by Rev. Thomas Disrud

a sermon given on Sunday, Jan. 9, 2000

at First Unitarian Church, Portland, OR

If the subject of time comes up in a conversation these days, chances are that someone will say something about how they don’t have enough of it. The day just doesn’t seem to contain enough hours.

Last Friday, the Oregonian had an article about how busy teenagers are these days trying to do school, job and social life. If their parents get them a car, the teenagers may need to have a job to pay for insurance and gas. Others want to have a job so they can buy the clothes they want. One young man talked about having to leave his parents notes when he got home late at night from his job because otherwise he would not have contact with them for days.

Even children in our modern times have appointment books. They have soccer and music and other things—many of them great for the kids—but the kids don’t seem to have much time to simply be. I remember the importance of being bored as a child. I may not have liked it at the time, but I can now see how important it was for me to find things for myself to do. I wonder how much of that children have these days.

And I hear from families that they, too are stressed. It is hard to find time when everyone can sit down and eat dinner together.

Now, with all of the technology we have at our fingertips, it is not supposed to be this way. We can communicate faster and more efficiently, we can get places faster, we have more help in all kinds of areas of life. So that should leave more time to do the things we want.

But it seems that as our options have increased, so have our stress levels. We are trying to move faster to make sure we have covered all the bases. Instead of being at work less, work now extends to all hours of the day. In fact, some people never seem to leave work, wherever they are. They are in touch by pager and cell phone, and in the process never really get time off.

And work is not the only thing we can do whenever we want. At 3 a.m., you can do your banking, order some clothes or other merchandise, get food in some places, and look up all kinds of things on the internet.

Now at first it seems great that we have all these options. You never know, after all, what kinds of information you may need at 3 a.m. But the options can also get twisted in our psyches. If we have the ability to be getting things done in the middle of the night, and we are not, then maybe we are not making very good use of our time. All of a sudden we feel more pressure than we did before. A blessing suddenly feels more and more like a curse.

And it may be we don’t feel all that busy, by choice or by circumstance. For us, it may feel like we have just been left out.

Not surprisingly, when researchers study how fast people walk down the street, our country is second only to Japan. It seems that the more we have to do, the faster things go. Our lives are simply filled up with more stuff.

What happens is that we are always on the go and still feel like things don’t get done. We want to do it all, and we try, but too often it feels like the clock has not given us enough time. So our impulse is to try to do more. WE get more frustrated. Road rage is on the rise.

The time we keep by clocks is relatively arbitrary. Certainly the seconds and the minutes and hours are ways for us to keep track of things. But they are a human invention. From culture to culture, the sense of time varies a great deal. A 3 p.m. meeting in Peru can mean a very different thing than one in Portland.

In keeping time, we attempt to give some meaning and framework to our lives. We follow night and day, and the seasons. The awareness of our hearts beating gives us each a sense of our own internal rhythms. As we age, we deepen our sense of time by how long it is people live. Most of us see our parents and grandparents dying and in this we see come to understand our own mortality in a very personal way. Sometimes, however, in the business of our lives, this may get lost.

If we once lived on human time, it is said that we now live on mice time—that everything has somehow sped up and we’re not quite sure what to do with that other than to try to go faster. In keeping up with the artificial count of time, we can lose touch with the natural rhythms in us and around us.

But sometimes it can catch up with us.

The other night I had a dream where I was walking along a beautiful beach. I was trying to get to a group of church people at one end of the beach. Something was about to start and I needed to be there. But the faster I tried to move, the more I kept getting tangled up in a bunch of vines and branches. The harder I tried, the more tangled I became. It felt as if I was I quicksand. Moving faster just got me into more trouble. This is the point where I woke up in the dream. I decided right there that this was probably something I should pay attention to.

That is certainly how things can feel sometimes.

If we get too caught up in the vines of life, we can start to lose sight of where we have been and where we want to be. The distractions win out.

It is natural to try to invest time with meaning. It is a framework we have assembled over generations to try to understand how time passes. How does one day connect to the rest? What does it mean to live for a year? Or a decade? Or maybe a century?

Certainly with the year 2000 and approaching turn of the millennium these questions are more in the public consciousness.

I find the millennium hard to get my head around. I can imagine a decade or even a century, but a thousand years is pretty hard to comprehend. I can only imagine what life was like a thousand years ago.

But all of these dates and numbers are arbitrary anyway. For each one of us, the sense of time starts as an individual experience and becomes something we share with others. But certainly, the living of life is not as linear as the arms of a clock or the dates of a calendar. How we view time depends very much upon where it is we are in life.

Over the holidays I had the pleasure of spending a few days with a seven-month old. I was stuck by how much she lives in the present. Her immediate needs, of course, were very important, but aside from that, her attention shifted to pretty much whatever was in front of her. She would set her eyes on something and would not leave it… until the next person or thing came along.

Being with her, I was aware of how much she helped me to be in the present. Wherever my mind might be wondering, what she was dealing with somehow became the rule of the moment. As I have come to know her in her few short months, I’m amazed as I watch her grow and change and how rapidly it seems to happen.

And as we age, our sense of time constantly evolves. A year in my thirties seems to go by a whole lot quicker than a year in my twenties did. And that is nothing from what I recall as a child. I remember my first grade teacher telling us as we left for Christmas vacation that she would see us again next year. Once I figured out what she was talking about, I remember what a big deal it seemed to be. A whole year would soon go by.

As a teenager it seemed to take forever for one year to go by. I just wanted to get on with things and could not understand how it could seem to be taking so long.

I can only imagine what it will be like twenty or thirty years from now. I’m told the years don’t come and go any slower. I remember reading a line that went something like: "Once you reach a certain age, every 15 minutes is breakfast." We are all heading there.

As we age we carry more and more memories with us and all those memories start to stack up. We are connected to both a greater sense of the past and also are more aware of the future. We grow more and more aware of our own mortality and we see our separate lives in a larger and larger context. As this happens, time moves at a different speed.

A friend of mine has tended to have a difficult relationship with his father. There were a lot of things he wanted from his father that his father was not able to give. Over the years, their relationship became more and more strained. He now has a son of his own and this has started to shift his view of his own father. He is starting to see him in a whole new light. While he still struggle with their relationship, he sees it in the context of his evolving relationship with his own son. He is more aware of his own limitations, and, perhaps of the limitations of his father.

Time is a much more elastic thing as we come to see all its dimensions. There is a lot more to look at than our daytimer or the clock in the corner of our computer screen.

And while at first it seems our lives move in some kind of line, there are many more dimensions to it. The seasons of the earth, the sun and the rain, move in their own time. and in each of us, the subconscious is at work. And the subconscious, said Freud, does not move in time. It exists in its own space and certainly does not move in a linear way. Our past, present and future thoughts all flow together, and it certainly not in any particular order. Time moves at its own pace.

And so the calendar and the clock are just a small part of what it is we have to pay attention to. But sometimes, they are the first things we see. As we have more to do with the time we have, it becomes more and more important to know what it is we hope to get out of that time. If not, it may be we simply get caught up in the frenzy. After a while, it can become pretty empty.

We need to allow ourselves to simply be. It is no wonder that the scriptures call for a day of sabbath, a day that is not like the other days, but a day when we break from our daily patterns and make space for God. It is a time to listen to those rhythms in us and around us, and to be intentional about the things that are most important to us.

In days past when stores were closed on Sundays and the pace of the world slowed down a lot more, Sundays felt more set apart. But today there is not much that seems separate. Because so much is happening around us, we are called to be more intentional about how it is we order our time.

In our modern context it means taking time to reflect, to be with family and loved ones, to be in religious community.

Spirit of Life, come unto me. Sing in my heart, all the stirrings of compassion.

It is important that we make space for the spirit to enter—to be as open as we can to what may come. One writer has said we need to allow for time full of its own emptiness. We must allow time to be what it is, and open to what may come to us, and not run to fill it up with whatever comes along.

I take a break from sermon writing to take a walk in my neighborhood. Rain has been falling on and off and clouds come and go. Suddenly they open up and a burst of sunshine comes forth. The wet sidewalk is suddenly so bright I can hardly see beyond it. I’m startled by the brightness.

My preoccupation about what I have to get done disappears and I’m lost in the radiance of the light. The sun goes back behind a cloud and I am left smiling.

The universe usually provides us all kinds of awareness if we are able to be open to what that might be. If we can see time in such a way to allow that, it may happen.

A Zen buddhist tale tells of a woman feels angry about how she is getting old. She is giving her granddaughter a bath in the kitchen sink. She covets the glowing skin of her granddaughter, and she is also envious of all the years that are stretched out before this magical spark of herself.

In washing the tiny hand, the grandmother noticed its miraculous construction: a beautiful miniature, perfect nails, even the little wrinkles on the tops of the fingers.

She studied her own hand beside her granddaughter’s hand and in a moment of clarity realized that both hands were the same. The only difference was time. Each was perfect in its time; each served its function in its time.

And the grandmother realized that her own hand was beautiful, too, only different.

If we can be present in the moment, we will be in touch with the rhythms of life. Those moments of clarity will come to us.

Annie Dillard writes about being in the present as she sits by her favorite creek:

"My God, I look at the creek. It is the answer to Merton’s prayer, "Give us time!" It never stops. If I seek the senses and skill of children, the information of a thousand books, the innocence of puppies, even the insights of my own city past, I do so only, solely, and entirely that I might look well at the creek. You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled. You’ll have fish left over. The creek is the one great giver. It is, by definition, Christmas, the incarnation. This old rock planet gets the present for a present on its birthday every day."

Too often, the present gets lost because we are busy planning for the future. We tell ourselves that we can worry about more important things later, because, after all, we have plenty of time.

Rai Sikora writes about a conference where she asked a thousand people the question: "If you had only twenty four hours left to live, where would you spend it? How would you spend it? and who, if anyone, would you have with you?"

She writes: "When I read the answers on small slips of paper, not one person said, "I will watch TV; I will sit in front of the computer; I will sit in traffic for hours in my car; I will fight with those who don’t see things my way; I will go shopping; I will figure out how to make more money." Not one said, "I will stay indoors; I will just go to sleep; I will worry about my hair and my weight’ I will not be good to myself and those around me."

"Instead, the thousand slips of paper spoke of loving family and friends, being in the most beautiful places on earth, making peace with all beings (especially those we have needlessly harmed), waking up, and spreading as much peace and laughter and honesty and touch as possible in those last hours."

It is when our lives get interrupted with something like the loss of a loved one that we stop and look at our priorities. The wind is taken out of our sails, and we need to reevaluate. As a minister, I see this again and again. Time doesn’t seem to move at the same pace, and we are asked what things are the most important in our lives. We realize that we may only have a few hours or days, and that those are precious hours.

It is living those experiences that call us to use the time we have as fully as we can. Time is a gift we have been given and we are called to make the most of it.

Words of e.e. cummings:

little man

(in a hurry

full of an

important worry)

halt stop forget relax

wait

(little child

who have tried

who have failed

who have cried)

lie bravely down

sleep

big rain

big snow

big sun

big moon

(enter

us)

As we enter a new time, may we enter it with humility and with hope. May we be open to what it may bring. As we are present, may life come to us, and may we, in gratitude, give it back to the world around us.

May it be so. Amen.

Let us pray: Spirit of life, open us that we might see all the beauty in our midst. May we listen to the rhythms of life that flow in us and among us. As we can be present with life, may we find meaning and joy. May each of us be connected to the life around us. May we find hope and meaning. May we offer all we are in service to the good. For these things we pray. Amen.

Benediction

As you listen to the beating of your heart, may you be connected to the presence of life in the world. May that knowing bring you joy. Go in love and peace. Amen.

Call to worship

We come this sabbath day to this house of worship.

We come to be reminded of who we are and to remind ourselves of our highest ideals.

We come to be with friends and family, with fellow travelers on the journey

we come to laugh and to cry,

to celebrate and to mourn,

Let us bring our who selves here to this place.

With our presence, let us make this time together holy.

Come, let us worship together.

Copyright © 2000, by Rev. Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.