The slippery fish of time

An essay winding longer than expected, but isn’t that the point?

1.

Too-tight shoes. Too-short pants. Another pencil mark traced on the wall, an inch above last year’s line.

We notice time’s relentless roll by physical markers left in its wake. But these signs only show that time is past, not present. Our eyes might be caught by a change in a child’s face—new teeth, new freckles, new pimples—but the time which brought the transformation remains elusive as a furtive fox. 

How can we approach this skittish creature? How to live with it, pray with it, move through its wild nature?

Children teach us that we cannot grasp time, cannot control it, cannot even fully behold it. We witness their growth—their bodies lengthening and expanding—but we cannot comprehend it. We can only marvel at the mystery.

Living close to children brings the press of time, the bittersweet brutality of its fleeting nature. “I wish time would slow down,” parents say. “Stop growing so fast,” we laugh or lament. 

We don’t mean it, of course. As bearers and tenders of life in its most fragile moments, parents know a child’s growing and maturing are good gifts. 

But loving what cannot last brings its own agony, reminding us that we too are mortal, our own time here is limited (and so is theirs), and much of our lives is spent on the unnoticed and quick-forgotten, the mundane and not the miraculous. 

Time’s ordinary extraordinary is too much to hold.

2. 

Ask a pregnant woman at full-term how she feels about time. 

Ask a young mother with terminal cancer. Ask a grandfather, a college senior, a new retiree, a child waiting for Christmas, a refugee caught in bureaucracy’s web. 

Time is not a monolith but a mystery, holding each of us in different places, peering through a kaleidoscope’s shifting perspectives. 

“What is time?” became a pandemic refrain, our collective disorientation as time became unmoored, weekdays melting into weekends, nights and days blurring as months and years passed.

At any given moment, people we love are waiting for days to speed up or wishing they would slow down. We each have to wrestle, making a way to live with and within the limits of our own mortality.

Time is elusive by nature. We grasp it differently, if we catch it at all.

3. 

My oldest son is now a teenager. I look him in the eye. 

He told me he liked the title of this essay when he glanced over my shoulder, rummaging in my office for school supplies. Startled, I told him thanks.

Parents forget we are growing alongside our children. We look up, bewildered, and find that years have passed without our knowing, without marking our own milestones. 

Yes, they learned to walk and talk, to ride a bike or read a book, to begin school and then complete it. But we, too, were learning and changing and growing alongside them, stretching capacities, gaining abilities, deepening our understanding of what it means to love and serve.

We call time a teacher or thief, a friend or foe depending on whether we want it to scatter or stay. We try to pin down its movement with photos or journals, but we cannot capture the fullness of any moment in all dimensions. 

Time is one of the central conditions of human experience, bounded as we are by bodies that grow and age and fail. But time is also a divine gift, created by God when the universe was spoken into being.

Time is the slippery fish and the waters in which it swims.

4.

Sometimes I picture God as a wizened fisherman, knee-deep in a rushing stream, holding the thrashing fish of time in triumph above his head, laughing at how he finally caught it for us.

One day God will be all-in-all, and the One who Holds All Things Together will bear aloft for us the ultimate gift of eternity: love and joy and communion without end, forever and ever, amen.

But today that dream still eludes us, the fish still a dark shadow escaping our lines under the waters. Herein lies the rub: how can we navigate earthly time passing while living toward sacred time unending?

Prayer. Patience. Perspective. (I wish I had an easier answer; believe me, I’ve tried.)

Prayer pierces the veil between here and eternity, allowing us for a flash of a moment to enter the divine space of the fullness of time, where God is present everywhere and always. 

Embracing a patient abiding-in-time as a holy practice offers its own dynamic prayer, adapting and responding to the needs of the moment. 

The circular perspective of liturgical time spins us through seasons with holy humility: we aren’t in charge, and spiritual growth is never linear. (This gentle gift is also why every turn through the cycle feels fresh and new: we haven’t had this Advent before, this Easter, this Ordinary Time.)

We cannot catch that fish. But we can move through the rushing stream with greater awe and deeper gratitude. 

We can learn to loosen our anxious grip, to allow time to teach us rather than trying to transform it. We can humble ourselves back into our own finitude, knowing we are here for only a sliver of a second in the long stretch of cosmic time. We can remember that we are called to do what we can while we are here. No more, no less.

We can try to lift our heads in more moments—whether mind-numbing or mind-blowing—and give thanks to the Creator of time itself that we got to be here at all, to dive into the great flowing mystery of life. 

5.

School starts soon. Ten more days for the oldest two, three weeks for the youngest. Their lament for summer is already in full cry. We didn’t do half of what we planned; it was too short and too fast; I want it to stay. The bittersweet love song of every August.

By nature I am prone to melancholy, so sad songs catch me off guard as seasons turn and school supplies shining on the kitchen table make me wistful. Wasn’t I just breathing in the scent of my own fresh pack of crayons? How am I old enough to send a fourth child to kindergarten?

Only time will tell, goes the adage. And time does tell: our best stories and our hardest days, the shining moments and the stumbling dark years.

Time is held, and we are held within it, and at day’s end when the light glistens off the water, I still glimpse that triumphant fisherman in my mind’s eye, laughing with joy as he holds high for us what was never ours to catch.

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Clearly I love to wrestle with the mystery of time. If you want to read more, here’s The Extraordinary Ordinary Time: a new collection of essays, prayers, and poems for Ordinary Time available today from Mothering Spirit.