…to reclaim time, the last night of that silly business of daylight savings time. People made ironic remarks to each other all day about getting back the hour stolen from them last spring. But the most ironic thing about this little biannual banter is that there’s no such thing in the first place. There’s no such thing as time, calculable time. We made it up. It’s a very handy abstract device for setting clocks and keeping calendars, a way to divide hours from epochs, and quite necessary to live any sort of ordered life—but, actually, nonexistent.

This year we reclaim time on the eve of All Souls Day, a coincidence that might make us think a bit more deeply about divisions of time—one of the only two that matter (birth and death), along with the artificial ones of our own making.

We might think a bit about the strangeness of time, not so much that it passes, but that it doesn’t “pass” at all. History is prophecy; we see that in both prophecy and history if we look closely enough.

But we can’t understand these things—and so we wind clocks and write calendars, and imagine there is time, time marked off in nano increments that we believe we control by appointments and schedules and such. But somewhere in eternity most of us exist together with those souls for whom we will pray at tomorrow’s Mass. And maybe we would pray for All Souls with a bit more sincerity and earnestness if we knew that it is for our own souls we are praying.