The thoughts I think at night - Time

One of the things I like about working nights here is being able to watch the moon rise and see it wax and wane. I saw it last night. It is a “waning gibbous moon, 60% lit.” I saw it first around 2 am, just after it had risen. Beautiful sight.

Every time I see the moon I am reminded that there is a rhythm built into creation that we moderns are only semi-vaguely aware of. Time is kept differently in creation. We have clocks and calendars. Creation has seasons. Everything in creation is precise, yet the year, the journey of the earth around the sun, “measured from one vernal equinox to the next [is] 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45.51 seconds.” And the lunar month, the time from one new moon to the next (or full moon to full moon) is “29.530589 days - 29 d 12 h 44 min 2.9 s.” That means there are roughly 12.4 months a year. Very interesting. Since God is a God of order and everything in creation is so precise, there must be a reason for this.

We have artfully and artificially imposed our own calendar over this. We sort of snicker at the ancients who had 360 day years (12 thirty day months), who, on a regular and fore-known schedule, had to add a month to the end of the year to make it come out right. Yet we have a leap year every four years to make our calendar come out right! And getting back to the moon, there have been and still are cultures that keep time by the moon rather than the sun. They experience an interesting phenomenon – their holy days move throughout the year! The Jews used a lunar month, and in order to keep Passover in the spring, they had to occasionally add a month. This is interesting!

The most basic unit of time is the day. Day and night. Light and darkness. It is much harder to ignore this rhythm of creation, yet we successfully blur even this with artificial light! I’m the offspring of that – I work nights and sleep days.

The day begins at sunrise. Or does it? For some reason we have the day begin in the middle of the night. It is actually called midnight. So 2 A.M., middle of the night, is “morning”. It would seem that God’s idea, and one followed by the Jews and other ancient cultures, was to have one day end and the next begin on the same note – the setting of the sun. So, for the Orthodox Jew, the Sabbath begins at sunset Friday night and ends at sunset Saturday night. The Celts and Anglo-Saxons observed the same practice. Remember Hallowe’en (All Hallows Eve) and Christmas Eve? Today that means “the night or evening before Christmas.” But it really means “Christmas evening” that is, they observed the day as consisting of “night and day”. We think of it as day and night, but we messed it all up by having the day start at midnight. Oy vay!

And think about hours and minutes and seconds. They are so essential to our society yet where do they go when you are on the river, in the woods, or at the beach? You are aware of time passing as the sun moves through the sky and the shadows shorten and lengthen, but there are no hours and minutes. These are artificial. You are also aware of the passing of time by listening to the birds. As the sun is setting they are singing, then, all of a sudden, there are no birds, only crickets. They are quiet all night. Then, around 4 am ‘man time’ there are these birds that begin singing. It is amazing! It is still dark but they know the sun is on the way. Awesome!

I am a modern man and as such suffer this loss with you. There is a rhythm in creation of day and night, the seasons, the year. The Creator established it in His creation. Sadly, I am only vaguely aware of it. And to the extent that I am not aware of it, I am the less. And in the measure that I have embraced the artificial and man made rhythms and lost awareness of the rhythms of creation, I have lost that degree of the awareness and awe of the Creator. Whenever I step outside and see the moon, my heart rises in praise to the Creator.

Sometimes, these are the thoughts I think at night.