Many people are used to a Christmas season which begins around the start of December and, if you are lucky, lasts until early January. But this is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the Middle Ages, and for centuries afterwards, most celebrations were concentrated within the Twelve Days of Christmas — December 25 to January 6 — but celebrations continued throughout the whole of January. Short days and bad weather limited the work that could be done anyway, and the general gloom made festivity all the more welcome — much more cheerful than Dry January.

Candlemas, 40 days after Christmas, was the time to at last take down the decorations, “down with the rosemary and bays, down with the mistletoe”, as the 17th century poet Robert Herrick writes in ‘Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve’. But it was also a time to celebrate a festival of light and hope. The feast commemorates an event from Christ’s early childhood, narrated in the Gospel of Luke. As the firstborn son of his mother, Jesus was taken by his parents to be presented in the Temple in Jerusalem, in accordance with Jewish law.

More from this author

The sad loss of our common rituals

By Eleanor Parker

There, Jesus and his parents were met by an elderly man and woman, Simeon and Anna, who recognised the baby as the Messiah for whom they had long been waiting. Holding the child in his arms, Simeon spoke a prayer — the Nunc Dimittis, which has become part of the daily cycle of Christian prayer, repeated night after night for many centuries: “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation…”

The date was set by the law of Moses, which stipulated that a woman should be ritually purified 40 days after giving birth to a son, marking the end of the dangerous postpartum period. And so Candlemas celebrates both the Presentation of Christ in the Temple and the Purification of the Virgin Mary.

Candlemas has been celebrated since the fourth century in the Eastern church, the seventh century in the West. The 40-day Christmas season is one of the ways in which the Christian church year, in its early medieval development, was influenced by Jewish practice: significant periods of 40 days feature several times in the Bible, and that unit of time forms the basis of the church’s seasons at Christmas, Lent and Easter. (Forty days was similarly used as a convenient period in medieval law, and that gave us a word we’ve been hearing a lot this year: quarantine. It derives from the medieval convention of a 40-day period of isolation to stop the spread of disease.)

Suggested reading

Light a candle; spring is coming

By Ed West

The English name Candlemas is first recorded in the late Anglo-Saxon period, and is paralleled in other languages — in France it’s la Chandeleur. It refers to the most distinctive custom of the feast: people would bring candles to church to be blessed, carry them in procession, then take the candles home with them and keep them all year. The association with light was inspired by the words of Simeon’s prayer, which hails Christ as “a light to lighten the Gentiles”. The act of bringing candles to church and taking them out into the world again re-enacts the Gospel story of the Presentation, with each little candle flame representing the light of the baby Christ.

That symbolism made Candlemas a very popular feast with which to round off winter, as we start to emerge into the world after months of darkness. It helps that 40 days after Christmas coincides with a significant point in the solar year, halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. In the Middle Ages, this time in early February was often considered to be the beginning of spring: the days are getting longer, the light is growing stronger, and the earliest flowers are starting to appear — especially snowdrops, traditionally known as ‘Candlemas bells’. In northern Europe, it was a natural time for a festival of light.

More from this author

Don't call Abingdon ordinary

By Eleanor Parker

Candlemas marks a turning-point, looking both back to Christmas and forward to the spring. It’s a time for weather-lore, as an old rhyme says:

If Candlemas Day be fair and bright,
Winter will have another flight;
If on Candlemas Day it be shower and rain,
Winter is gone and will not come again.

Such forecasting is best known now from the related American tradition, Groundhog Day, which is celebrated across North America on February 2nd. The tradition was imported by immigrants from Germanic parts of Europe, where Candlemas was also known as ‘Badger Day’. The story goes that if a badger comes out of its burrow today and sees its shadow, because the weather is “fair and bright”, it will return to the ground and winter will continue. If it doesn’t see its shadow, because the weather is grey, winter “is gone and will not come again.”

A number of medieval carols imagine Christmas finally bidding farewell at Candlemas and directing our attention onwards to the year ahead. One has Christmas saying:

Here have I dwelt with more and less [i.e. with everyone] From Hallowtide till Candlemas,
And now must I from you hence pass;
Now have good day!

He’s describing a Christmastide lasting from November 1 to February 2: the darkest and coldest months of the year were all meant to be cheered by Christmas brightness, from the bell-ringing of Hallowtide to the lights of Candlemas. And now the darkness is over. It’s time to look ahead.

In this carol Christmas says he can hear Lent calling, so it’s his cue to be on his way. Candlemas and Ash Wednesday often fall close together — sometimes they’re separated by just a few days. This year, it’s two weeks, which feels appropriate. Candlemas is a festival of hope and the coming spring, but it’s a hope coloured by full knowledge of suffering. Simeon says to Mary, as he holds her baby in his arms, that because of this child “a sword will pierce your soul” — a reference to Christ’s death and the grief his mother will experience for his sake. Simeon and Anna themselves are close to death, and will not live to see this baby come to adulthood.

Suggested reading

Why Covid can't cancel Christmas

By Giles Fraser

So Candlemas is about the meeting between birth and death, love and grief, winter and spring, childhood and old age. Images of the Presentation usually show aged Simeon taking the baby into his arms, and one of the texts sung at Candlemas muses on this meeting: “The old man carried the child, but the child guided the old man”.

This year such images might call to mind one of the most painful prohibitions of lockdown, which has cut off the young from the old and stopped grandparents from holding their grandchildren. But children, even if their grandparents never get to hold them, carry the hopes of their elders — bearing onwards in time a hope for a future the old may never see. And if Simeon’s words to Mary are a reminder that grief is the price we pay for love, the light of Candlemas is a promise that it’s a price worth paying.

A key element of Candlemas, the blessing of candles, was suppressed at the Reformation, but in recent years it’s been making a comeback in many churches. Even this year, in lockdown, Candlemas can easily be celebrated. Light a candle — that’s all it takes. It might be just a tiny flame, flickering and fragile, as vulnerable as the youngest baby or the oldest among us. But in a winter that feels endless, it may yet be a sign that spring is coming.

A year ago, it would have been unthinkable that we might be prevented, by law, from visiting the dying or comforting the grieving. Who would have ever thought there would be national rules restricting who you can hug at a funeral? A year ago, you wouldn’t have allowed yourself to imagine it; it would have been too grim to contemplate.

There’s a particular horror in the idea of dying alone, and the fear of a lonely death haunts many of us. But in one or way another, death is always lonely. The grave is a solitary place, and death is a journey you have to undertake alone. Different cultures develop their own ways of lessening the loneliness of the grave, providing those who are grieving with some continuing connection to the dead. In the Christian Church, for the past thousand years, an important season for bridging the gap between the living and the dead has been the twin feasts of All Saints’ and All Souls’, on 1 and 2 November.

As the names suggest, both feasts offer the very opposite of solitude: they are opportunities to connect with multitudes, communities, vast companies of the dead. The first day celebrates the saints in heaven, the “cloud of witnesses” and the “great multitude which no man could number”, as they are described in Biblical texts read at this feast; the second day is for everyone else, all the “faithful departed” — an even greater crowd of souls.

The two feasts, now entwined, have separate histories, and weren’t always kept so close together. They have their origins in a diversity of local feasts which emerged in different parts of the Church during the first millennium, some commemorating all the saints, others all the departed. In different regions these were observed on various dates, in the spring and summer as well as in the winter. By the ninth century, however, 1 November had become the predominant date for the feast of All Saints’, and over the course of the next few centuries it was gradually supplemented by a second commemoration the following day.

By the later Middle Ages, these days formed a coherent and widely observed season of remembrance, known in medieval England as “Hallowtide”. The two days had distinct but related aims: All Saints’ was intended to celebrate the glorious dead and to ask for their prayers, but the purpose of All Souls’ was to pray for the dead, for those in Purgatory who needed the prayers of the living to help them in their passage to heaven. It was a time not only to remember the dead but to look after them, to give them assistance and comfort. On the nights of Hallowtide, church bells rang out to reassure the souls in Purgatory that the living had not forgotten them. It must have been profoundly comforting to the grieving, too, to feel that they could still do something to help those they had lost.

More from this author

The sad loss of our common rituals

By Eleanor Parker

Caring for the dead wasn’t just for Hallowtide, though. In the Middle Ages, looking after the dead was a duty incumbent on believers all year round. Prayer for the dead, known and unknown, was a regular feature of medieval devotion, and was seen as an important act of charity. Believers were encouraged to pray for the souls of those they had known in life — their family, godparents, or benefactors — but also for those whom they had not personally known, but with whom they shared some connection: deceased members of their professional guild, or all the dead buried in their parish church. And they were asked to pray too, as many still do today, for those who had no one else to pray for them. No one was to be left alone in death.

It was important to care for the bodies of the dead as well as their souls. To bury the dead was one of the seven Works of Mercy, a set of charitable deeds medieval Christians were encouraged to perform. To modern eyes it can be surprising: we understand feeding the hungry and clothing the poor as impulses of charity, but why burying the dead? It was not just a response to a social need — assisting those who had no family to bury them — but another manifestation of the idea that the dead needed the help of the living; the need for community and mutual aid did not end with death.

Medieval ghost stories tell of corpses who can’t rest until they’ve had a decent burial, and have to wander the earth asking the living for their help and prayers. In other stories, a person who buries a penniless stranger out of charity is then rewarded in some fabulous way by the ghost of the deceased (a story-type known to folklorists as “the Grateful Dead”).

At the Reformation, many of these practices by which people had sustained a relationship with the dead were banned. All Saints’ Day survived in a circumscribed form, but All Souls’ Day was suppressed; it was no longer permitted to pray for the dead or say masses for their souls. This was a huge cultural shift, and some historians have seen it as the most significant and painful rupture of the Reformation, violently severing the links between the living and the dead. It meant, in the words of the historian Greg Walker, “an end to those spiritual continuities that had hitherto bound the generations of the living and the dead together in mutually supportive collaboration, and tied both to the mediation of the saints in heaven”.

For centuries, people had believed that there were practical things they could do to communicate with their dead, both to help them and to ask for their help. They could have masses said for them, light candles, go on pilgrimage; they could ask saints for assistance and they could seek comfort for their departed loved ones, all in the hope that one day they would be helped in their turn. People in the Middle Ages were constantly speaking to and for the dead. And then, suddenly, all those channels of communication were closed.

More from this author

The sad loss of our common rituals

By Eleanor Parker

The suppression of All Souls Day meant that Britain doesn’t today have the kinds of widespread customs which are still common in Catholic countries, such as visiting churchyards to bring flowers or light candles on the graves of loved ones. But the longing to feel a connection with the dead is a deep-seated desire, and it wasn’t so easily rooted out. Even after prayers on All Souls’ Day were officially prevented within churches, the desire lingered in unofficial, private rituals of commemoration. Children still went door-to-door begging for “soul cakes”, originally cakes given in exchange for prayers to help the dead out of Purgatory. Long after such prayers had been forbidden, the custom of “souling” continued, and survived well into the 20th century in some parts of Britain.

In pockets of rural England, All Souls’ Day also lingered in local traditions of going out to fields or hilltops at midnight and lighting fires to pray for departed family and friends. These were called “tindles” or “teen-lay” fires (“tind” is an old word for kindling a fire). One witness of such a custom in 19th-century Lancashire memorably described how each family would go to the highest hill near their home and set fire to a large bunch of straw, praying for the dead until the fire burned down; he recalled seeing the bright fires burning in the darkness in every direction, forming a circle all round the horizon.

In the past century the British festival calendar has changed rapidly, and today’s All Souls’ Day doesn’t look much like it would have done in the Middle Ages. It might seem strange to say it, but the modern version of this early-November season actually offers a much more intense focus on death than the medieval Hallowtide did. For one thing, it’s now heralded by a much bigger version of Halloween than was at all common in the Middle Ages. Even a few decades ago Halloween, though popular in some parts of Britain, was far from ubiquitous — but now its grinning skeletons and ghosts are everywhere, and gaining more ground by the year.

Suggested reading

Plague and the comforts of history

By Tom Holland

On top of that, the modern All Souls’ Day has also been influenced by the fact that — by sheer coincidence — it now falls close to Remembrance Day. That relatively new commemoration, scarcely a century old, means that for several weeks at the beginning of November we’re constantly surrounded by bright-red reminders of mortality: the poppy, one of the most ancient symbols of death, invested with new meaning in modern times.

So from late October to mid-November, images of death are impossible to avoid, whether it’s shops full of Halloween costumes or poppies on coats and war memorials. Everywhere you look, you see a memento mori. In effect, we’ve created a modern fortnight of Remembrance — a longer and more intensive season for encountering mortality, whether to laugh or to mourn, than the medieval Hallowtide ever was.

Both Halloween and Remembrance Day have had to be severely curtailed this year; All Souls’ Day will once again be focused on private, family rituals, as in the days of tindle fires. In the thousand-year history of its rise, suppression and revival, All Souls has had to be a mutable commemoration. It was only in the 20th century that the Church of England began tentatively to accept All Souls Day, but it was careful to develop its own version: officially, its purpose is to remember the dead, not to pray for their souls.

This year the Church of England is offering people who can’t get to a church the opportunity to light candles virtually. That’s only a new step in the ongoing evolution of the day, which seems more important than ever after this difficult year for the dying and the grieving. The longing for a connection with the dead is a need which never goes away.

Tourists who come to Oxford from around the world rarely make their way to Abingdon; it’s a working town, not a showplace. Its central shopping area was a casualty of post-war planners, a mass of modern concrete and chain stores; to the north, new housing estates are creeping ever closer to the famous university city. What might have been Abingdon’s chief tourist attraction, its cathedral-like abbey church, was destroyed five centuries ago.

More from this series

Why Britain needs a peasants’ revolt

By John Lewis-Stempel

And yet few towns are better proof of just how long and rich the history of apparently ordinary places can be. The two caveats in Abingdon’s claim to longevity (“town”, rather than city, and “in continuous occupation”) are significant, because it’s in these smaller communities — and the remarkable continuity of their institutions and collective lives — that the bedrock of British history lies.

The monks of Abingdon were making books and writing history centuries before any scholars came to settle in Oxford. One of the most influential figures in the late Anglo-Saxon church, St Æthelwold, was abbot here in the tenth century. A vigorous and industrious man — and a champion of educational and religious progress — Æthelwold didn’t spend long at Abingdon. But it still bears traces of the work he did to build up the abbey: a stream in the town, once the abbey millstream, follows the course Æthelwold and his monks set for it a thousand years ago. They may have been copying the line of the prehistoric defences, already ancient by Æthelwold’s time.

Æthelwold and his fellow abbots were running a school at Abingdon when Oxford was just a crossing-place over the Thames. But by the twelfth century, when Abingdon’s most famous son was born, the balance was already beginning to shift. Abingdon’s own saint, Edmund, was born into a middle-class family in the town around 1174. His mother wanted him to be well-educated, so she sent him not to the abbey but to school in Oxford, which by that time was gathering the communities of teachers and students who would form the nucleus of the university.

More from author

The sad loss of our common rituals

By Eleanor Parker

A devout and studious boy, Edmund made the most of his opportunities, and prospered both in Oxford and at university in Paris. He was known for his skill as a lecturer, his attention to his students, and his generosity to poorer scholars. He ended his career as Archbishop of Canterbury, but it’s as “Edmund of Abingdon” that he has gone down in history — and how he’s remembered here.

His mother Mabel is buried in one of Abingdon’s medieval churches, and around the town you can see representations of her symbol: three interlocking circles, which she drew on Edmund’s palm to remind him that with all his learning, honouring the Holy Trinity must still be his highest aim. By drawing those lines on her son’s hand, she left her mark on the town as surely as the people who traced out its medieval street plan.

More from this series

Why Stamford said no to modernity

By Mary Harrington

Behind the little church in which Edmund’s mother is buried stretches the site by the Thames where the abbey of Abingdon once stood. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century, the abbey’s buildings were destroyed, leaving a huge expanse of empty ground. Some of that space is now a public park, with bright flowerbeds, a swimming pool, and a broad green space where children play over the footprint of the abbey church marked out in the grass. The building would have been the size of the greatest churches in England — imagine Wells Cathedral — and no less splendid. Nothing of it survives.

But in a town thousands of years old, a couple of hundred years seem like nothing. It’s worth remembering that the abbey acted as the town’s heart for more centuries than have passed since its destruction. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was an imposing presence in Abingdon — one of the greatest landowners in the county, as well as the chief provider of education and healthcare. Losing it must have ripped the heart out of the town, but the wound closed over, grass grew on the site, life went on. Though the big church was destroyed, the town’s smaller churches went on doing their work, and other monuments to medieval philanthropy endured: a complex of beautiful almshouses which have been looking after the town’s elderly since the fifteenth century, and a school which traces its origins back more than 750 years.

Today Abingdon is small enough to have maintained its identity, but big enough to have a thriving community willing to celebrate it. I first visited during a heritage festival, which revelled in an eclectic mish-mash of moments from the town’s long history: a display of medieval pilgrim badges, some Anglo-Saxon beads, a few men in khaki to remember Abingdon’s First World War dead. Of course, the town has seen plenty of tragedies in its thousands of years: plenty of loss, change and suffering. That’s what “continuous occupation” means — a long history of living and dying.

Suggested reading

Will Covid spell the end of city life?

By Barney Norris

As in any town, the history of Abingdon isn’t fossilised, but always developing, adding new layers. Part of Berkshire since the time of Alfred the Great, Abingdon was gobbled up by Oxfordshire in 1974, and most recently it’s become part of a region branded ‘Science Vale UK’, which intends to be “a global hotspot for enterprise and innovation”. But you can have innovation and still remember the past: a place of enterprise this has always been, as much now as when Æthelwold marked out his millstream. The stream keeps going; so does the town.

That’s what British history is in a place like this — accretive and accumulative. The history of an island where people have lived in the same places for thousands of years is less a series of discrete moments, however violent and disruptive each individual event might be, and more like a stream — countless days flowing into each other, carrying onwards the place and its people. At this strange time of social disruption, when everything is “unprecedented” and a “new normal”, there’s comfort in the thought of that continuous flow.

Anyway, it is Whitsun. From the Middle Ages until the first half of the 20^th century, Whitsun and the week that followed was the chief summer holiday of the year in Britain. It was a time for all kinds of communal merry-making, varying over the centuries but consistent in spirit: the season for feasts and fairs, dancing and drinking, school and church processions, and generally having a good time.

Though its roots lie in the Christian feast of Pentecost, most of the festivities historically associated with Whitsun bear little direct relation to that event. More significant was the fact that the feast always falls in May or June — a promising time of year for outdoor events with at least the hope of good weather.

In the early medieval church, including Anglo-Saxon England, Pentecost was a common date for baptisms and other kinds of public ceremonies, such as coronations, which must have meant it soon became an occasion for more general celebration. The English name for the feast is first recorded in the eleventh century, and until the past few decades was much more widely used among English-speakers than Pentecost. Most likely this name came from ‘White Sunday’, referring to the garments worn by the newly baptised, though folk etymology has sometimes claimed a link to the ‘wit’ or wisdom which descended on the disciples.

Many records from the later Middle Ages testify to the holiday spirit of Whitsun, especially after the development of ‘Whitsun ales’ — feasts which combined communal entertainment, dancing, plays and games with the useful function of fundraising for the parish church. Writers of medieval romance liked to set Arthurian stories at Whitsun, telling how King Arthur had a custom that he would not dine on that day until he had heard a great marvel, and so, Thomas Malory says, “all manner of strange adventures came before Arthur at that feast, before all other feasts”.

Suggested reading

Plague and the comforts of history

By Tom Holland

But it was a festival for commoners as well as kings. What’s notable about later Whitsun festivities, from the 19^th and early 20^th century, is how popular the holiday was across all classes. It was a time for church and village feasts, sports, and fairs, and by the end of the 19^th century it was a Bank Holiday – statutory merriment.

Particularly appealing are accounts of Whitsun in industrial northern England, where mills and factories were closed and their workers had a well-earned, much-treasured holiday. Churches and Sunday schools would come together for Whit Walks in huge crowds — in their thousands in cities like Manchester — to walk in procession with singing and music.

Even well into the twentieth century, Whitsuntide was still a shared cultural landmark. As the occasion for mass holiday-making it crops up in various literary contexts, from the sinister opening scenes of Brighton Rock, set among crowds of Londoners pouring down to the seaside for Whit Monday, to Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, in which the poet observes a succession of working-class families who have all taken advantage of the holiday to get married.

And then, in 1971, it was decided that the Spring Bank Holiday should be a fixed rather than a moveable feast, and would always fall on the last Monday in May. The holiday lost its centuries-long link to Whitsun; as a result, even the name is now increasingly forgotten.

Without getting too nostalgic about a pastoral idyll of feasts on the village green, it’s hard not to be wistful right now for something of this — for any kind of shared, communal festivity. Happy holiday crowds — crowds of any description — are out of the question at the moment, and probably will be for a long time to come. Many people don’t feel much like celebrating, and for those who do, all forms of outdoor leisure are fraught with tension.

Anyone who’s attempted a socially-distanced street party in recent weeks or, now it’s permitted, gone outside to sit in the sun has been liable to find themselves the target of a Twitter shaming (one form of communal activity which even a lockdown can’t stop). How long will it be before we can look at a crowd of people again without an undercurrent of fear?

Suggested reading

Oliver Cromwell: conservative revolutionary

By Paul Lay

But it doesn’t feel natural, either, to go on living indefinitely in unmarked time, without holiday or festival. Normal cycles of work and leisure have been disrupted by this crisis: some people are working harder than ever, under impossible stress, while others have found themselves unemployed or on uneasy furlough, with time on their hands that can’t be enjoyed as carefree holiday.

Months of monotony, with nothing to look forward to and nothing to distinguish one day from another, is an experience which fundamentally conflicts with most of the ways societies throughout history have found to give structure to the passage of time. Most religions recognise the importance of marking time: celebrating rites of passage, appointing seasons for feasting and fasting, getting together at set times to celebrate, pray, or mourn. As religious holidays die away, secular society invents its own alternatives.

Over the past few months, we’ve been stripped of all that. Those keeping Easter, Passover, Ramadan or other commemorations have had to do so at home and online, for many a very imperfect substitute, and non-believers have lost their rituals too: no birthday parties, no graduations, not even the weekly trip to a favourite coffee shop. We’ve been deprived of almost every conceivable form of public, shared experience — perhaps most painfully of all, with restrictions on funerals, the rituals of grieving. These are anchors, and without them we drift.

It’s hard to assess the cumulative effect of all those missed rituals, all those cancelled joys, and the voids where memories should have been. The impact of their loss is intangible compared to the more obvious effects of this crisis, but perhaps we should acknowledge that this, too, brings a kind of grief — for the lonely funeral, the milestone birthdays that won’t come again, or just the ever-lurking recollection of what we would have been doing now, if…

It’s not surprising that part of the reaction has been the creation of brand-new rituals, in an attempt to share at least brief moments of connection and to find something, anything, that marks the passage of time: if it’s #clapforcarers, it must be Thursday.

Suggested reading

Britain's divisions go way, way back

By Ed West

The history of Whitsun is an example of how fundamental the precise observance of time has been for religions where time itself may be sacred. Pentecost means ‘fiftieth’, and it occurs fifty days after Easter (yes, whether it feels like it or not) because the Biblical event it commemorates took place on a specific date: the disciples were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish Feast of Weeks, Shavuot, seven weeks after Passover. The Christian Pentecost is shaped by the anniversary of that festival, which is itself an anniversary, marking the giving of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai.

Seven and fifty are both meaningful numbers, with a significance carried over into early Christian practice from Jewish law. As the Venerable Bede, medieval calendar expert, explains in his sermon for Pentecost, in Old Testament law the fiftieth year was the year of jubilee, when “the people were to be at rest from all work, all debts were to be cancelled, slaves were to go free”; so fifty represents heaven, the greatest rest of all, “when the labours and hardships of this age come to an end, and our debts, that is all our faults, have been forgiven”. From his perspective, this is a cycle of labour and rest, work and holiday, which goes back to the very beginning of time itself:

‘This number fifty is appropriate to signify inward rest, because it is arrived at by multiplying seven times seven and adding one. Under the law the people were ordered to work for six days and to rest on the seventh, and to plow and reap for six years and cease in the seventh, because the Lord completed the creation of the world in six days and rested from his work in the seventh.’

So the seven and fifty of the dating of Pentecost signify the heavenly Sabbath — eternal Bank Holiday — when all work and trouble cease. The idea is that these sacred numbers point beyond time to eternity, to a place where anniversaries and calendars are no more: to what Bede calls ‘festal times that are not annual but uninterrupted, not earthly but heavenly.’ Perhaps heaven is the only place where unmarked time is a blessing, and not a curse.