The Beginning and the End of Time

Above: Zodiac Clock


Time may be defined as a series of sequential moments in linear order.  Just as a child recites the alphabet by running through a linear series of unique letters, so time runs through a linear series of orderly, sequential and unique events, from the beginning of time to the end of time.

Presumably time is a straight line that begins at one point, Alpha, and ends at another, Omega.

Most clocks, however, represent time as a circle.  The small hand (hours) and the big hand (minutes) run round and round, through the same sequence of 12 numbers, over and over and over again.  There is no end to the number of times that the hour hand, the minute hand or the second hand on a clock may sweep through the same sequence. 

Circular clocks imply that time is indeed a series of sequential moments that follow one another in an orderly and sequential manner, but the series is cyclical and recurrent -- at 12 midnight a clock magically resets itself, and starts all over again. 

At midnight on December 31st, our calendars act like circular clocks and do the same thing: They magically reset themselves to zero and start the sequence of 12 months all over again.  The 12 days of Christmas (December 25 to January 6) neatly bracket that magical zero-hour, and thus they represent in miniature the twelves months of the year and the twelve astrological signs of the celestial zodiac.

Like a snowglobe, Christmas represents the magical circle of time in one small and beautiful crystal ball.  In the center of that crystal ball, one may see the image of a father, a mother and a baby held in the mother's arms (the past, the present and the future) joined together in a happy family group.

What is this picture trying to tell us? 

Be joyful and glad!  Life may sometimes seem to be linear, at the end of each year it may seem to end in gloom, doom, winter, death, despair and darkness, but in fact life is a great circle.  At the end of each cycle of time, the clock does not stop.  Sunset is followed by a new sunrise. Winter is followed by another Spring.  Death is followed by birth, resurrection and a new generation of life.

Time does not stop. Life goes on. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

Recently, a number of books on the year 2012 have made people begin to wonder if time and the world are about to end.  As proof, they point to the Mayan calendar, which ends on the date 21 December 2012.

Obviously this is a very linear, straight-line way of looking at things. It's a philosophy of time that places little or no faith in the great circle of time or the power of life to regenerate.  It believes in abrupt beginnings and dead ends.

This "End Time" view of 2012 is the natural opposite of the Big Bang Theory of creation, and it is the necessary corollary of such a linear hypothesis of time.  If time and the universe began at point Alpha with a Big Bang, then surely there must be some final point in time, point Omega, where time and the world come to a screeching halt with a Big Crash or a Big Thud. 

To straight-line thinkers, the Mayan calendar suggests we are going to reach point Omega in 2012 because 21 December 2012 marks the end of the Mayan calendar.

Should we all panic, then, and run around like Chicken Little shouting that the sky is about to fall on us?  Of course!  Start screaming right now.  But only if you really believe that time is linear.

The Mayan calendar itself is a big circle, and one must emphasize that the Mayans believed that time was cyclical.  December 21, 2012 may represent the end of a great cycle, but one must underscore the word cycle.   The Mayans were not linear thinkers.

The Mayans thought of time and life as a great circle.

One might ask anyone who is worried about time ending, how did they know that it would not end at midnight on December 31st, 2011?  After all, that was the last day on just about every 2011 calendar ever sold.

Why did all of the calendar makers make December 31 the very last day in 2011?  Why didn't they keep the 2011 calendar going? Was it because they knew that the world was going to end on December 31 at midnight?

Or did they, like the Mayans, stop there because that was the end of a single cycle?

The Mayans assumed that people in the future would be bright enough to realize that calendars, like alphabets, are linear measurements of cyclical time.  All calendars must come to an end. They end when they have finished summarizing a single cycle of the never-ending cycle of time.  The fact that a single calendar has come to an end does not mean that time itself is going to dead end.

The Mayans assumed that the people of our generation (a generation that they imagined as the distant future) would be bright enough to understand the circular nature of time.   They never imagined that millions of people would be running around in 2012, freaking out over the end of a calendar the Mayan priests had carved on a temple wall, thinking that time itself was going to stop.

Just in case future generations really were that stupid, the Mayans decided to portray time as a big circle or wheel.  They trusted that we would understand what a circle means.

What were they thinking?

Nativity and the Miracle of Childbirth

The poet John Keats once referred to the imagination as a "chamber of maiden thought" in which the conceptions of the mind spring to life, manifesting themselves in the same way that a rabbit miraculously jumps out of a magician's hat.

The miracle of dreams, thoughts and ideas, where they come from and how they "pop into" a person's head like a dream or a voice from nowhere, has puzzled people for thousands of years.  Likewise, to mothers as well as brain scientists, the notion that a baby may be conceived and born with a unique and independent personality of its own, a spirit and personality that arrives out of the blue, is a cause for anxiety and endless wonder.

Underlying this anxiety (will my child be a boy or a girl, a demon or an angel, a sad little runt or a powerful world-hero?) lies a secret: No one really knows where all of these children, their minds, personalities and spirits are coming from.   Explain it away as biology and chemistry if you want to, but any mother can tell you that you've missed the point if you think the birth of her child is simply a routine process of organic chemistry.

It's a miracle.

Nature has only one trick, but it's a good one.  Peakaboo!  People appear from nowhere (birth) and they disappear to nowhere (death) and nobody seems to have a very convincing explanation for why this is happening or how this is possible. 

Cynics delight in pointing out that the Christian tradition of celebrating the Nativity of Christ is nothing but a fairytale told to little children, much in the manner of a bedtime story full of make-believe characters (Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the shepherds, the three wisemen who follow a shining star, and, perhaps, as the playwright Christopher Durang has suggested, a camel named Misty.)

Mythologers affirm that many elements in the Nativity story are borrowed from the myths of Horus, Dionysus, Mithra and Krishna.  According to legend, Horus, Dionysus, Mithra and Krishna were sun-gods and world-saviors born on or near the winter soltice (December 21), born in a dark cave or stable surrounded by animals (the animal characters of the Zodiac) and visited by shepherds or wise men.  It's interesting to note that on December 24 the three stars in the belt of Orion (called "the three kings") align themselves with the star Sirius (the brightest star in the East) and point to the place on the horizon where the Sun will rise on December 25. These story elements originate with ancient astronomy, ancient star lore, and the worship of sun gods, not Christianity.

Historians, meanwhile, assure us that the commercialized forms of Christmas ritual we practice today have nothing to do with historical Christianity.  See, for example, the History Channel series of videos on the history of Christmas, which note that Christmas trees and Santa Claus were adopted from the Yuletide traditions of Scandinavia.  The Catholic Church has adopted these and many other pagan symbols during its 2,000 year history, with the result that the modern practice of Christmas has precious little to do with ancient Christian beliefs. The Dead Sea Scrolls constantly amaze people by refusing to mention smoothe jazz, reindeer or Santa Claus.  There is nary an eggnog or a Starbucks employee in a funny Christmas hat to be found among any of the ancient scrolls.

Economists agree the modern practice of pigging out on consumer goods one day of the year, December 25, has nothing to do with Christianity.  It's not about prophecy.  It's about profit.  Those who give more than they get at Christmas (charity) have mortally sinned against the Gospel of Greed, which commands us to make a profit and pray to Santa that we will get more than we give.

Evidently Christmas has become a perverse and tinsel-covered hash of the original nativity story found in the gospels of Matthew and Luke.  Many are understandably bitter about this fact.  This is a season when the worshippers of Mammon and Moloch mask their greed and the cold, cutthroat calculus of profit with a colorful but tissue-thin veneer of charity, and by doing so for only one day a year they seem to be giving themselves permission to behave with brutal indifference toward humanity the remaining 364.

As a lie told to little children and a hollow mockery of true Christian charity, the commercial version of Christmas sold at department stores deserves to be bashed. What the cynical Christmas-bashers miss, however, is the universal truth that got lost among all of this tinsel and wrapping paper: The miracle of childbirth.

Childbirth and the miraculous manifestation of new life in the world remain a mystery. The magic of a baby's grasp around one's finger and the breathtaking joy of gazing into the eyes of a newborn child remain every bit as powerful and amazing now in the year 2011 A.D. as they were 2,000 years ago.

Those who have grown old, cynical, tired or bitterly disappointed by the degraded form of commercialized Christmas practiced in our day, need to look back at the original fairytale of Christmas and ask themselves a simple question:  Were our ancestors really so stupid, when they invented this bedtime story for children?

As with many fairytales told by a clever writer, there is a second (hidden) meaning behind the innocent (literal) meaning. This hidden story speaks not only to the imagination of children, but also to the hearts of wise and world-weary adults. At the heart of the Christmas nativity story lies an ancient and archetypal symbol: A child held in its mother's arms.

Those who do not understand the love and hope behind this image have a great deal to learn.