33 Sunday Ordinary Time, B, 18 November 2012, Mark 13:24-32

The Greenwich Meridian

Time

A few years ago, I was visiting London. While there, I took a water-taxi down the River Thames to Greenwich. This was one of the things that was on my to-do list.

Located at Greenwich, the Royal Observatory is a laboratory of time. As the British Empire spread across the world, navigators needed to have reference points so that they could calculate where they were on the face of the earth. And so, in 1884, Greenwich Mean Time was adopted internationally as a reference point. Everywhere on the earth tells its time by Greenwich Mean Time. So, here in Ireland we share the same time-zone as London, Lisbon, The Ivory Coast, and Morocco along with many other places. Rome, Paris, Berlin, Madrid are all one hour ahead of us.

One of the fascinating places to visit at the Royal Observatory is its museum. There are timepieces there from the last four hundred years or so. Some of them were made by Isaac Newton. Some are from very recent history. Most of the early attempts are very inaccurate by our standards today.

The gospel this Sunday is all about time. It is about the end of the world, a so-called apocalyptic vision of the end of time.

Time is strange for us human beings. Our perception of time is effected by our personality, by the activity we are engaged in and by our mental state. If we are depressed we can lose all sense of time and time can seem to move very slowly. If we are intoxicated with alcohol we can lose our sense of time. If we are having great fun, time can seem to fly by. And, we are told that we have to occupy our time, because as the old saying goes: 'idle hands are the devil's work.' And, of course, time might seem to go very slowly when we are at Mass listening to the priest rabbit on!

Our sense of time changes as we get older. Time seems to slip by very fast as we age, whereas when we are young, time can seem to go very slowly. When we are a teenager, our body clock is set around a 25 or 26 hour day which means teenagers are always sleepy and will happily sleep in any chance they get. But, the average 60 year old can actually cope with a lot less sleep as there body clock is set around a 20 hour day. The older we get, the earlier we wake up!

The gospel this Sunday is an apocalyptic vision of the end of time. The closest we can come to understanding this is when a loved-one belonging to us dies. Time can seem to stand still. We cannot understand why the world keeps going, the trains keep rolling, cars keep driving by. We want to scream and shout at the world to stop. We want time to stop because of what has happened to us. Time has stopped.

Whatever our experience of time, one thing is for certain. We don't have a lot of it. And in today's world we seem to have less and less of it. We are so busy that time seems to slip through our fingers. We forget to catch up with friends and family. We meet at weddings and funerals. Our career becomes all-important. Time is too short.

Some day our time here will come to an end. Becoming more conscious of this every day can lead us to live fuller, more fulfilling lives – dare I say, holier lives. An awareness of our mortality, that death comes for us at a time that we know not, this awareness of our mortality helps us to live our time here in the best way that we can. Our time on this earth is valuable and not to be wasted. Its time to put our time to good use.