Lent, Daylight Saving Time, and the Holiness of Losing an Hour
It is a curious thing that the world expects heroism from us in March. By now, we are already running late, juggling children, spreadsheets, half-finished resolutions, and Lenten penances that began bravely and have since drifted toward survival mode. The coffee is cold, the inbox is full, and the prayers are mumbled in the car. We are dust, yes, but hurried dust with emails. And just when we begin to accept that Lent is about slowing down and letting the soul breathe, some bureaucratic clockmaker somewhere decides to carve an hour from our sleep and call it progress.
You can almost hear the announcement: “Rejoice! You now have more daylight to get more done.” As though light were a tool, a spiritual extension cord. The irony is exquisite. We are already exhausted, and now our reward is one hour less of rest in exchange for the privilege of a brighter commute. It’s as if the world keeps insisting that salvation comes by better scheduling.
The parish Mass on the first Sunday of Daylight Saving is a sight worthy of a modern icon. Behold the bleary faithful, yawning through the Creed, parents carrying toddlers who are half-asleep and wholly resistant to time zone manipulation, the choir an octave lower than usual. Even Father looks dazed, flipping ahead in his missal as though it too had lost an hour in the night. But somehow grace abides in the daze. The Eucharist, thankfully, does not depend on punctuality.
If there were ever a season that could handle losing time, it would be Lent. Lent is the calendar’s gentle whisper to relinquish our grip on control, to remember that holiness is not efficiency dressed up in purple. I keep thinking about St. Teresa of Avila falling asleep when she meant to pray and hearing the Lord’s kindness instead of His rebuke. “God walks among the pots and pans,” she said, which is to say that He is not put off by our grogginess or disorganization. He is quite at home in our kitchens, our commutes, and our yawns.
The whole experiment of Daylight Saving Time began as an ingenious effort to harness light, as though the human race could stretch the day by sheer resolve. There is something mysteriously revealing about that. We want to save daylight in the same way we wish to save time itself, even though both keep slipping out of our pockets. The poets are wiser. Annie Dillard writes that how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives, which is another way of reminding us that no rearrangement of clocks can really alter what matters.
St. Francis de Sales, ever patient, might smile at the spectacle. He spent his life teaching that sanctity must be found not in grand gestures but in cheerful fidelity to small duties. He would not be alarmed that your fast faltered or that you nodded off during morning prayer. He would probably tell you that losing an hour of sleep is no tragedy if it invites humility. In one of his letters, he advises souls to “do all through love, and nothing through constraint.” How gentle and radical that is in a world that keeps shouting at us to do more, be more, hurry up.
Karl Rahner, who spent his life writing about grace in the ordinary, once said that the Christian of the future would be a mystic or nothing at all. A mystic, mind you, not someone who floats above exhaustion, but someone who discovers God within it. Daylight Saving might just be our annual rehearsal for that. It asks whether our spiritual life can still be real in a fog of sleepiness and lost hours. Whether holiness can bloom even when we feel misaligned with the clock.
Dorothy Day would surely laugh at the notion that this “extra daylight” was for getting ahead. She believed that time was for love, not output. Her days were full of interruptions: visitors, hungry strangers, newspaper deadlines, and she called them sacramental. “The mystery of the poor is this,” she wrote, “that they are Jesus.” I suspect she would tell us that the mystery of the tired, the late, the caffeine-dependent—that is Jesus too. Perhaps He yawns with us on that first Sunday in March.
What a curious mix of comedy and mercy it is, this loss of time. We worship a God who let Himself be killed in the middle of the day, implying that even the hours can break and yet be made whole again. When the clock jumps forward, we play-act a miniature death and resurrection: an hour gone, an evening transfigured by light. We cannot master time, but God can make even lost hours luminous.
The old monks used to ring bells throughout the day to mark prayer, not because they needed reminders but because they understood rhythm as worship. Catherine Doherty, in her little book Poustinia, said that praying in the midst of noise, in the middle of schedules, was the modern desert. Maybe Daylight Saving is one more clang of that bell, annoying, yes, but also awakening us to how precious and fleeting this whole business of time really is.
The Gospel offers endless counsel to the weary: consider the lilies, stay awake, do not worry about tomorrow. Each of these commands is also a release. They invite us to stop pretending that time belongs to us. We are, at best, tenants of the clock, caretakers of borrowed light. And so maybe it is not an accident that we lose an hour right in the heart of Lent, that season when we remember that everything, even breath, is a gift. We fast not to prove discipline but to rediscover dependence. We give alms not to fix the world but to trust that love can work miracles we cannot measure.
So here we are: dreaming of rest, clutching coffee cups like chalices, stumbling toward Easter one bleary morning at a time. Perhaps that is the truest image of discipleship—half-awake, half-aware, wholly loved. Maybe this annual theft of sixty minutes is God’s gentle joke, a kind of timely parable. You do not own your hours, child, He says in His quiet, smiling way. You can only live them, offer them, squander them into goodness.
Let the clocks jump. Let the morning come too soon. Christ remains. And if one weary Sunday you find yourself at Mass, one eye open, whispering your prayers off-beat, know that heaven is delighted by your effort. Grace keeps better time than you ever could.
