Human beings are temporal creatures, but our experience of time isn’t merely of the relentless tick-tock of clock time. Time has quality as well as duration. We can spend an hour waiting for a late bus, or we can spend an hour absorbed in a book or a lively conversation. By the clock, it’s the same time, but our experience is very different. Our experience of duration is very different.

Time is always socially shaped. The present isn’t the knife-edge between the vanishing past and the not-existing future. We make present times by our activities, alone or with one another. There is the present time of the classroom, formed by teacher and students. There’s dinnertime made by a family gathered at a table. There’s the time of the game or the time of the project or the time of the movie. Our time is always articulated.

We organize our lives by organizing our times. We schedule our days for waking, preparing, eating, working, relaxing, talking, sleeping. We orchestrate our weeks in a rhythm of work and leisure. We compose our years with holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, vacations.

And we do this collectively. Every society has a liturgical calendar. Every people punctuates time, italicizing this moment and underlining that. In the U.S., we have national holidays like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. Nearly every American celebrates Christmas, even if they are not Christians. Other countries have other holidays, and organize their year differently.

Holidays are moments for collective memory, for memorializing our heroes, for remembering our common past and for recommitting ourselves to what makes us the people we are, so that we lean toward to a common future.

The choice is never between having an annual pattern to our time or not. The question is which pattern we will adopt.

Read the remainder of this article at Patheos.com.

(Photo by Elmar Ersch.)