by Rev. Thomas Disrud

When just over 1,000 adults were polled recently by the Associated Press, it was clear that Americans don’t like wasting time.

Over half said that they would not return to a business where they were kept waiting too long. Nearly one in five owned up to speaking rudely to someone in the past few months when they weren’t served efficiently.

Grocery stores top the list of places where patience is most likely to melt, along with the ice cream. Post offices and motor vehicle offices are not far behind.

Hana Sklar, 23, lives in New York and wants things done, yes, in a New York minute.

A native of Australia, where “it’s relaxing, calm, everyone takes their time,” Sklar now lives in Brooklyn and says she typically loses patience after waiting less than one minute in a line or on the phone.

And it doesn’t matter what age people are. In fact, the survey found that older people are more impatient than younger people.

“If you ask the typical person do you feel more time-poor or money-poor, the answer almost always is time-poor,” said Paco Underhill, an authority on what draws and drives away shoppers.

In our culture, time is money. And we don’t like to waste what we have. After all, it seems we have less and less of it these days to do what we want to do. We can’t waste it in line. We have families and work; we have our volunteering and our leisure. We have phone calls and e-mails; we have instant messaging and pagers. We have round-the-clock up-to-the- minute-news wherever we turn. There just isn’t enough time to do all the things we are supposed to do or feel compelled to do.

Which brings us to be the subject of today’s sermon: the importance of being idle.

Being idle, or not doing, seems to be harder and harder to accomplish these days. And even if we have the time, we have maybe learned that we should be a little suspicious of just doing nothing. Being idle is, after all, the beginning of all vices, according to the proverb.

Do you remember Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper?

In a field one summer’s day a Grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart’s content. An Ant passed by, bearing along with great toil an ear of corn he was taking to the nest.

“Why not come and chat with me,” said the Grasshopper, “instead of toiling and moiling in that way?”

“I am helping to lay up food for the winter,” said the Ant, “and recommend you to do the same.”

“Why bother about winter?” said the Grasshopper; “we have got plenty of food at present.” But the Ant went on its way and continued its toil. When the winter came the Grasshopper had no food and found itself dying of hunger, while it saw the ants distributing every day corn and grain from the stores they had collected in the summer. Then the Grasshopper knew:

It is best to prepare for the days of necessity.

The story points to many things that we value in our culture: working, doing, keeping busy. Of course we also value making money while we are doing all that. I’m not so sure about the preparation for the days of necessity. We are not a culture that values saving as much as we value consuming. In fact, the message that we get over and over again is that we are what we consume.

But the story still rings true. It is virtuous to be busy and not to waste our time. And certainly we are not supposed to be idle.

There’s some irony in all this because it seems that we have all kinds of things that are supposed to make life easier and give us more time. But that doesn’t seem to be the way that it works. Sometimes it seems as if half of the people driving cars are talking on their cell phones. Do you ever wonder what they are all talking about? Do you ever wonder what is so important?

A couple of weeks ago I was in a store talking to a salesman. As I was paying for my purchase he asked if I wanted to upgrade to a different cell phone package. I told him I didn’t have a cell phone and he looked at me as if I had told him that at the end of the month I was moving—lock, stock and barrel—to Mars. I left the conversation thinking, gee, maybe I really do need a cell phone.

The educator Robert Gass says that many of us have become habituated, even addicted, to a high level of urgency. Even as we complain about too much to do, our minds crave yet more stimuli. We have a free moment in our schedule, and we surf the Net or pick up something to read rather than breathe deeply and renew our energy. Those working for social change often operate in a high level of stress, driven by the sheer magnitude of the problems we face. But that is not a sustainable way to approach change.

In our lives we need space. Space to think, space to do nothing. Space to fill as life will fill it. Space to contemplate our lives, space to think about where we are going. We need space to imagine.

The writer Sue Monk Kid tells this story about her grandfather:

“My grandfather was a lawyer, a judge, and a farmer. He was frequently busy and conquesting, but I remember also that he sometimes entered into golden moments of wu wei (what the Taoists call the moment when we discover the value of being effortless). He and I used to go fishing at one of the little ponds on his farm. He would sit and hold his cane pole over the water, becoming as still as the stumps that jutted up from the water. I usually tired of fishing fairly soon and went on to other things, like dandelions.

“One day having given up on the fishing, I was playing in his old black truck when I noticed that his fishing bait was still on the seat. I remember being surprised that my grandfather had been out fishing an hour or more without bait.

“I grabbed the bait basket and raced over to him. ‘Granddaddy, how can you fish without bait?’

“He tilted back his hat and smiled as if he had been caught in some delicious secret. ‘Well, sometimes it’s not the fish I’m after,’ he said, ‘it’s the fishing.’”

It seems like the more things we have to grab our attention the more difficult it is to find moments to think, uninterrupted. The irony is that it is in these very times where there is more coming at us that we need more times when we aren’t doing anything.

We live in times when much is asked of us as citizens, as parents, as neighbors, as people of faith. If we are to know our values and to come to live them out, those things that are the most important to us, we need time to be with them and to know where we are.

Too often we are rushing from one thing to the next and the role of citizen gets lost in the shuffle.

Writer Mark Slouka, in an essay in Harper’s Magazine, says idleness is not just a psychological necessity, something that human beings need, but something more important. He says it “constitutes as well a kind of political space, a space as necessary to the workings of an actual democracy as, say, a free press.” How does it do this? “By allowing us time to figure out who we are, and what we believe; by allowing us time to consider what is unjust, and what we might do about it.” In having time to be idle we give the inner life its due. And he says that is exactly what makes idleness dangerous. Too much time means we might think up all kinds of things we shouldn’t think up. Just think of how mothers grow suspicious when kids have too much time on their hands. The kids might be up to something. And no wonder that kids will say in such a situation, “Look busy.”

As citizens in a democracy, we need time to think about our options. We need time to consider what is best in our lives and in the life of our larger community. We need time to think about the course we are on and time to think about whether it is time to move in another direction. We need time to know what questions we should be asking.

Elie Wiesel tells the story of a young boy in a small East European town in 1941. One day the combination town fool and wise man, Moche, approaches him as he is praying.

“Why do you pray?” he asked the young boy.

“I don't know why,” the boy said.

“And why do you pray, Moche?” the young boy asked him.

“I pray to the God within me (to) give me the strength to ask ... the right questions.”

These are times when we need to be asking questions. These are times when we need to be able to listen for the answers. We need to give ourselves space to know what we are called to do. We need space to cultivate our imaginations. We need space to know how to face all that is happening in the world right now.

I was moved last week by a story I heard on National Public Radio.

There was a profile of an author named Kenneth Helphand, who writes about gardens planted in times of war. Not just victory gardens, grown in time of scarcity, but those planted in hostile places, including battle trenches in World War I, in Eastern Europe’s ghettos, in Japanese-American internment camps of World War II and even gardens grown by soldiers serving in Iraq.

His fascination with what he now calls “defiant gardens” began with this undated photograph of soldiers in the French trenches in WW I flanked by their planting beds. Notice the use of twigs as ornamental borders delineating each soldier’s plot. Helphand had this picture on his bookshelf for several years before deciding to pursue the meaning of gardens in such extreme circumstances, beyond their obvious use for food.

The gardens, he said, “exemplified the struggle to create something normal in the most abnormal conditions.”

The story profiled Army Sgt. Carl Quam, Jr., stationed outside Tikrit, Iraq. He and others in his company borrowed irrigation and planting techniques from Iraqis in the area and grew bumper crops of food: corn, cauliflower, cucumbers and peas. Their battalion ate particularly well, but that was only part of Quam’s motivation. Four men from his company were killed in the fighting. Quam said working in the garden was a release for a little while, usually in the evening. It was a place where you could “take your mind off what was going on around you. It helped me cope with missing them.”

Tuning into the news, opening up the newspaper these days is not easy. Day after day we are asked to find our way in the world. We live with images of war, of violence, with the awareness of what is happening to the planet. We live with images of wonder and beauty, of tragedy and injustice. 

We are asked to make some sense of it all, to discern our role as parents and spouses, as citizens and workers, as people of faith. We are asked to have the courage to listen to the promptings of the spirit. We are asked to know how it is we are to be in the world.

Words of poet Mary Oliver:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Every moment of our lives is precious. We are asked day by day to live as one among many and to know our place in the family of things. Every day new life comes into the world at the same time as other lives are leaving. May our lives be not just about doing but also about being. May we use the bounty of time before us well—there is too much happening for us to do anything else. In our doing and our being, may we know love, may we know hope, may we know peace. Amen.

PRAYER


Great spirit, who moves and lives among us and within us, open us, hold us, guide us on our journey. Call us to be idle and blessed. Call us to move in the world as the spirit calls us to move. Call us to be seekers and risk takers. Give us courage. Give us hope in all our days. Amen.

BENEDICTION

As you leave this place, live with an open heart. Have courage to listen to what the spirit asks of you. May your life be idle and blessed. Go in love. Go in peace. Amen.