Msgr. Pope on the Mystery of Time

"I began our New Years Eve adoration at 11:00 AM with the observation that we begin this prayer in one year, and end in another. New Years Eve features the mysterious passage from one year to another. In a way I suppose it is no more mysterious than the passage from Tuesday to Wednesday or from 10:00 AM to 10:01 AM.

"In one sense, nothing could be simpler than time. What time is it? It is 1:15. Simple! But time has mysteries about it.

"What is time? Some say it is merely a measure of change. But that doesn't really make a lot of sense since change doesn't happen at a steady pace at all.

"Some say it is just another way of clocking distance in the space/time continuum. Time and distance surely are related. To look out at the stars at night is to look into the past, for is has taken sometimes millions of years for the light of many stars to reach us through the vacuum and vast distances of space. Even the light of the sun is eight minutes old before it reaches us.

"But there's just more to time than distance and we all know it. The Greeks had several words for time. Chronos was clock-time. Kairos was a complex notion of time as experienced subjectively. Thus ten minutes can seem like an hour or an hour pass swiftly. Further things can seem fitting at certain times and not at others. Kairos is thus an elastic notion of time. And lastly there is Aeon (eternity, or the fullness of time). . . ."

In a recent commentary, Monsignor Charles Pope (pastor of Holy Comforter-Saint Cyprian Parish, Washington, DC) reflected on some of the mysteries of time, including its elasticity, our "inner clocks," and eternity..

To access Msgr. Pope's complete post, please visit:

Community in Mission: Does anybody really know what time it is? A meditation on the mystery of time. (1 JAN 21)