"Take Five" is a classic jazz piece first recorded by the Dave Brubeck Quartet and released on its 1959 album Time Out.
Gentle Reader “What we have is a failure to communicate.” (A line from the great movie “Cool Hand Luke”). We don’t listen to one another , we are to busy forming our next thoughts in response to what we are not listening to you saying. No wonder we don’t have the time.
Dakota Indians on the other hand (spoken like a true Libra) have this kind of time perspective. The world in which they live is entirely a present one. They would agree with Augustine when he said,(11)
What is now plain and clear is that neither future nor past things are in existence and that it is not correct to say there are three periods of time: past, present, and future. Perhaps it would be proper to say there are three periods of time: the present of things past, the present of things present, and the present of things future.
In short, only the present has any reality. A few years ago a full-blooded Dakota Indian girl with a Ph.D. wrote to a friend and said, "You see, we Indians live in eternity."(12) She explained that the Dakota Indian was not striving to get somewhere in this world, or the next; he was already there.
Time, events, and space relationships
What is said of time is thought about space also. The Australian aborigines have no difficulty at certain times of the year in believing they can be in two different places at once, an idea that to us seems clearly impossible. Two branches of a family with a shared totem will ceremonially eat this totem animal once a year to re-unite themselves with their ancestral roots. Though the two branches may be hundreds of miles apart and have each captured a specimen of their totem animal and slaughtered it, they will both believe they have captured and eaten the very same animal, not simply the same species of animal, but the same particular animal. There is no contradiction to this in their mind. Both they and the animal can be in two different places at the same time. It reminds one of the statement made by the Lord (John 3:13 (13) ) in which He speaks of Himself as actually being "in heaven," though also on earth. And in keeping with this elimination of distinction between the two worlds, the same Lord could speak of Himself as existing at this very moment "before Abraham was" (John 8:5 8 ) .(14)
It is impossible by our logic to reconcile such conceptions of space and time but this is only because we are culturally bound to a view which is only partially correct. The native sense of space is not like that of an enormous box with the top and bottom missing and the sides knocked out, within which discrete things are separately positioned apart from one another: and their sense of time is not that of a river flowing by, a river which is in existence before it reaches us and continues on after it has passed us. The native creates both his own space and his own time by his own experience. Evans-Pritchard, who for many years studied and lived with a Nilotic black people called the Nuer, had to develop a different time sense in order to enter into their way of thinking. They do not keep time with their clocks, their clocks keep time with them. As he put it ( 15) The daily tasks of the kraal are the points of reference for each day, and for longer periods than a day the points are the phases of other recurrent activity such as weeding or the seasonalmovement of men and their herds. The passage of time is the succession of activities and their relations to one another. All sorts of interesting conclusions follow. Time has not the same value at one season of the year that it has at another. Since the Nuer have, properly speaking, no abstract of time reckoning they do not think of time as something actual which passes, which can be wasted, can"be saved, and so forth; and they do not have to co-ordinate their activities with an abstract passage of time, because their point of reference is the activities themselves.Thus, in a certain month one makes the first fishing dams and forms the first cattle camps, and since one is doing these things it must be that month or thereabouts. One does not make fishing dams because it is November; it is November because one is making fishing dams. [Emphasis mine].
Intervals between events are not reckoned as short or long passages of intervening time. What intervals of time there are, are "measured" by the importance of the events that bracket the interval. And as for an event itself, if it is very important it takes up a lot of time regardless of what the clock may happen to say. Even the order in which events are remembered and reported will be the order of their importance, notnecessarily the order of their historical sequence.
Time reflected in social codes
A culture's particular sense of time can have some remarkable repercussions on their methods of handling social problems. If the past is of no consequence for the present, a crime or a misdemeanor done long ago has no present significance from a legal standpoint. It no longer counts. Suppose in a South African gold mine a native employee is late and is docked so much "time" as a penalty. If the penalty is not imposed at once, it will strike him as a gross injustice to penalize him at the end of the week. It requires a basic re-orientation of time sense for such an employee, freshly introduced into a clock conscious world, to accept a delayed penalty as just. It is not without parallel in our own culture, as C. S. Lewis commented ( 16)
We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speakers, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact orto the guilt of the sin. The guilt is not washed out by time but by repentance and the blood ofChrist.
How much time must elapse until an event which has moral implications becomes an event without moral implications? Can guilt be cancelled at all by the mere passage of time? Admittedly as an accommodation to the fact that we are time bound because we are space bound, it seems that the mere passage of time must be allowed to have some bearing in the matter; and so we have the Statute of Limitations as a necessary accommodation.
Our time is limited and will run out so that, as we have less and less of it remaining to us in this life, it becomes in a sense increasingly worth more and more to us. Experience shows that to delay the penalty unduly may impose an unfair hardship because what at thetime might have been a just imposition becomes, as our time begins to run out, less and less just, simply because what time remains to us becomes increasingly more valuable. It is a kind of progressive inflation. Thus a man earning a high salary could be reasonably expected to pay a penalty that at the time represented ten percent of his current income. But if the same penalty is imposed upon him ten years later when he has retired and his current income is not a quarter of what it then was, the burden of the samepenalty becomes unbearable. It is commonly agreed as unjust to impose a penalty after many years have elapsed which change the circumstances. It is true that the same delay in some cases may place the guilty party in a much better position to pay so that the penalty is reduced in its effect. However, the prime object of the system is really intended to protect the injured party, but limitations are imposed in an effort to balance injustice to either party. As Paton and Derham have noted ( 17) "It is unsettling to allow no time limit to legal claims. . . . The small percentage of cases in which there may be injustice is outweighed by the legal interests in establishing security."
Such considerations are relevant only while we remain within the present space-time framework. In terms of the justice of God in the light of eternity in which the present does not recede into the past, such limitations surely do not apply. Here the time factor becomes irrelevant, for guilt is present not past. In so far as heaven belongs to a timeless order of things, time lapse is not going to be relevant in determining the measure of guilt or of innocence.
The Christian: two worlds — two times
When a man becomes a child of God he is placed in a position of living in two different worlds. He cannot yet escape the world of time and space, and in his horizontal man-to-man relationships he must accept the consequences of the framework within which his social life is lived. But in so far as he has been translated into the Kingdom of God's dear Son and has become a citizen of eternity, to this extent in his man-to-God vertical relationships he lives within a different framework. There is a sense in which his life becomes timeless, the new man ceases to grow old even though hopefully he may mature. There is a sense in which he lives in heaven even though he does not altogether escape the bonds of the material world. The community of the saints is a society of people who share together this dual sense of time, and it is important that we should not isolate ourselves from this new society, for membership here is everlasting: we are only passing through this world. The Lord prayed for us, not that we might be taken out of it but kept while we are in it (John 17:15). (18 )
Is there only a subjective sense of time?
In summary it can be said that any culture which places a major emphasis on the accumulation of things will tend to be pre-occupied with the value of time. It will cut up time, parcel it out, reify it as quantifiable, give it a measurable existence in its own right which it probably does not in fact possess. Our culture has done this pre-eminently. Many other cultures do it scarcely at all. Thus we have to recognize that a different culture with a different ethos may have a different perception of time. We also need to recognize that as Christians our sense of time has been modified, because Christian culture is different in its ethos and thus also in its perception of time. But quite apart from "cultural" influences, we also have to recognize that it is not merely a modified sense of the passage of time (which is subjective) that has to be taken into account. It is now known that time itself does not flow past us at a constant rate even when viewed objectively. It is as though the tape that is running through the recorder from the future into the past can actually run more slowly or more quickly under certain circumstances — and perhaps even stop running altogether! This is not a subjective deceleration or acceleration, but an objective phenomenon, a phenomenon that is (as we shall see) quantitatively measurable. The implications of such a possibility are tremendous.
To be continued . . .
Love, Denis
p. s. Keep thinking and listening
Footnotes: for those who want to check things out for themselves...
11. Augustine, Confessions, Bk.XI.xx.26.
12. Miss Deloria to R. Clyde McCone, "Evolutionary Time: A Moral Issue" in A Symposium on Creation, Henry Morris et al., Grand Rapids, Baker, 1968, p.144.
13. "No man has yet ascended up into heaven but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man, who is in heaven". John 3:13.
14. "Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am." John 8:58.
15. Evans-Pritchard, E. E., Social Anthropology, London, Cohen & West, 1951, p.103.
16. Lewis, C. S., The Problem of Pain, New York, Macmillan, 1962, p.61
17. Paton, G. W. and David P. Derham, A Textbook of Jurisprudence, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1972, p.502.
18. "I pray not that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil. . . ." John 17:15.
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