We've probably gotten used to it this year, so I think it's time to ask: What is the deal with daylight savings time? Why do we do it? Or maybe I should ask, why do we do it to ourselves? Who decided that we should get used to waking up at one hour, and then change it all up? And who had the audacity to suggest we should repeat it every six months?
The publicity behind the whole thing is that we get an extra hour of daylight as we head into spring, which is good for people who work the regular nine-to-five and—allegedly—it gives farmers an extra hour of sunshine with which to make hay. We spring ahead, we push four o'clock into five o'clock, and it appears as if we have a new hour of sunlight, as clean as virgin soil, waiting for us at the end of the day.
But with saying that, I think I've found a hole in the concept. If I understand things properly, the days already get longer as we slide into summer, so this seems less like an effort at improving our circumstances and more like an effort at fixing nature.
If we actually wanted to help ourselves, we should probably do something like spring ahead every year without falling back at all. That way, we'd extend the day over and over again, perhaps canceling out the next leap year in the process. Maybe the math wouldn't work out, but at least we'd feel like we were getting somewhere, rather than all this step-forward-step-backward stuff.
This year, daylight savings time coincided with the beginning of Lent, the season of the Christian calendar that leads us toward the Passion and all the stories that go with it. They're like fables or fairy tales when you think about them: the ride into Jerusalem on a donkey; the burst of anger in the Temple; the ear of an assailant miraculously healed in the Garden of Gethsemane; the pageantry of the Crucifixion; and, of course, the Resurrection.
What is the deal with the Resurrection? Perhaps, like daylight savings time, we may ask ourselves that. How are we supposed to understand something like Christ's Resurrection, particularly in the modern world where people don't rise from the dead on a regular basis?
Are we to understand it as a physical resurrection—a literal resurrection of the body, with the scars running up Christ's arms and down his side for doubting Thomas to touch? That's not a bad interpretation. It grants the Christian story a gravity and a reality for believers, like a solid historical point on the human timeline.
Are we to understand the Resurrection as a figurative resurrection, one that has its seat in folklore and myth-making? That's not a bad interpretation either. It maintains the history of the Christian story, of the genesis and evolution of its community. It also links the Christian story to the stories of other great religions of the world, allowing us to see their shared truth.
Perhaps there's a third way to understand it, an abstract way. The Resurrection is Platonic, about being brought back from the ignorance of death to the enlightenment of life, or even Gnostic, about dying to a false world and returning alive to a world of truth.
An abstract interpretation further aligns the Christian story with the great thinkers and schools of thought, the ones that have influenced the way that we experience and understand our reality and ourselves. Furthermore, it opens up the Christian story to us personally. The unbelievable becomes something we can comprehend, and what Christ did we can do, as long as we can grapple with the impossible so that it becomes possible in our lives.
But there's even another understanding of the Resurrection, and it's the most incredible understanding of them all. It's that all of those understandings are equally true at the same time. This is not waving them away as “it's all a matter of interpretation.” It's bigger than that. It's the ability to see the same phenomenon from different, coexisting vantage points.
For example, we can all agree that time is a construct. We can divide up the day and the night into hours or minutes or seconds, the same way that we can divide up the slow course of the Earth into weeks or months or centuries. But those hours are not really time. Hours are a useful way to comprehend time, but at the end of the day, time doesn't care what we call it.
Have you heard the phrase “map is not territory”? It comes from Science and Sanity, a book by Alfred Korzybski, a philosopher of language. The full quote is: “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”
Our map of the territory is not the territory it represents. It can come close to the real thing, perhaps even very close, but a map will never be that territory it describes. However, while that description is not the real thing, it does not lack value as long as we can learn something from it.
Map is not territory. Time is not territory either. It's a counting of beats, whether it's the ticking hand of a clock or the pulse of every human heart. The first chapter of the book of Genesis gives us a cosmic vantage point to comprehend time and what it measures:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the Earth, the Earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a mighty wind swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, 'Let there be light'; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day and the darkness Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Time is a counting of beats that measures light and darkness, where the night ends and the light of day begins. But remember, time is not territory. It isn't even time. And time is not light, that elusive substance that slips between wave and particle and through our fingers into day and night and day again. Time is a map of that light.
In the creation story, light is many things. Light is the order of awareness, because when we see things for what they really are, everything is made clear in the light. Light is the awareness of creation, which is an awareness of the one who brought everything into being as we see the hand of the creator in the creation.
Light is also knowledge, because it is a dividing line between clarity and chaos, between the light of awareness and the darkness that was banished with the light of the new world. And finally, the definition of light is given directly: Light is good, and light is that which is good.
When we examine time, whether it's the past lives of holy men and women or our own futures, it's an opportunity to explore light, the goodness that we have seen and the goodness that we could be. When we explore with light, we banish the darkness of chaos and ignorance with order and understanding. But that light doesn't care what we call it or how we observe it. All that matters is that we see the light for what it is: light.
That means we can change the language we use to define the light—we can shift our focus by springing forward or falling back—but in doing so, all we are doing is understanding light a little differently, hopefully even a little better. That doesn't change what the light was and continues to be. It's all light. And it's all good.
Lent is not territory either. Our observation of Lent is not the same as Christ's Passion—what went into his mission or through his mind as he pulsed onward toward the Crucifixion and Resurrection. But Lent is a map of that territory. It's our way of discovering that territory every year.
Lent is a map of spiritual territory—perhaps well trod but always worth reevaluation. Lent shows us what has been, and Lent points at what could be, what we could be if we take on the humble mission, the compassionate spirit, the enlightened mind of Christ. Lent is a map of a beautiful country. Let's start exploring.
