Gene Roddenberry and the Trekkies had it wrong all along. Space is not the final frontier. It never was. The ancients knew that long before there were telescopes with which to ponder space or flying machines with which to pierce it. Space was, and always has been, no more than a continuation of place as we know and occupy it.
But time….ahhh, therein lies our final frontier, the proof of our limitedness, the prison car whose forward thrust we can neither slow nor reverse. Escape it and we are other in a manner and of a substance we can not grasp, so alien are both to our experience and so encapsulated are we in time.

But today, on this day when once in every 365 days, we fancy ourselves capable of manipulating time by taking an hour from the earth’s courses, today I shall go to my prayers tutored by the sure knowledge that Lent is really about time and overwhelmed by the terrible beauty of that fact.