It’s Time – But not as we Know it

As a university chaplain I spend a lot of time I expend a lot of effort explaining to the secular institution in the run up to exams why so many of their students cause so much trouble by wanting to go and pray at such odd times. University timetabling has a clockwork mentality – Muslim and Jewish prayer, however, is governed by the movement of the sun and moon. This causes a degree of holy havoc, and in many ways I’m glad that it does.

Time as we know it was invented in the middle of the nineteenth century to solve a railway timetabling problem. In those innocent early days everyone assumed that the trains would run on time, but the time in London was different to the time in Bristol. Everyone set their clocks by the sun but the sun takes a longer to get to Bristol than it does to London. Having struggled with publishing timetables with each stop adjusted for local time, Bradshaw’s Railway Guide eventually gave up and unilaterally declared train time to be London time.

Machines run like clockwork; nature does not. Natural time is messy and surprisingly variable, so the time we use now is “mean time” - watered down wishy-washy stuff averaged out over the year by timetablers, engineers and administrators. It’s a time of our own making which ties us to the regular motion of the machines we make to serve us and the needs of the industrial production which supplies us.

Time wasn’t always like that and for many people today it still is not, and here is the rub. Originally the “hours” of the day were the “hours” of prayer in the monasteries. It was prayer not production which defined time. After all who is to say that our days must be governed by that nasty, pinched “mean” time driven by productivity rather than God’s messy, awkward, wasteful and wonderfully generous gift of time?

I’ve learnt a lot from students who are being “awkward” because of their faith; I’m sorry to say few of them have been Christians.