Celebrating Sacred Time
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But in the everyday here and now, we are creatures limited by time; time is the context within which we live our lives; all our activity takes place within time; as creatures, we belong within time; it's impossible for us to get outside time and view it objectively and dispassionately. Time exists as part of the created universe and so it becomes the setting for the whole of human existence and it also marks the moment -by-moment passing of that existence. Big Ben is the archetypal image of our bondage to time ...


And this scene from Heathrow Airport just before Christmas shows even more clearly how the time of day, the day of the week, the time of the year, the time the flight leaves, or arrives - how all these things rule our lives. We can measure time, we can set our watches, we run national rail services, we organise flights to and from international airports, we can compute time from billions of years ago, right down to the nearest nano-second - perhaps this picture sums up our current world and its preoccupations very neatly - but in case we might think this is a modern 21st century preoccupation ...
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