{In this Lenten season, I’ve been writing about sanctuaries I’ve worshipped in or sometimes merely visited on various vacations. Today marks the first “rerun,” that is, the first time I’ve returned to a church I’d previously written about. The first time, I noted the massive pipe organ; today we look up to that vaulted ceiling.}

This is the ceiling of Haarlem’s Grote Kerk, or Sint-Bavokerk, once a Roman Catholic cathedral, now a Reformed Protestant congregation. We are looking at the wooden ceiling in the crossing of the church, the section commissioned in 1500. Notes about this church indicate that its interior has been repainted numerous times, so that explains why the colors are fresh and and the sights overhead so bright. Joan and I stand in awe of these impressive churches.

[A warm family memory of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. springs to mind. We had taken our two young (then!) children to the National Zoo, and when we wanted to pull them away from the giraffes and elephants and tigers so we could get to the cathedral before closing time, they whined with disappointment. Of course they did; who wants to leave the zoo to see a church? But when they first entered the staggeringly magnificent space, in unison they went, “Wow!” Yes, it was awesome.]

So we were looking up, a quite natural thing to do when there is so much up there to gape at, and I saw what looked like a clock that had lost a hand. Seemed natural enough, given the age of the structure. But I’ve learned that the clock is perfectly intact. When the crossing was added to the previously constructed sections of the cathedral, clocks only needed one hand. Time-keeping wasn’t as precise in those days. The clock pictured here (and clocks of its era) were run by a lever escapement regulated by a flywheel or balanced weights going back and forth on a spring. The pendulum hadn’t been invented yet; that would come in the 1650s. And with the pendulum came more precise timekeeping. Since the Grote Kerk crossing had been commissioned in 1500, the clock we see up there was a century and a half away from being obsolete.

Because of the old mechanism, the clocks of that era didn’t keep time to the minute. If the time were within 15 minutes, that was about normal. So, the quarter hour was an adequate measure and one hand was enough to “tell the time.” I’m imagining a cathedral parishioner looking up there during a sermon, and wondering how long the preacher/priest is going to run on that morning. How different things were back then, time-wise. Services in that sanctuary weren’t expected to run exactly one hour before people got antsy. The 60 minute time slot for a church service didn’t come until the age of broadcasting. It was only then that precise timing was set for church or much of anything else in day-to-day life.

In this pandemic era, when our sanctuaries are closed or at least very limited in attendance, many of us are watching services on our various electronic devices. And many pastors who have adapted their worship services for streaming or replay on various platforms have modified the components of the service in order to fit the shorter attention span of “viewers” (who were once called “worshippers”). Sermons are brief(er), there are fewer musical contributions, and many traditional parts of the service are missing. One wonders: when things move to a new normal, how willing will folks be to go back to what we had thought was a typical hour-long service?

Beyond the church setting, thinking about that one-handed clock and the imprecise timing of one’s daily activities, I wonder whether the stress or the rhythm of life might have been more laid back in those days. Life had to be more casual. I’ll get there when I get there. I’ll see you sometime tomorrow. Some time. Hour glasses and sun dials were good enough guides for the day’s work, and those one-handed clocks.

There’s a song I’m hearing right now. It runs exactly three minutes and thirty-three seconds. “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” Does anybody really care? About time?