There is a certain rhythm in each day in our lives. Weekdays, Saturdays, Sundays, vacation days and all the other categories of days. Each has its own rhythm. No matter what your state and role in life, your time is rarely your own. There are demands upon you time and attention that are unrelenting, recurring, and unavoidable – even as they are welcomed and cherished.. It can be a rhythm that sets the current and flow upon which you navigate the day like an Olympic kayaker on rapids of the slalom course. It can be a tyrant that can drive you to want to strike back at Time. On the afternoon of February 15, 1894, a French anarchist, Martial Bourdin, carried a homemade bomb in what was thought to be an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Royal Observatory which just 10 years earlier had been established as the global time standard — Greenwich Mean Time. Was it a symbolic revolutionary act to disrupt the tyranny of time? In any case, he wasn’t the only one to attack clocks during this period: In Paris, rebels simultaneously destroyed public clocks across the city, and in Bombay, protestors shattered the famous Crawford Market clock with gunfire.

If establishing GMT was the revolution of a global connection, the counter-revolution failed and we adapted to the inevitability of the march of time. But there are moments, events, when time stops and our full attention is demanded. It matters not that there is a list of things that need to be done, calls to return, connections to be made, and that all the unrelenting, recurring, and unavoidable demands await us.

But there are encounters in life when Time seems suspended even as it inexorably moves ahead.

One of those encounters was with Elias Syriani. a man I first met in 2003.  He was a member of the Catholic community on North Carolina’s death row since 1990.  He was scheduled for execution in November of that year.  Elias was the community psalmist. The other men always left it to Elias to read the psalm.  Elias emigrated to the United States from Jordan as a young adult. He was a Catholic Palestinian and there was a rhythm to his reading which seemed to speak of his home. There were words that flowed even as certain words and phonetic sounds challenged him. It was part and parcel of the Catholic community “on the row.”

Our ministry on the row was the weekly celebration of Mass. We were not counselors, lawyers, or spiritual directors – those were roles for others in the confined and restricted life on the row. In time you become a member of the row community – at least on the periphery and you begin to wonder about the backstory of what brought them to this place. Only knowing Elias for a limited time and in a confined context, it was natural to ask why this 60-something grandfather figure was in prison.  He most often carried the comportment of a gentle, humble man who spoke little, but when he did speak, spoke wisely. What had he done? There is a Wikipedia page that describes the circumstances of how Elias murdered his wife (1990). He was convicted and on November 18, 2005 the State of North Carolina executed him for his crime.

Capital crimes are attended by suffering and affliction – for the victims and their loved ones, for the family of the perpetrator, and sometimes for those surrounding them, and perhaps even society. In October 2005 I heard a presentation by Elias’ children as they presented their own account of suffering with a moving and heart-felt story about their experience as children, being witnesses to the murder, and becoming orphans – mother dead and father disowned.  They also told of their road through hate, eventually reaching doubt as they heard the Arabic community of Calumet, IL speak of a good and wise man, who once had been their father and who had earned the respect of that local community.  The doubts led them to confront their father in August 2004, to ask “why” in order to reach some closure to a past part of their life so that they could move forward.  As they so movingly told, what they found instead was reconciliation and discovered they were no longer orphans.  For them their father had risen from a grave even as the State planned to again return Elias to the grave cementing that fate of Rose, Sarah, John and Janet as orphans.

Elias’ children, now pleading for setting aside the death penalty, would have readily joined the French anarchist, Martial Bourdin and blown up “time.” But time can bring its own affliction as the moments tick away.