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One morning on the way to church I was struck by the preciousness of different moments in time. I was listening to Bob Dylan. He was crooning away about how ‘the times they are a changin’. Preston, my one year old, was in the back seat playing with a plastic phone that plays songs when you push various keys. So on top of Dylan’s angst about life and the passage of time is this tinker-toy sound of “Mary had a Little Lamb” and “Row, Row, Row, Your Boat.” . At that moment Ariana, my eleven year old, who had borrowed one of my skirts to wear to church (I am acutely aware that she is now old enough now to wear my clothes), asked me what it was like in my youth group. She wanted to know what it was like for me as a high school person, who my friends were, and what we did for fun. The images of those years flooded into my awareness as I picked through what to share with her. The converging of past, present and future in that moment as I pulled into the church parking lot was palpable. I became instantly aware of where I had and hadn’t been (the multitude of paths I had walked or chosen not to walk), where I am now (how I got here) and where the future might lead (not its end point but the paradoxical awareness of the future as something that was both in the making in that moment and something that had already arrived). It was a moment that brought all the pieces of my life together. It was a capsule of time, both simple and complex.
Time is a fickle concept. As Dorothy Sayers writes, “All conscious thought is a process in time; so that to think consciously about time is like trying to use a foot-rule to measure its own length.”[1] This morning we will wonder about time as we wander through time discussing time. You will spend time and I will I take your time. Hopefully it will not be a waste of your time and although all things take time with any luck I will end on time.
“Humans are different from all other species because they are able to comprehend the world in terms of distant futures and pasts…”[2] Animals prepare for the future out of necessity. Their behavior is severely limited by their instincts and the seasons. They are unconscious of any sense of the future. Nor can they comprehend the past. I can tell the dogs I will feed them now but they don’t understand, “I already fed you.” Humanity has a past, present, and future; we are aware of changes over time. So, too, we are aware of death.
Religions represent one of the many ways humans have of acquiring a sense of security in the face of the insecurity engendered by the passage of time. “Religions, therefore, are necessarily coeval with the discovery of time, and there is no major religion that does not address our awareness of the inevitability of individual death.”[3] But what they teach about the nature and importance or unimportance of time differs from religion to religion. Traditional peoples, as far as we are able to tell, were bound to the seasons, and the stars for their sense of time. Changes in life were marked by ceremonies that took place at certain times of the year. During these ceremonies time was a somersaulting encounter. Past was often brought into the present by the attendance of people and events long gone. For instance, spirits that had lived before would live again, while manipulating current events often controlled the future. (A dance of a successful hunt was designed to create that same success in the next day’s hunt.) For traditional people time just is. Past, future, and present merge like rivers in a boundless ocean we would call the present moment.
J.T. Fraser, in his book, Time the Familiar Stranger, states that “The religious systems of China – Confucianism and Taoism – have a preference for time perceived as aspects of dynamic living systems to be explored quantitatively Whereas Westerners have preferred time perceived as aspects of nonliving systems to be explored quantitatively.”[4]
Hinduism and Buddhism’s goal is to escape time. Humans are born and reborn until they are eventually released from time, which, remaining consistent with the earlier connection I made between time and death, is a way of escaping suffering. For Hindus and Buddhists, time, while real enough for daily chores and events, is judged unimportant in the total economy of the universe. “By coming down heavily on the side of timelessness as the ultimate reality of the world, [these faiths] lessen the existential tension created by the knowledge of time.”[5]
Not only for Hindus and Buddhists, but for much of pre-Christian world history moved in cycles of time. This seems to be true the more one sees one’s life bound up with the cycles of the seasons. But with the rise of Christianity, this belief was replaced by the notion of linear time; the notion that time progressed from an identifiable beginning to an appointed end goal. The progression of history from the Fall from Eden through the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and to the last Judgment became the foundation of the Christian faith and Western society.
Indeed, it has been argued that the West’s sense of linear time has been essential for the development of science and technology. Without a way to mark forward motion and cumulative effects there could be no clocks and thus no science. Objects moving mark linear time. At first it was the swing of the pendulum and now it is the movement of tiny atoms that pace our days. It was the railroads and their need to know when trains would arrive that created the time zones and a unified standard of time. Factories with their assembly lines required workers to begin their day together so alarm clocks and watches entered the picture. Linear time became a vicious cycle. As the idea of making every second count spread throughout society efficiency became an American virtue. Today many businesses are open round the clock while we frantically multitask.[6]
In 1884 Charles Warner wrote in Harper’ magazine that “The chopping up of time into rigid periods is an invasion of freedom and makes no allowance for differences in temperament and feeling.” In fact, while this type of division of time might play well to the modern “type A” personality, some of us feel marginalized because this arbitrary approach to time makes our skin crawl. Warner was not the first to complain. Plautus cursed the sundial, “The Gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial to cut and hack my days so wretchedly in to small portions.”[7] Our perception of time is a very individual and changing awareness.
James Gleick, in his book, Faster, describes several indicators of the rush of our lives: “The door close button in the elevator with no function but to distract for a moment those riders to whom ten seconds seems an eternity. Speed-dial buttons on telephones: do you invest minutes in programming them and reap your reward in tenths of a second? Fast food restaurants that add express lanes.”[8] And computers that link to the Master Clock and constantly update the time to assure its accuracy.
Eventually, however, if we pay attention to the clocks and the time we realize that lived time is different from clock time. Our experience of time changes with our moods, with our age, and with the events of our lives.[9] In his book, Oh! The Places You Will Go, Dr Seuss describes “the waiting place.” It’s a place where trains don’t go and everyone just sits around and looks at their watches. It’s not a fun place. We all know that place. The place where we are waiting for something awful to end or something wonderful to begin is a place where time seems not to change. Time drags on and we just wait. The clock in fact continues to tick at the same rate but not for us. The only solution seems to be keeping busy and keeping an eye toward the future goals. Two people in the same house living through the same time frame can experience it in very different ways. Take this time of year for instance. Children who saw me light the Advent wreath are well aware of the waiting time till Christmas. Four more weeks seems like a very long time – an interminable length of time. Adults on the other hand – especially those who celebrate Christmas – saw me light the Advent candle and felt a mild panic as they realized there are only four weeks left and they still have so much left to do. Same time frame – very different perspectives.
This may have been part of what lead Albert Einstein to discover the theory of relativity. The passage of time is a relative event depending on where one is standing and how one is feeling. But now there are theories, like those of quantum mechanics that explain the smallest particles of the universe, depend on the invisible framework of time steadily ticking in the background. I am not sure I understand either of these two theories, but I do see how it is difficult to reconcile definitive time with relative time.
One man, Julian Barbour, has suggested the only way to square these two different ways of describing the universe is to take time completely out of the picture. Mr. Barbour has written a book called, The End of Time. Unfortunately I ran out of time to read it for this sermon, but I did get to the “Discover” magazine interview with Mr. Barbour. Using references to equations too complex for laypeople and other physicists’ theories Barbour suggests that our lives are a series of still life configurations much like a film. Each of these configurations he calls a “now”. He suggests that each of these “nows” goes on into eternity. We coexist with all we have ever been and ever will be. “Every possible configuration of the universe, past, present and future, exists separately and eternally. We don’t live in a single universe that passes through time. Instead we – or many slightly different versions of ourselves – simultaneously inhabit a multitude of static every lasting tableaux that include everything in the universe at any given moment.”[10] Like snapshots our reality is simply laid out instant to instant. What is still unclear to me is Barbour’s statement that there is no movement. He says, “some configurations of the universe simply contain little patches of consciousness – people- with memories of what they call past built into each now.”[11] Our consciousness and the content of each “now” is what gives us our sense of identity.
Suffice it to say that in many ways Barbour brings us back to where we started with an almost religious explanation of existence. “Immortality is all around us, he says. Our task is to recognize it.”[12] All the universes of our existence and non-existence continue forever side by side. Many philosophers and theologians have been pondering this idea for centuries. Is there life after death? In a timeless universe the question of death becomes moot because it is ever present.
But still the clock ticks and eventually this sermon will end, or will it. Maybe the Hindus and Buddhists are right; time is only important when it comes to getting things done. But getting things done and doing seem to be the masters of our day. The voices of the danger of paying too much attention to the clock and the hazards of the hurried pace our busy lives have become deafening. Relax. Slow down. Simplify, simplify, simplify. The Unitarian Universalists passed a resolution asking us to simplify. At First Parish in Wayland we are hosting a potluck on Friday with ideas of how to simplify the holidays. We all try to master time and save time. While we wonder if time even exists we feel it rushing past us as we grow older. We are caught in a constant tangle of running with or against time.
Well, I see my time is almost up so I offer these words of Gleick to close, ”Death may be absolute but time is not. Our ancestors may have considered time to be divine property, but we know better - we who have created jet lag, slow-motion replays and metamphetamines. You can synchronize your watch with the master timekeepers and still time will drag slowly while you wait. Even if you feel yourself rushed by the sheer plentitude of things, you can remember that time is defined, analyzed, measured, and even constructed by humans. It may help to think of time as a continuous flow or a series of segmented packages. Or to find aggressive ways of squandering the time you manage to save. Or at least to recognize that neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing we ever had. It is what we live in if it exists at all. We can drift in its currents or we can swim.”[13] Here’s to a restful holiday. May it be so.
Footnotes:
1) Dorothy Sayers, “Strong Meat” (1939) from The
New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women edited by Rosalie Maggio p. 697
2) Time the Familiar Stranger by J.T. Fraser p. 7
3) Ibid p. 17
4) Ibid 20
5) Ibid p. 19
6) Time Magazine 12/27/99 The Riddle of Time by
Michael Lemonick p. 144
7) Faster by James Gleick p. 44
8) Ibid p.9
9) Ibid p.4
10) Discover December 2000 “From Here to Eternity”
by Tim Folger p.58
11) Ibid. p. 60
12) Ibid p. 61
13) Faster by James Gleick p. 280