and the liturgies are nothing but the Word of God. 

If we lose time with inane activities, we gain it in ceremonial prayer. If you have ever arrived five minutes late for Mass you might have been astonished to hear the first reading as you entered. The entrance song, sign of the cross, greeting, penitential prayer and collect have flowed by in stately, unhurried procession but, in your absence they were only a few minutes. 

These cycles of daily, weekly and annual prayer consecrate time. Notice that, among all the times Ecclesiastes lists, "a time for prayer" is not among them. Prayer is for any, and every, and all time. Prayer is life for us, as is time. When our prayer stops, we'll know we've run out of time.