The Congregation in a Secular Age (Ministry in a Secular Age Book #3): Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life

Love for something unchanging is a love not for a person but for an object.

For change to remain properly ordered, and not become a utensil for weariness, it must be born out of ecstasy. Ecstasy, Yannaras believes, produces a proper change.

The encounter with him is ecstatic, bringing the fullness of time. It changes them both by drawing them deeper and deeper into each other’s personhood. The change that comes into their lives is never wearying (though the jumping and noisemaking might get exhausting), because the ecstatic encounter of personhood produces its own energy.

Change is a slave master when the sacred is stripped from time and we therefore live inside a closed immanent frame where relationships are instruments.

what links weariness and change—threatening a depression that produces an alienation from the world itself—is the seeking for change outside the sacredness of time (outside the events of persons in relationship of Eros).

Time is not the measure of impersonal motion but the encounter of personal relations.

The love for the child can’t happen outside of time. But time is only the stage, the measured location of the encounter with the child.34 Through deep encounters of love, friendship, and care, time is subordinate to the sacred action (motion) of the ministry of persons in relation.

We overlook that these measuring and time-counting machines were made by persons. Machines never make machines. It is persons who, in erotic moments in the fullness of time (call this eureka!), found themselves discovering something profound—that electricity was light, that silicon could hold data.

To say that time is motion is to say that change is inevitable.