Present Time
Delivered by Stephanie Shute Kelsch at Second Parish, October 25, 2009
The next time we gather together, Daylight Savings Time will have changed over to Eastern Standard Time. Next Sunday at 2: 00 AM – so it will really feel like it happens Saturday night, which happens to be Halloween – we will set our clocks back an hour. Lovely, isn’t it? One whole, complete, delicious extra hour. My question for you this morning is: What will you do with that extra hour? If you’re anything like the teenagers I work with all day, you’ll sleep. Great choice. We move in such a busy, fast-paced, multi-tasking world that an extra hour of sleep seems appropriate use of a gift of time. But sleep certainly isn’t the only way to spend this extra hour. I, for one, can anticipate really reading the Sunday New York Times at a leisurely pace with the gift of an extra hour. Contemplating what to do with 60 “free” minutes (not really free as we have to pay them back in the spring, but we do have them on credit for six months) has led me to think a bit more about the entire concept of Time.
Actually, I think about Time a lot. I suspect that we all do, and that it’s not just a function of middle age. I remember as a college student engaging in late night, terribly intense arguments about the perception of time. When I was struggling to stay awake in my 8:00 AM pass/fail General Biology class after a late night at rehearsal for Man of La Mancha that had seemed to fly by, I wondered why all hours had to be measured the same way. Why couldn’t we find some way to BANK time so that we could save the “bored” hours to spend when truly “engaged”? Ultimately I dismissed the entire issue as a problem of physics and dropped it.
Well, I didn’t really drop it, for I’ve remembered those conversations over the years and – revisiting my ideas from different vantage points as I’ve grown older – have come to realize some important things thanks to my adolescent “time is the perception of time” arguments.
First of all, they reflect a terribly personal – okay, self-centered – view of time. When I was 19 years old, time was just about what I or my friends wanted. The concept of “banking time” reflected our individual perceptions. We were putting our individual perceptions of time at the center of the world. Once I’d grown up enough to realize how confusing it could be if everyone were on individual time, I got to thinking about what a social construct the measurement of time is– for that was what we were really talking about. Of course we need to coordinate time if we live in any kind of community. The very word “clock” comes from the Latin word for bell, “clocca” and that reflects a 10th century device created to call monks to prayers. Talk about coordinated time and community! The clocks in cathedral towers made measurement of time available to the entire community, not unlike the function of the steeple clocks in our own part of the world where the church served as the center of village life. Think about our own community and this church service for further example of the agreement about measuring time – as I stand here facing a clock and listening to the ticking of my own wristwatch. We agree to meet at 10:00 A.M. and all understand just when that means we should show up. We agree to worship for an hour and all parties respect that length of time, mindful of how people with busy days or conflicting plans will work this worship hour into their Sunday morning; how people with joys or concerns will count on an hour to express and feel rejoicing or respite. A community needs to agree on time for it all to work.
But once you start talking about social constructs, once you start considering human needs and purposes, you can’t help but expect that there will be some manipulation as certain agendas are deemed of greater importance than others.
Let’s start with larger units of time as an example, like calendars. If any of you have done genealogical research in the New England area, you may have encountered a system of “double dating” where there are two dates given for an event, those dates separated by a slash. One of those dates is referred to as “Old Style”, the other “New Style”. This conflict reflects the slowness of Protestant countries to adopt Pope Gregory’s revamping of the Julian calendar in the 16th century. It wasn’t until the 18th century that the British Calendar Act of 1752 brought the colonies in line with the Gregorian version of the year. And why had Pope Gregory adjusted the calendar? So church holidays would fall in the appropriate seasons. (If you want to think further about man-made manipulation of time and what happens when time is not perceived with some uniformity, imagine all the upset the British Calendar Act caused . The day after September 2nd was September 14th – which prompted workers in London to take to the streets in protest of the eleven days pay they had lost. I know a few people who would have been protesting losing their birthdays.)
All of this illustrates how there is nothing absolute about the measurement of time. Oh, there are things that are precise and accurate, that may in fact reflect what is happening in the natural world – but the very construct is man-made one that generally serves man-defined purposes. For example, the human invention of the train and the telegraph drove development of standardized time zones. Train schedules just didn’t work when each community retained its own local time based on the sun – trains and telegraph messages traveled too quickly. Clearly the measurement of time, which my self-centered collegiate discussion limited to personal needs, belongs to a larger social context – and with it the complications of political and economic agendas.
And that brings us back to Daylight Savings Time. Benjamin Franklin first proposed the concept of Daylight Savings Time in a humorous essay in 1784. Despite his “early to bed, early to rise” proverb, in France Franklin was known to stay out quite late and upon awakening quite late one day to bright sunshine must have been motivated by a Yankee impulse to suggest a way to excuse himself from any feeling of guilt. What started out as a bit of a joke, became a political issue in the early 20th century. Because it seemed that people accomplished a great deal in the evening, the American government passed a law setting the clocks ahead to help people get more done before it was dark and thus save energy. During both World Wars, our country utilized this practice. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson finally made it official- the United States would run on Daylight Savings and Eastern Standard Time. Almost. Parts of Arizona still ignore the time change. Remember, we are talking about human institutions here and in our democracy the variety of opinions can indeed be respected.
But the measurement of time, the way we talk about it, is indeed a social construct, with all the complications that can entail. But time is still personal, very personal – considering what it represents. All we have done with our clocks and our calendars and our time zones and our Daylight Savings Time is manufacture a way to deal with a phenomenon. And we might succeed in measuring it. We do not succeed in controlling.
Our reading from Ecclesiastes this morning reminds us that there is a time for everything. “A time to be born and a time to die. A time to break down and a time to build up.” And we try mightily to control that schedule, don’t we? My high school students assure me that they will graduate from college in four years, marry about seven years after that, have their 2.5 children and dog. But it isn’t just adolescents that think they will control time. How many of us schedule our day, assuming that we can correctly allot time and that things will happen as we wish? Until we try to navigate the Route 228 detour, maybe. We want to control time. For time represents our very life.
Perhaps because of what time represents, there can be, at times, something of an adversarial attitude underlying our attitude towards time. We know what happens when we fail to control it, when we run out of it. So we try to dominate it. Think of the language: the biological clock is ticking, so we must act; we kill time; beat time; cheat time; waste time.
Yet interestingly enough, we really only overcome time when we forget it – when we stop measuring it. When, As Marianne Moore asks in her poem, we ask – “what are years?” And reminds us that it is “in surrendering (that we) find continuing.”
She’s hardly the first to articulate this view. Mindful of time, I won’t take this sermon into a discussion of Eastern mysticism. But true to my background as a teacher of American Literature, let me share how two other Western writers have expressed similar thoughts.
From our own Unitarian heritage we have Ralph Waldo Emerson writing in his essay Nature in 1836, describing himself so completely IN a moment that “ … Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed in the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”
We forget Time and we become part of the Infinite.
One hundred and thirty-five years later, Robert Heinlein writing in the science fiction classic Stranger in a Strange Land which many of you may remember, presented the concept of “groking” - a concept quite complicated and quite 1960’s, but a concept that involves becoming merged in understanding with another to the exclusion of all other distractions. Heinlein describes it as meaning “almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science.” What I remember from my high school reading
of it is the woman kissed by the Martian noting how his concentration was so completely on the KISS – not what might follow or what had led to it – that she was overwhelmed. As she put it, “I’ve been kissed by men who did a very good job. But they don’t give kissing their whole attention. They can’t. No matter how hard they try parts of their minds are on something else….but when he kisses (me), he isn’t doing anything else. I’m his whole universe … and the moment is eternal because he doesn’t have any plans and isn’t going anywhere. Just kissing me.”(175)
I think all of us have moments when we forget Time, and thus transcend it. The moments aren’t easy to achieve – we have our cell phones, our blackberrys, our iphones – all the technological devices that demand we be in two places at once, cram two minutes into one. But they lose their power when - like Ralph Waldo Emerson – we become absorbed in Nature, perhaps watching the waves on Nantasket Beach. When we become absorbed in some mental-emotional activity like listening to a fine piece of music or reading an compelling book. When we fully enter a physical activity like the much-touted runner’s high. When something in one of our relationships lift us to a place of present time. When we hold a child.
Another example of forgetting time comes from my experience with my mother in the last days of her life. Once we had all decided that no extraordinary measures would be taken to keep her alive, time seemed to stop. I – who am so driven by time, usually the lack thereof, who works in a school where bells ring every 48 minutes and then four minutes after that just to make sure students and teachers know someone is late, who struggles to fit all I want to accomplish into a day – I realized I had to set time aside once the decision had been made. And as a result I got to spend a lovely day sitting by my mother’s bedside in a world where there was no time. There was only a future we couldn’t contemplate, a past that meant more than we could articulate. So we could only be present. People came in – hospital staff – family – friends – and, absent time, we were completely present to each other.
It was beautiful.
And lest you think it somber and profound, let me just tell you that at one point in the day, my mother roused herself to speech and said, “Stephanie, why don’t you take a teeth whitening course?” She certainly was looking at me.
It is one of the most cherished memories of my life.
Now, I know it’s not easy to set aside time to live in the present moment, to experience PRESENT TIME. But when we do, for however long it lasts, we have ceased to experience the usual adversarial relationship with time. No longer worrying about measuring, standardizing, controlling, scheduling, juggling time, we are here, in the moment. And we are the most alive we will ever be. If managing time is a practical skill, living in the moment is as well, for it reveals the REASON to manage time.
I think back now on my college discussions about time and realize how foolish it was to dismiss the problem as one of physics. It’s really more a problem of faith, about trusting time - and all that time means: love, life, God – enough to not try to control it, but rather to experience it.
So I repeat my question. What will you do with the gift of an extra hour that you receive at 2:00 AM next Sunday? Will you sleep? If that’s what you need, that’s a good use of the hour. Will you plan to immerse yourself in an activity – bread making, cycling, birdwatching? If that represents something you will fully engage in, great. Will you set aside time to be present to and with and for someone- a family member, the memory of a family member – for much as they may be gone, the relationship is still present ?
Whatever you do, my hope for you is that you will remember the words of the poet Rumi who said, “Come out of the circle of time and into the circle of love.”
What Are Years?
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What is our innocence, what is our guilt? All are naked, none is safe. And whence is courage: the unanswered question, the resolute doubt, - dumbly calling, deafly listening-that in misfortune, even death, encourage others and in it's defeat, stirs
the soul to be strong? He sees deep and is glad, who accededs to mortality and in his imprisonment rises upon himself as the sea in a chasm, struggling to be free and unable to be, in its surrendering finds its continuing.
So he who strongly feels, behaves. The very bird, grown taller as he sings, steels his form straight up. Though he is captive, his mighty singing says, satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy. This is mortality, this is eternity. |