“Please stop Christmas from leaving,” my toddler pled as each box of Christmas was sent back to its post-season resting place. Despite our best protests, the Christmas season as most of us know it has drawn to a close. All the preparations and fanfare of Christmas fade into the calendar of another year.

But the church calendar, which quietly honors another rhythm within the time-crunching world around us, offers the strange suggestion that we actually can stop Christmas from leaving. Six days into our new calendars, after trees have come down, lights are put away, and the ambiance of Christmas has dimmed to a faint afterthought, Epiphany is celebrated. Hardly dim in significance, the feast of Epiphany commemorates all of the peculiar events that first revealed the identity of Jesus in the world: the magi’s adoration of the Christ child, the manifestation of Christ at his baptism, the first miracle at the wedding in Cana, among others.

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Most of us, if we’re honest, live by the clock. The alarm sounds and we are off watching the minutes slip by. Time-sensitive deadlines drive our days. We have appointments and meetings, we eat at a certain time, and the day ends by a certain time. Bound to our timepieces, it often seems our every moment is synchronized and controlled. Those timepieces count the minutes that make up the hours that fill our days, months and even years which come and go.

In contrast to these “objective” measures of time marking seconds, minutes, and hours, there is also a “subjective” experience of time being “fast or slow.” Those of us who are growing older describe our experience of time as passing by more and more quickly. We feel our vacation time as ephemeral, while our work week plods slowly by—and yet both are marked by the same objective measurements of time. How is it that our subjective experience of time is so different from what our watches and clocks objectively mark out for us, second by second, hour by hour?

This question of our subjective experience of time is one that the ancient philosophers and early Christian leaders pondered. Their philosophical and theological musings bequeathed to us many perplexities regarding the human experience of time. Saint Augustine, for example, wrestled with the fleeting character of our human temporal experience. No sooner do we apprehend the present than it has receded into the past. He wrote, “We cannot rightly say what time is, except by reason of its impending state of not-being.”(1)

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