I have been very appreciative of those who have posted on social media reminders such as “Today is Tuesday.” All joking aside, it’s been helpful. Somedays I’m not sure. Rhythm is tied to space and movement. If we are limited in our movement and denied certain spaces, our rhythm loses its orientation.
Many have called the ecclesiastical implications of this loss of rhythm during the pandemic, Coronatide, not only as a way to acknowledge that everything during this pandemic is unprecedented, but to also acknowledge that time in Coronatide feels no obligation to remain linear.
I have chosen to pre-record most of our liturgies as opposed to livestream them. This was a choice driven not by theology but technology. This means that Sunday is often celebrated on Wednesday. The Triduum Sacrum took place with 14 hours this week, and out of order. Good Friday was at 5pm, Maundy Thursday followed at 7:30pm, and Easter Day was at following sunrise.
But that’s not all. Along with bending time, Coronatide multiplies it. I may have recorded the Easter Mass on Wednesday, but I will still celebrate it on Sunday. Many priests now live in multiple, alternative universes. My senior warden sent a text on Wednesday to ask if I dug up the Alleluia. “It’s not Easter,” I replied. “But you said Easter mass this morning.” We were both correct. Sometimes I need to log on to Facebook for someone to tell me what day it is.
Rhythm, as I said, is tied to space and movement. If we tinker with the space, or remove it all together, and alter to the motions, we lose orientation. I’ve said my prayers daily, but barely. And certainly not with the same devotion as when I’m with a daily community and we are called to pray by the bell and the heretofore certainty that space and movement are guaranteed daily.
Still, as much as I dislike it, there may be something for us to learn during Coronatide. The late Fr. Herber McCabe wrote:
The can be no succession in the eternal God, no change. Eternity is not, of course, a very long time; it is not time at all…eternity is timeless because it totally transcends time.
He goes on to challenge what every linear-minded Christian assumed to be true: before the Incarnation, the Son of God existed as spirit. After the Incarnation, the Son of God existed as the God-Man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. That serious flaw, according to McCabe and now, Fr John Behr, is this assumes God, to use McCabe’s words, as a ‘story.’ From his side of the matter, God has no story. A story implies (requires) development and development demands time. God does not.
McCabe says, “There is no story of God ‘before’ the story of Jesus.” We only know God through Jesus and we only know Jesus through the Cross.
“The simple truth,” McCabe writes, “is that apart from the incarnation the Son of God exists at no time at all, at no ‘now’, but in eternity, in which he acts upon all time but is not himself ‘measured by it’, as Aquinas would say. ‘Before Abraham as, I am.””
This is not easy for us. Time is our scorecard.
Philosopher Paul Virilio wrote that “speed is power itself.” And what is speed if not a measurement of time? He goes on, “because the nature of absolute speed is also to be absolute power, absolute and instantaneous control, in other words an almost divine power.” And if we can only find a way to travel fast enough, we too can transcend time.
Time (speed) may be our generation’s Tower of Babel. 5G, Amazon Prime, livestream, etc., our subtle and unconscious efforts toward divinity. Coronatide may be the thing that slows the advance. Perhaps the gift of Coronatide is that very reminder: the Son of God acts upon all time but is not himself measured by it. Christians have always kept time by the person of Jesus Christ. This pandemic may bend our observances or even multiply them, but Our Lord has not moved.
If we want to keep time with Our Lord, we discover the Lord does not keep time. Coronatide is a profound disruption of my routine, my schedule, my rhythm, my control. In other words – my power.
Jesus Christ met Abraham with bread and wine. Jesus Christ met Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fire. Jesus Christ, outside of time, disrupts our time.
Coronatide has forced me to think about and celebrate the Resurrection on multiple days. I’ve had to keep Good Friday on a Tuesday and again on Friday. I’ve stopped writing things in the calendar, because I’m not sure it matters. And maybe that is the gift of this season. Instead of trying to fit Jesus Christ into our calendar, I have no calendar at all.
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
See Herbert McCabe’s essay, The Involvement of God and Paul Virilio’s Politics of the Very Worst