RECENTLY, I heard of an elderly nun who lay dying in Carlow. One evening she asked, "What day is this?"

"It is Easter Monday," she was told by her sister. "Ah yes!" the dying lady, "Fairyhouse!"

Ways of telling the time are among those things "stored as we grow". A sense of time is as important as a sense of place. It is formative in our search for pleasure, and in our search for happiness. We are initiated into time sense by our first communities:

and families. We learn an horarium of mealtimes and bedtimes, as well as a calendar of birthdays and gathering days, of days for the opening of seasons and festivals and of serendipitous multiplicities (faith festivals and Fairyhouse). They carry us into their rhythms, prompting our search for pleasure, informing our anticipation of happiness.

We are initiated, too, into clocktime. It is a magical moment of childhood - to be helped distinguish the functions of the big and little hand, and then to read them jointly.

In retrospect, this lesson seems decisive. Our culture affords it great prestige. Until then, we merely learned family time and local calendars. The clock, by contrast, tracks the movement of the earth turning on its axis. The public calendar year - tracks the movement of the earth's gyration around the sun. Clock time is the time of the universe - disengaged from human affairs or local condition.

Cultures, however, are cleverly deceptive about their purposes. I want to argue that our culture is deceptive about time. For appearances, we have secular time, detached from any human interest. Detachment is more apparent than real. Behind the clock face lies hidden, quite specific purposes and cultural interests.

It can readily be demonstrated that clock time is not the time of physics. In the Atlanta games, for instance, two swimmers touched the end poolwall at exactly the same time on the clock, measured to one hundredth of a second. The last place in a final was at issue. To general astonishment in a swim off there resulted a second impasse, a second dead heat.

Now what? Should a physicist be summoned? The physicist might suggest a more refined mechanism - ending to one millionth of a second. He or she might also attempt to take us further afield. In the special theory of relativity there is the view that judgment of simultaneity of two events corresponds to no unique physical reality (i.e. no dead heats).

Moreover, in subatomic measurement there is systemic uncertainty about position and momentum, and only a language of probability. Now sport would be destroyed from within by these notions, these measurements. Clock time - but not the time of physics - is constitutive of sport. Clock time is not universe time tout court. Although drawing on certain measurements of an earth's movements, it also draws on its relevance to certain culture specific practices. (In Atlanta the matter was resolved when one competitor retired.)

In fact, clock time has developed in an intricate relationship with the modern industrial era. Lewis Mumford writes: "The clock, not the steam engine, is the key to the modern industrial age." Before the mechanical clock, water clocks were widely used. They were complicated because the hours they measured varied according to the time of the year. An hour was a twelfth part of daylight, and so was constantly lengthening or shortening.

The mechanical clock brought an unvarying hour of 60 minutes, and this standard hour first achieved its widespread popularity because of the needs of the textile trade. Greenwich Mean Time emerged because of the need for a single time for railway timetables, and was first known as "railway time". In the modern era, time gets defined through its role in the organisation of certain human practices, principally that of commodity accumulation (and over accumulation).

A challenge to the prestige of clock time is by no means arcane, because time horizons enter into our political decisions. What is the optimal rate of exploitation of a nature resource such as a peat bog, a zinc mine, or a species of fish? Is the time frame set by the profit rate or interest rate? Or should we search for a development which ensures the perpetuation of human conditions into an indefinite future - as environmentalists insist? It is our education in time which will guide our hand in these matters.

We receive primary education in time from our first communities and families. It is a formation in sensibility, not just in ideas or the technique of how to read the clock.

WHAT then can reshape humanity at such levels, and with so much at stake? I suggest that the disciplines of music, liturgy, and contemplation can help here. Rowan Williams writes: "If music is the most fundamentally contemplative of the arts, it is not because it takes us into the timeless but because it obliges us to rethink time; it is no longer time for action, achievement, dominion and power. It is simply time for feeding upon reality; quite precisely like that patient openness to God that is religious contemplation".

We like to think that we have a neat and secularised version of time, detached from cultural story - a ticking clock, mirroring the turning universe. It is not so. Our practices of time have evolved as part of material practices characterising this age - a rather arrogant commodification of everything and anything, around and about.

Liturgy, contemplation, music introduce a different story through a different practice. We belong to time. Time is gift. We belong to the cosmos and to the time given to us. Gratitude is fundamental, and not incompatible with control.