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(This is the third article in a series aimed at building up parents in their role as primary educators and encouraging them to hand on the Catholic faith at home as they form their own Curriculum for Life.) 

Time Management for Eternity

The world around us has largely forgotten that seasons change, and we are meant to change with them. There are not a few examples of this resistance: a person can have any fruit or vegetable at any time of year, we have light all night long, year-round Christmas stores, and we keep our homes around 72F whether it is sweltering or freezing outside. The Church, however, teaches us a different lesson—she teaches the sacredness of time.

Recognizing the sacredness of the moment is no small task for the family amid a culture that has taken Christian seasons and both de-seasoned and un-Christed them. In such a culture, Easter is only one day, not a season, and it is really about egg laying rabbits (and they accuse Catholics of strange beliefs…).

The answer at the level of the family to the secularization of time is to work intentionally to sacralize time in the domestic church. To change the culture, Christian families first change the culture of their own home. Every season can be celebrated seasonally, and moments of working, eating, and sleeping can become holy times of encounter with the eternal God. A family that deliberately hallows time comes to know and live the words of the teacher in Ecclesiastes, “There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under heaven…”[1] 

In the Old Testament, the awareness of hallowed time is woven into the creation story in the first chapters of Genesis. The whole of creation, the work of God, is structured around days of the week. This creative work leads up to the seventh day of rest that God blessed and made holy.[2] This sacralized sevening was formally instituted among the Hebrews in the Commandments given to Moses at Mount Sinai.[3]

The coming of Christ did not change the divine desire or mandate to hallow time—it only changed the focus from the eternal God’s covenantal encounter with Moses and his people in history to God himself entering time in Christ and encountering all men and all creation. The focal point for the universal centering of time in Christ is when he is lifted upon the Cross drawing all men to himself.[4]

To reconcile is to make compatible, and before the Incarnation and Paschal Mystery that followed, God and his creation were incompatible.  By stepping out of eternity and into the flow of time in the created order, the Son facilitated the possibility for creature and Creator to coexist in harmony.

It is possible for a family of faith to live the truth of sacred time in a culture that does not. The first essential step is gaining the awareness of the Good News about time. The second is the recognition that individual Catholics do not need to invent sacred seasons and times for the family; Christ has already done this through the Church with the liturgical year. There is no shortage of opportunities to celebrate feasts within the Catholic year – only a failure to regularly seize them.

Such celebration and hallowing of time is not alien or something imposed from outside but rather wells up from a desire placed in man since the creation of the first week. This is certainly seen within the liturgical year, but the longing for it can also be demonstrated when there is an absence of sacred celebration in the culture. In America in recent years, there has sprung up a “National Day” for just about everything, from celebrating more obscure members of the workforce, to days for eating various foods, to the celebration of banal or even absurd activities.[5] The multiplicity of such secular “national days” indicates a deep hunger to satisfy the natural longing to hallow time but without the sacred means to do so.

In this lies a great and largely untapped opportunity for evangelization, especially by the Christian family to the culture around it, but it must be built up first in the home. H. Lyman Stebbins wrote, “How vain it is to think about evangelization on a grand scale if we decline to work first on the tiny field of our own families! To become a Doctor of Sacred Theology is neither possible nor necessary for most of us, but to want to know our faith and live from it is both possible and necessary.”[6] It does not take expertise – only a willing faithfulness.

Sharing the joy of sacred seasons, rejoicing in the present moment—in short, joining Christ in hallowing time—is a significant way the domestic church can know and live the faith to contribute to the evangelical mission of Christ.

[1] Ecclesiastes 3:1.
[2] Genesis 2:3.
[3] Cf. Exodus 20:8-11.
[4] John 12:32.
[5]  There is a website dedicated to the promulgation of such trivial celebrations-www.nationaldaycalendar.com. 
[6]  Stebbins, “The Priesthood of the Laity in the Domestic Church” in Scripture and the Mystery of Marriage and Family Life, p. 96.