“O my soul, pass through the flowing waters of time like the Ark of old, and take possession of the land of promise, for God commands thee.” –Great Canon of Saint Andrew of Crete

Above: A Mount Athos-style clock, reflecting the times of the Prayers of the Hours and services throughout the day; the hours of the day would be set to start at sunset (see also explanatory diagram below). A similar clock hangs in the altar space of our mission, St. John’s, in Winfield.

Orthodox clock of the Hours (above). The day begins in the evening biblically, and hours of the day (for the Prayers of the Hours) in Orthodoxy traditionally are calculated from sunrise rather than standardized cell-phone time. The day would begin from sunrise on Mount Athos in Greece, the traditional monastic center of Orthodoxy, or in each local area.

Orthodox Christianity offers a multi-layered God-centered experience of time, based on patterns of the day, and different from technocratic “cell phone” time today, which is based digitally on the Greenwich, England, time zones of the old British Empire, now layered over by the Coordinated Universal Time of atomic clocks, satellites, and cyberspace. In Orthodox Christianity, following the Church fathers, we live amid layers of natural time (seasons and cycles of life on earth), human time (that set by society), and eternal time (of angels and demons and the human soul), all of which are set in the everlasting or beyond-time of God.

Here is a glimpse into this different experience of time:

The Church calendar. The difference between modern technocratic global time and Orthodox Christian temporalities extends to the Church calendar, best known in the West for marking Christmas on Jan. 7 of the civil calendar (really Dec. 25 in Church reckoning, though). This distinguishes the Nativity of our Lord from the commercial worldly “holiday season.” British colonial control brought the calendar change in Appalachian America in 1752 that led to “new” and “old” Christmas in America. But “old Christmas” remained in folklore calendars of Appalachia. The move from the old Julian Calendar of the Christian Roman Empire (Byzantium) to the late sixteenth-century Gregorian calendar synchronized Scholastic Catholic and emerging Enlightenment views of a supposedly scientific secular reality. Resulting standardized time zones reflected the emergence in the 19th century of “railroad” and telegraphic techno-time.

Chronography. The reckoning of years is also different in Orthodox Christian time, and based on Scripture in the traditions of the Church. The ecclesiastical new year starts in the evening of the year, September 1, Sept. 14 on today’s Western civil calendar. Thus, the Church calendar on the Julian calendar is 13 days later in observing that. For example, 9/14/2026 on the civil calendar starts the year 7535, on Sept. 1 on the Church calendar. The new year begins in the evening of the year, just as the new day in the cycle of daily Church services starts in the evening, following the pattern in Genesis of “the evening and the morning” constituting the day. In terms of feasts on the Church calendar, the last prominent one of the “old year” is the Beheading of John the Baptist on Aug. 29/Sept. 11, marking the martyrdom of the last of the Old Testament prophets who then preached the Gospel to the Old Testament righteous in Hades. This follows the Dormition season of the Falling Asleep of the Mother of God and feasts also marking the first fruits of harvest. The first great feast of the new year marks the Nativity or birth of the Mother of God, on Sept. 8/Sept. 21.

(Above) Icon of the Indiction or Orthodox Christian New Year, Sept. 1/14: НАЧАЛО ИНДИКТУ ЕЖЕ ЕСТЬ НОВОМУ ЛЕТУ, Nachalo indiktu ezhe est’ Novomu Lyetu–“The Beginning of the Indiction, which is the New Year.” This is the time of the beginning of Jesus Christ’s public ministry in Luke 4, when He read in the synagogue from Isaiah verses about his ministry, including “to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Traditionally marking the day of Creation in the Orthodox Christian Church, Sept. 1 also in 1989 was declared by the Ecumenical Patriarchate to be dedicated to thanksgiving and supplications for the protection and preservation of the great gift of the Creation from every evil that threatens it, a proposal that was taken up by the other Orthodox Churches in 1992. Your unworthy scribe was baptized and chrismated into the Orthodox Church on Sept. 1, 1999 (on the civil calendar, in the Greek Orthodox Church, although now on the Church calendar in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia). Asking for your prayers for this sinful priest.

The calendar beginning Sept. 1 was established during the Christian Roman Empire (commonly called in modern times the Byzantine Empire), and was in use officially from around  c. 691 to 1728 in the Ecumenical Patriarchate at Constantinople, in the Empire from 988 to 1453, and in Kievan Rus’ and Russia from around 988 to 1700, when it was ended by Peter the Great. However, it continues to be used by traditional Orthodox Christian communities around the world, as does the Julian calendar and Septuagint system of dating years associated with it, described here. Significantly, the Byzantine calendar integrated ecclesiastical and civil calendars, the latter in terms of the 15-year “indiction” cycle of taxation that the pagan Emperor Diocletion, a great persecutor of Christians, had begun in the third century. The date according to the Church calendar marked the beginning of the public ministry of Jesus Christ, his proclamation (kerygma) of the year of the Lord, as referenced in the Gospel reading for the day from Luke 4. It also according to tradition was at this time of the year that the people of Israel came to the promised land in the Old Testament. September 1 also marked the victory of Holy Equal-to-the-Apostles Emperor Constantine the Great over the Roman ruler Maxentius in 312. It was in this battle that St Constantine was shown the image of the Cross in heaven. This paved the way for the signing of the Edict of Milan in 313, a landmark document that gave equal rights to Christians by legitimizing the Orthodox Church. More background on the ecclesiastical new year follows in the inset below.

Dates. On the ancient Orthodox Christian Church calendar, dates are numbered 13 days beyond the Western Gregorian calendar, which was adopted in Western Christianity in 1582 and beyond, originally by order of a Roman Catholic Papal declaration. The Orthodox Church retained the original Church calendar, as did for example the English colonies in America well into the 18th century. Thus the original Christian dating of Christmas on Dec. 25 is on the Gregorian calendar now Jan. 7 for most Orthodox Christians. The later date remained known in American Appalachian folklore as “Old Christmas” or “Appalachian Christmas” to the present day, and so early American practice in that sense is in sync with continued Orthodox Christian practice. Likewise the Gwaun Valley in Wales, in ancient times home to the Orthodox Celtic Saint Brynach, also holds to the “old calendar” still (in both the Appalachian and Welsh pockets, however, their calendar is 12 days different, due to shifts in days since the Anglo world went off the Julian calendar, and lack of contact with the Orthodox Christian world that has maintained the old calendar). Again, on the civil calendar Jan. 7, most Orthodox Christians around the world celebrate Christmas on the Church calendar that day, on December 25. In the modern world, this difference deepens a sense of sacred time in the Church calendar, set apart from global commercialized time, in which the civil calendar’s Dec. 25 has become often a time for materialistic shopping and partying rather than traditional commemoration of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ’s Nativity.

Years. In Orthodox tradition years are not reckoned “Anno Domini” (AD) renamed in secular times “Common Era” (CE). This system, while originally developed in Late Antiquity by a Romanian monk, was popularized in the West and became based on inaccurate medieval calculations there of the dating of the birth of Jesus Christ. That would have been a few years earlier than their base year. The traditional Orthodox Christian reckoning of years follows the “Anno Mundi” approach, (AM) years since Creation, traditionally in Greek called Ἔτος Κόσμου and abbreviated ε.Κ. (This is similar to the Jewish calendar’s reckoning from biblical creation, but the Orthodox Christian calculation is based on the Greek Septuagint Old Testament, which survives in older extant manuscripts than the Hebrew Masoretic text and was the source for Scriptural quotes in the New Testament. The Septuagint also has a longer chronography; thus in early October 2024, the Jewish calendar starts the year 5785.) The Orthodox Christian approach to temporality also reflects how in the Church’s tradition the Fall is seen as having scrambled space-time as a watershed before which we cannot discern their nature. So we can’t really know how temporality existed before the Fall and right at the start of the reckoning of years. “In the beginning” (Gen. 1:1) means “In the Logos,” because as the Evangelist John notes, “‘In the beginning’ was the Logos (John 1:1). All this is a mystery, which further works against modern Western scientism’s attempt to establish an hegemony of chronology.

Western-modern ontology and time. Today’s online frame of temporality — “cell phone time” — follows a universalist assumption in the West about time and linear progress, and about the nature of being. It began with the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar by the Catholic Papacy in the Middle Ages as more “scientific,” and later the use of Greenwich Mean Time based in England as the basis of global time. Under the political influence of the British Empire (and with hope for their help against the Turks) the Constantinople-based Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarchate after World War I adopted the Gregorian Calendar of the West. Later, the digital world adopted as its framework this idea of universal time based originally on Greenwich Mean Time, with time zones standardized and providing a framework for globalization and making time more of a commodity for control. But Scripture states that “a day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). The vast majority of Orthodox Christians globally remain on the traditional Church calendar. Both groups calculate Pascha or Easter on the same date nevertheless, differently than Western Christian calculations.

God’s beyond-time. The assumptions behind “universalized ” world time today reflect the neocolonialist emphases of systemic secularism in the postmodern West. These flow through worldwide tech networks (operating in their construct of universal time), historically rooted in modern Anglo-American imperialist visions, which historically provided a basis for a post-Christian “global West.” In non-Western Orthodox Christian tradition, folds of natural time, human time, and eternal temporalities are overlaid simultaneously by the everlasting beyond-time of God and His uncreated energies. Orthodox Christian temporality challenges Western claims to a universal secular ontology. The nature of this ontological problem, really a kind of neocolonialism cloaked in technocracy, is discussed further in my writings in Re-Imagining Nature. Orthodox Christianity recognizes that in Jesus Christ, as the Apostle Paul writes, “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).