Time is a gift, but one whose texture makes accepting it almost impossible. We are catechized into thinking it linear and capable of being ordered, constrained, and used; and we are encouraged to enter it and remain in it Janus-faced, looking back with nostalgic regret or disappointed agony, and forward with fear-laced hopelessness, certain only of loss and decay and betrayal. Our days & nights, lived like this, are like weavers’ shuttles: the fabric of our lives is worn thin by them, until we die. The liturgy orders time differently, and remakes us if we can learn to let it. The liturgical life empties time of its power by transfiguring it into a repetitive stammer, each of whose repetitions confesses its own inadequacy differently, and in so doing glories in what it is. No longer linear, no longer Janus-faced, time becomes the circular Psalm-chant, the Sanctus sung in choir without beginning or end. The time of narrative, of development from this to that, of one damn thing after another, is in this way rendered into a tableau in which the Prodigal’s departure and return are together iconically present.
paul j. griffiths
warren chair of catholic theology at duke divinity school
