The Möbius strip of time

Our yearly reminder that we are held

Still Life, December 28. Dusty floor, unmade bed, unfolded laundry, presents piled in corner. But behold that LIGHT, that gorgeous slanting winter light.

Here we are. There we are. Everything is the same. Everything is different.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s slips into time outside of time. The young ones beg for a pajama day; the older ones sleep till noon. We warm up leftovers for lunch again (or is it dinner?), keep the Christmas music spinning, make popcorn and pile on the couch for another favorite movie we have watched a hundred times before. Nothing new this week; we have indulged too much, our senses overloaded by bright presents and brighter lights, heaps of sweet food, warm drinks, and rich fare. Time loops like one long day. Is it Saturday? Or Friday? What is time? We laugh, we share memes of eating nothing but cookies and cheese, we joke about everything that sounds like a New Year’s problem.

This liminal time spools like a Möbius strip. If you’ve forgotten this bit of grade school magic, a Möbius strip is made from a thin piece of paper half-twisted and connected at the ends to make a neverending loop. A Möbius strip has only one side. If you trace its edge, you never have to lift your finger. When you try to go in, you come out. In a delightful twist, the Möbius strip as a mathematical object was discovered by two different Germans in the same year.¹ But ancient Roman mosaics with the same twisted loop show us how humans have been pondering the mysteries of space and time from the beginning.

“Aion, the god of eternity, is standing inside a celestial sphere decorated with zodiac signs. Sitting in front of him is the mother-earth goddess, Tellus (the Roman counterpart of Gaia) with her four children, who possibly represent the four seasons.” You could write a dissertation about those side-eyes, whew. Wikipedia.

Liminal comes from the Latin limen, meaning threshold.² At certain sacred times of the year, we are betwixt and between, standing on the edge but not yet arrived. We have lost track of time; the kids are on school break; we are wedging in work from home or leaving it till next year. Rather than the timeliness with which we hustle and grind and drive our days forward-ever-forward, this hallowed week invites us to imagine timelessness. What if we lived more like this, it whispers. What if we made more time for less? 

But this week also gives us something else. 

What if right now is the closest we come to realizing we don’t control time? What if this mysterious combination of feast and rest, celebration and quiet held between holidays, teaches us to start the new year not in our same old work but a fresh new Sabbath? We are offered this reminder every week—Sunday can be the holy seventh day, but it is also the first day (both Alpha and Omega, beginning or end of the calendar week, depending where you live).³ Yet we humans are slow to learn, even slower to slow ourselves down. Only when this strange, suspended week arrives, ending one year and beginning another, do we remember that time is not of our own making.

We are held by forces not our own.

Our chronos is not ultimate.⁴ Whether chronological time loops like a Möbius strip or stretches endlessly linear into past and future from where we stand today, what surrounds us is the holy time of kairos, the endless water in which we swim or the abundant air in which we breathe. Held by the Creator who holds all times together: past, present, and future. Who exists and operates outside of time, a blessed truth we don’t probe enough.

In a sharp (sometimes sarcastic) existential reflection, the author of Ecclesiastes reflects in looping circles on human time and holy time—and the chasm between them:

“What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end…I know that whatever God does endures for ever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.” (Ecclesiastes 3:9-11, 14-15)

That last line loops and loops, folding in on itself: that which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is. You cannot smooth out a Möbius strip. If you try to flatten it, there will always be a fold. In life, too, you cannot see around all the corners. We try, desperately, don’t we? Eager to know and more eager to control. But this looping, loping, looming or gleaming mystery of time—we can only be held within it, cradled by the Creator. Christmas’ out-of-time octave⁵ urges us to step back, to step away from life’s regular rhythms and ask deeper questions, probing how am I living and what do I need to change? Far from mere resolutions, these are reckonings we must make every year if we want to live well. (If we want to live, period.)

Yesterday I read one whole book and started another, a rare luxury only afforded by a week-outside-time. In Rest As Resistance, Tricia Hersey makes a passionate, prophetic, provocative argument that we need to rest to reconnect with our bodies and souls as well as with the bodies and souls of our ancestors. Hersey writes that “time loops when we rest,” reminding me of words I’d written here and long forgotten:   

We need new language for grief.

How time loops, touching past to present. The way prayer breathes though hot tears, silent save the salt trace. Grief’s kaleidoscope of colors: jealous green, angry red, indigo sorrow, violet lament. The uncanny un-coincidences—a loving text in a lonely moment, stubborn sun full in your eyes, the living breathing smiling child appearing at your elbow right before grief’s weight drags you under.

Today is beautiful, my life is full, I know so much joy—and still there are moments every day that catch my breath. I will never get used to that.

Grief has a word for that—our fierce faithful protest against the losses we were never created to endure. It is love.

Grief loops. Joy, too, the two entwined like garlands. During holidays we crave the comfort of childhood tastes, sights, and smells. And during these uncommon days when life’s regular rhythms—work, school, home, repeat—do not apply, time weighs differently: the lighter float of leisure, the freedom of unfettered hours, the faded memory of younger years. But ‘tis the time of year when old griefs and grudges resurface and cloud our vision, too. The darkest days can be hardest to bear. We forget that anyone might have created this time, let alone created it for us.

In The Rock That Is Higher: Story As Truth, Madeleine L’Engle writes of a long, painful recovery from a car accident that nearly killed her, leaving her hospitalized for months:

“As July turned into August, and the August days drooped slowly by, I was grateful in the hospital for the prayer of Jesus that stayed with me, a continuing, strengthening rhythm that was as strong as my heartbeat. I was grateful that Jesus left all the good sheep and went out into the storm after the lost and strayed one. I was even grateful that he paid the workers in the vineyard the same amount of money, no matter how long they had or hadn't worked. I was grateful for his promises to us that were either true or insane. I looked at the bruised and battered matter of my body and I was grateful that I believe that matter matters, matters to me, matters to the God who made it, and who took it on when all Love came to us as Jesus of Nazareth. I was grateful that my faith is more a matter of joy than of security. I was grateful that I still have a lot of questions that I do not expect to have answered, at least not by facts.

There's nothing anyone can tell me about death that's in the realm of laboratory proof or literalism. To think about death is an act of faith, a courage that the unknown is not empty, a belief that God is love, and Love does not create and then abandon or annihilate. I can't prove it. Sometimes I don't even believe it. And then hope, the deep, innate faith, surfaces.”

(italics hers; bold mine)

Rest as resistance and rest as revelation. Time as portal and time as prayer. Resurrection as hope and resurrection as practice. These words loop round and round like a Möbius strip, bowing and bending to each other, honoring the Love that made us and holds us.

This is a week to ponder what matters most. A liminal time for leisure (however you can get it when caregiving, children, and certain professions allow for scant free hours). A grateful time for joy. A tender time for grief. A looping time created by holy hands. A turning time for hope to surface. 

May you receive this time as gift, and may you know yourself held within hope—the hope that was and is and ever shall be.

Unintentional almost-Möbius strip made by one of my children and abandoned post present-unwrapping.

1. If you want to nerd out on Möbius strips. Or check out this deep dive.

2. Go figure: I started the year writing about liminal time, too. Cancer will do that to you, I guess.

3. “Most countries start the week on Monday, but most people start on Sunday: 67 countries and over 4 billion people start the week on Sunday; 160 countries and roughly 3.3 billion people start on Monday; in terms of population, it is almost 50/50: half the world’s population begins on Sunday. Almost all countries in North and South America start their week on Sunday, while countries in Europe and Oceania overwhelmingly start on Monday. The world’s most populated continents are split: roughly half the countries in Africa and Asia are on team Sunday, the other on team Monday. There are countries starting neither on Sunday nor on Monday: Countries like Afghanistan, Iran, and Somalia start their week on Saturday.” From here. More on Sunday as 1st/7th day here. I first noticed this when buying calendars in France that started the week on Monday, but I had no idea how this broke down culturally/continentally. FASCINATING.

4. I’m mildly obsessed with chronos and kairos. From last December: “We mortals are forever trying to control kairos within chronos, wanting to wedge God’s holy time within our earthly own, wrestling the coming of God into calendar countdowns.”

5. Did you know the Octave of Christmas is a whole holy celebration?