Liturgical Time vs. Clock Time

Read an interesting blog by Dr. Matthew Tan on the difference between liturgical/kairos time and clock/chronos time. It was something I had never really thought about before, and for that reason I found myself intrigued. Anytime I read something that brings an idea to me I have never even thought about or heard, I am intrigued..once again realizing the depths of learning and thought that are to be explored...especially when it is a thought about such a simple and taken for granted thing as time.

Tan questions the modern and post modern idea of "empty homogenized" clock time, where all of time is measured out into single and impartial moments that can be controlled. For me i was struck by the reality that not everyone always had clocks on there wall, and for all of time...time has not been measured by the passing of measurable moments. Another way of looking at time is as "liturgical", filling time with meaning....here are some of my favorite quotes from the blog:

When time becomes defined by an endless string of moments, what becomes denied is the possibility of radical transformation, what Walter Benjamin calls a “Messianic cessation of happening”. Things are always the way they are, and things will always be the way they are. There is a despair that becomes particularly acute when you consider that in postmodernity, the essentially modern search continues for individual security. There is a hyper-emphasis on the isolated monad, which heightens the sense that social relations are, as Daniel M. Bell observes, merely relations of “combat and sheer assertion”.

 both modern and postmodern time requires stripping time of any significance. Liturgical time, by contrast, in following a liturgical calendar, actually fills the time with meaning. 

Tan's thoughts are interesting and deep, and I enjoyed reading through it. I just got onto Tan's work today, but I like what I initially see of him. Tan is a professor of theology and philosophy at the Australian Catholic University, he edits a blog called the "divine wedgie" and already I have found his doctoral thesis and another paper he wrote online: thick stuff that I am looking forward to getting into at some point.