Time for shed

About time I wrote something about technology. In churches. Went to St Michael's last night for a change. Was quite surprised to find a laptop at the front seemingly ready for use by the Reader leader. Turned out that the song he'd downloaded 'wasn't loud enough' by which I assume he hadn't figured out it could be routed through the PA system.

There was one piece of technology in the church that I found distracting and annoying every second of the service.

It wasn't the laptop or any computer.
It wasn't a big screen demanding my attention or a noisy projector.
It wasn't a PA being too loud or too quiet or failing to loop.
It wasn't a squealing hearing aid.
It wasn't a mobile phone.
It was... a clock.
A very loud old clock by the sound of it.

I don't have a clock in the shed because ticking annoys me. But I like the idea of church clocks. We have one at St Peter's so that the preacher can see how long they've gone on for. I like big ones in church towers that chime the time.
there's a clock in Salisbury cathedral that's thought to date back to 1386. And is therefore the oldest working clock in the world. It doesn't have a clock face but it does an hourly chime.
Seems like the clock is another technology on which the church led the way.
I guess clocks arose out of the monastic ideals of time-keeping. In ancient Greece or Rome, it was easier to divide the day and night into 12 hours because at that latitude there isn't much seasonal variation in their lengths. So the day was always 12 hours, even if those hours were hardly ever exactly 60 minutes. Time was stretchy. But in the cold north of Europe, it worked out better to have a regular repeating event like a clock tick and all the hours the same length. So we became a society enslaved to one particular, rigid, way of thinking about time. This is partly responsible for 6-day creationism!

I am a bit of time-geek. Chronology, horology, tachyology all interest me. (the last one doesn't exist. Until it did. Don't try to Google it.)

I wrote about the relationship between God and Time for my MTh. (Seems not many theologians have much idea about it!).
The difficulty is that God is outside time and yet interacts with it and through it. I reckon that time may simply be the medium or facilitator of faith.
St Augustine said he thought he understood time until he thought about it. (That's the trouble with time. The more time you spend thinking about it, the harder it gets. And when it comes to time-travel, it gets awfully confusing. Even if it can sometimes be neatly tied up, a wilful time-traveller could really mess up the universe. Probably. So hopefully it's not possible.)


I have no idea what to make of this Old Testament passage that describes how God stretched a day out to allow for more killing. But beware of this.

Joshua 10:13 NIV
So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.

Location:Shed