Thread by @dianabutlerbass

I was on the phone (yeah, real phone call) with a friend today. We were talking about the pandemic, both moaning that we didn't know what day it is.

I laughed. "I don't even know what hour it is! I feel lost in time."

He told me he also was experiencing "temporal dislocation."

Temporal dislocation.

Lost in time.

We all feel like we're not only lost in time, but that we've lost time.

Weeks, months, a year of our lives.

It occurred to me that this state of being "lost" in time is part of the pandemic petrie dish of social discontent.

We need to feel our time is meaningful, that we contribute to something that makes a difference.

To speak of this in spiritual terms, we humans experience time -- but we also experience "sacred time," time with meaning.

Without regular work, with calendars that are meaningless, with online meetings and school, with familiar rituals and holidays limited, sacred time is "empty."

That's why people violated directives about Thanksgiving and Christmas.

They wanted to re-order sacred time.

And that impulse is *part* of what is behind yesterday's insurrection.

Some people, already MAGA-influenced, Trump tweets, "America First," etc., are sitting at home, in that temporal dislocation, and start reading posts, "news" stories, etc. about how a revolution is at hand.

A new revolution!

All of the sudden, your feeds are full of excitement. The time is at hand! Be ready! The long awaited moment is here!

Time is no longer empty. But anticipatory, full of hope.

Months of empty waiting, all those feelings of loss, recede. Time wasn't lost. It was a kind of spiritual preparation for your real calling -- to be part of this revolution.

And there is a date: January 6. Your destiny. America's destiny.

Time becomes an invitation to make history. Time is fulfilled.

You are no longer lost. You are found.

Thus, the pandemic plunged us into temporal dislocation - many millions of us looking or longing for a way to find meaning and not being lost in time.

Most of us baked bread. Found ourselves in project, binge-watching, re-tooling our work, etc.

And many of us found surprising meaning in these new activities. They filled our time well.

But others? Already living in mental universes of threat, persecution, racism -- they found meaning immersing themselves more deeply into grievance and conspiracy theories.

Filling the time with "sacred meaning" that would dedicate itself to violent revolution. Waiting for a signal that the time was ready for its consummation.

The pandemic, by introducing the element of temporal dislocation, heightened all the apocalyptic imaginations of those who would find meaning, fame, and (maybe even) martyrdom in revolution.

People who believe all this not only live in an "alternative media universe," but in an alternative sense of time. That alternative has not only a different sense of facts, but an entirely different sense of what is sacred, what imbues meaning.

In short, these are powerful forces.

There aren't things that can just be undone by argument. There are profound religious and psychological aspects to what we're going through right now.

And the idea of temporal dislocation and finding a new sense of sacred time IS NOT a single explanation, it is a dimension of the multiple aspects of the crisis facing us.

*This is also why some evangelicals persist in meeting.

Final thought: Finding one's self in sacred time is like a religious conversion.

We're not just dealing with a political crisis. It is a religious-political crisis.

The signs and the crosses at yesterday's rally testify to this.

(fyi: this is why solitary confinement is considered torture - it robs people of any sense of time, sacred or otherwise, and plunges them into despair and mental instability)