How to make today holy

Time flies. A race against time. Time out. Waste of time. Time management. Time crunch. Time is money….Happy Hour. His finest hour. At the eleventh hour. Our darkest hour. Zero hour.“His hour had come.”Each one of us has a particular "relationship" with time; in the created world, time is the way we measure our experience. Some of us are efficient and have a keen sense of passing time, some seem more aloof from the ticking of the clock. Sometimes, our schedules are so packed we are rushing from one thing to the next without intentionality, which can suppress our ability to be intentional at any time! Sometimes, we even “kill time” while we wait for something better to happen.But as created beings with a call from God, it is our task to SANCTIFY time as we progress toward the Kingdom outside of time. Every moment is valuable, because every moment is a gift.God Himself taught us this at the very beginning of time, by making the seventh day HOLY. Later, He taught the Israelites wandering in the wilderness to observe certain feasts on specific weeks/days of the year, every year. Fasts and feasts, Sabbath and jubilee years established a pattern for living and understanding our relationship with God, with each other, and with the time we walk in this earth. And now, within the Church, we experience this rhythm in the liturgical year.But our lives are full, and each year they seem to become fuller and busier, and there is no “slow down” button, or a “pause for Church stuff” option. As a mother of seven, a catechist, and a parish DRE, I know this; year after year, the liturgical seasons seem to come upon us suddenly and we speed through them before we can fully enter the banquet.Yes, the banquet. Each year, God puts before us in the Church a wonderful banquet of feasts to keep us well-fed. But often we seem to race past the table that is set as if it were a fast food drive-thru: yes, ok, I’ll take that; please hurry up because I am short on time. Too often we nibble around the edges on our way by because we don’t take time to hold still, appreciate the beautiful historical setting, the background music, the awesome guests. Too often, we do not express our heartfelt gratitude to the Host, Who is also our loving Father.The Church is the family of God to which we belong by baptism, and the liturgical year – with its fasts and feasts, sorrows and joys, smells and bells - is the repeated celebration of OUR STORY. Each year, we walk through salvation history as if for the first time, so that we have the repeated opportunity to hear and celebrate the story of creation, fall, Incarnation, redemption, and resurrection, and realize it is OURS.If we want to be well-fed by this banquet, we will need to be intentional about our attendance. While this does not need to be time-consuming, we must invest the energy and effort needed to establish a way of communicating to ourselves and to the young people for whom we are responsible that this time is special.So let’s consider our relationship with time. And together, let’s explore ways we can make every moment holy. The Church, in her wisdom, has a tradition of dedicating the hours, the days of the week, the months of the year, and the liturgical seasons so that there is always a rich feast. In the next few weeks, let’s look at this tradition in some detail, and share the ways we “redeem the time.”