The Sacred Pause

The year 2020 has changed many of our relationships with time, possibly permanently. The hours of solitude, and for many the weeks of mandatory isolation, have made us aware of passing time. People have been forcibly separated from the activities that made time meaningful, like productive, autonomous work, or time with family; others have been separated from the activities that make time go away, like drinking with friends.

If I’ve learned anything about time in 2020, it’s how flimsy time really is. Only two objective units of time have any meaning to our lives, the day and the year, and those only matter because we happen to live on a certain planet orbiting a certain star. Technology has bequeathed us the “hour” and the “second,” measurable only by man-made machines. Scientists can measure time by vibrations of a cesium atom, accurate but, for most people, wildly impractical.

“Time,” in any meaningful sense, only exists inside our minds. Like anything else that apparently exists in the outside world, we can only perceive it through our senses, and impose meaning on the sensory data through our minds. While evidence suggests an objective world exists outside ourselves, our brains and bodies impose limits on our perceptions of that world. Time, space, and matter probably exist; but only our minds give anything meaning.

Therefore one of antiquity’s greatest activities, was defining time. Ancient civilizations sought ways to define time that allowed humans to synchronize their activities. Beginning with the basics of survival, they organized time around planting and harvesting. These times weren’t only practical, they were sacred, because the collaborative effort of creating food guaranteed the people’s survival. Planting wasn’t ordinary time; it was transcendent.

In the strictest sense, calling something “holy” doesn’t mean calling it “morally pure”; it means calling it “separate from everything else.” This applies to places, but it also to time. Pre-Christian festivals like Beltane and Samhain weren’t pretty traditions; they marked changing seasons, associated with growing and eating. Celebrations of cyclical seasons meant celebrating the people’s continued survival. Time meant keeping people together and alive.

We see something similar in the Abrahamic tradition. Ecclesiastes, with its famous statements about “a time to plant, and a time to sow,” as well as “a time to kill, and a time to heal,” wasn’t simply dividing human lives into hours; it imposed shared meaning on time, keeping the people together. Christianity, in its biblical roots, doesn’t have specific seasons that way, but preserves (sometimes wrongly) previous seasonal festivals, especially Christmas.

Remember, however, that these festivals weren’t private celebrations; everyone participated. To be Mesopotamian, for instance, meant participating in Mesopotamia’s seasonal festivals. Ancients had no separation between one’s national identity and one’s religion; language, ritual, and ethnicity traveled together. Even Judaic tradition preserves this, as the wandering Israelites paid homage to other people’s gods during their sojourns, according to the books of Moses.

Modernity doesn’t have this continuity. One can be American, or British, or Japanese, without observing that nation’s religion. Some countries, like America, have no official religion. You can believe and practice anything, or nothing, and still consider yourself American. There’s definite value to this, as it means one needn’t conform oneself to narrow and oppressive standards to be a citizen. But it also means Americans have no shared definition of time.

Except one. Everybody celebrates Christmas. One needn’t be Christian to celebrate Christmas, as demonstrated by the ascendance of that strictly modern “religious” tradition, the Hannukah Bush. For one day every year, America’s economy pauses. Most people don’t work. We don’t have pressures to perform “useful” or “profitable” activities; we simply sit with our families and appreciate being here, now. Christmas is Capitalist America’s only shared festival of time.

We have exceptions, certainly. First responders remain vigilant, and Chinese restaurants remain so widely open that it’s become a running joke. Generally speaking, though, Christmas is the one time nearly all Americans renounce worldly demands upon our time, and instead celebrate the present. Employers, governments, communities, and other outside pressures don’t own our time; for one day, time belongs uniquely to us.

Other holidays increase pressures: the July Fourth barbecue, with its public warm-weather spectacle, comes to mind. Certainly, advertisers and PR agencies cajole us to spend lavishly before Christmas on huge trees and garish presents. But on Christmas itself, for one day annually, we silence their demands. Frequently it isn’t easy; we’ve internalized demands to work, act, and produce. But Christmas, uniquely, allows us to pause time and just exist.

See also:
Fear of Darkness