MAN AND TIME: D. H. LAWRENCE

 

D.   H. LAWRENCE 

MAN AND TIME

The day and the year are the primordial units for our measurement of time; in each case, the earth completes a full movement, and such integral cycles can be a symbol of life itself for us, a life which has its morning and its evening, its Spring and its Fall.

Caught up in the natural rhythms of the universe and the world, man can also find in them a rhythm for his soul. Just as the earth receives its energy from the sun, so man finds in the passage of the days and the years dimensions adapted to the successive stages of his spiritual growth.²

The daily cycle is one of immediate demands, of indispensable little tasks, of the "terrible duties of everyday." It is the cycle of daily work, of the kind of things that a workman can weigh and count each evening as the tangible fruit of his daily labor, earning him his bread and his bed. The day is the field of ascetical effort, viewed a little naively perhaps by one of the Fathers of the Desert in the following way: "Man can attain to divine proportions between sun-up and sundown, if he wants to." ³ With all its limitations and its human preoccupations, the day contains divine possibilities. The daily cycle is also the eucharistic cycle and the cycle of choral prayer, of the hours of the Divine Offce, "so that the whole course of the day and night is made holy by the praise of God " 4

The day may be thought of as a little year, concealing within its twenty-four hours a kind of miniature of the rich varieties of the annual cycle. For men, the year with its four seasons of

growth and decline, fecundity and repose constitutes the whole cycle of nature, and is the one great natural unity by which we measure our duration. By means of the year we can situate ourselves in the swift flow of events and capture, as it were, in a framework given us by nature, the shifting kaleidoscope of existence. Like the sower and the reaper, every man must surrender himself in the vast perspective of the turning seasons to something greater and more venerable than himself. Neither the earth nor man can simply turn on its own axis as in the daily cycle; each must turn around a fixed center which measures and disposes in sovereign fashion the phases and the incidents of its progress. The very grandeur of this cycle invites man to the awareness that even the most personal and freest of his actions is inserted in a grand and mysterious and overarching design which is guided from above. Such a complete and mysterious cycle very fittingly stands for the whole of life and of history. Jesus himself, citing Isaiah, referred to His redemptive mission as the proclama(ion of the acceptable year of the Lord [Lk. 4, 19], and more than once cast the history of the world in terms of sowing and reaping, planting and harvesting. [Mk. 4, 3—20, 26—29; Mt. 13, 24-33; Jn. 4, 37-381

If the secret of human existence lies in a close synthesis of permanency and renewal, we shall find that the annual cycle of the liturgical year fulfills both these requirements. It is a renewal of the abiding mysteries of both the natural and the supernatural worlds; it provides men with a fixed center as well as with those rhythmic revolutions which are his immersion in time.

The old Church knew that life is here our portion, to be lived in fulfillment. The stern rule of Benedict, the wild flights of Francis of Assisi, these were coruscations in the steady heaven of the Church. The rhythm of life itself was preserved by the Church, hour by hour, day by day, season by season, year by year, epoch by epoch, down among the people, and the wild coruscations were accommodated to this permanent rhythm. We feel it, in the south, in the country, when we hear the jangle of the bells at dawn, at noon, at sunset, marking the hours with the sound of Mass or prayers. It is the rhythm of the daily sun. We feel it in the

festivals, the processions, Christmas, the Three Kings, Easter, Pentecost, St. John's Day, All Saints', All Souls'. This is the wheeling of the year, the movement of the sun through solstice and equinox, the coming of the seasons, the going of the seasons. And it is the inward rhythm of man and woman, too, the sadness of Lent, the delight of Easter, the wonder of Pentecost, the fires of St. John, the candles on the graves of All Souls', the lit-up tree of Christmas, all representing kindled rhythmic emotions in the souls of men and women Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his union with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox! This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the earth and sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from its stem on the tree of Life, and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilized vase on the table.