Third Sunday of Lent: Opening the Gift of Time
Ecclesiastes 3:1-14
Every fall, more than one thousand members of the Society for the Deceleration of Time meet for their annual conference in a resort town n the Austrian Alps. The members of this society do what many people do at conferences: network, present papers. Unlike many other societies, they also do a few publicity stunts. Not long ago, the Society for the Deceleration of Time called on the International Olympic Committee to award gold medals to the athletes with the slowest times.[1]
Interestingly, the motto of this group is not "Slow Down Now" or "Speed Kills." Their goal is not to do everything at a snail's pace. They don't hope to dismantle our speedy civilization and send us back into a slow-moving, agrarian past. Their motto is, actually, a German word — eigenzeit — which translates into "own time." In other words, they are saying, each person should be able to move at their own pace — sometimes going slow when that is what you want to do, sometimes going fast. In Italian, the phrase is tempo giusto, meaning the right speed for the right activity.
It seems sort of silly that there has to be a movement that fights for the right to determine our own speed of life. But such is the state we find ourselves in, huh? Says Carlo Petrini, the Italian founder of the Slow Food movement— the international movement dedicated to cultivating, cooking and consuming our food at a relaxed pace — "Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Food." And engage in Fast Sex, according to the founders of the Slow Sex movement. There is also something called the Slow Cities Movements, the Slow Design Movement and a handful of other such movements — all documented, by the way, the book In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed.
Speed is not intrinsically wrong. Sometimes, it's very fun to go fast. But speed can also be sort of addictive, can't it? I know if I've been going too fast, multitasking for too long, I can't turn it off. I start doing everything fast, including things that really need to be slow to be savored, like cooking and eating and playing with my son. And when we live in a culture that encourages and rewards that sort of non-stop speed, it can be easy to become "slaves of speed," as Carlos Petrini says.
So how do we find our tempo giusto, our eigenzeit — or, in English, our sacred speed? Fortunately, there are many resources in the Christian traditions hat can help us establish these sacred rhythms, to be in time in way that is more geared to the pace of our bodies and nature than the unyielding forward motion of the clock. So for the rest of this sermon, I want to talk about resources for shaping our day, week and year. We'll have a chance together to share some of our ideas about how we do this during Education Hour.
The day. Perhaps the most helpful thing we can do to shape our days is to pay attention to how we begin them. Do we wake up to the clock radio already blaring the days' bad news, roll out of bed and begin mentally rehearsing what needs to be accomplished that day? Doing so subtly communicates to our soul: "This is who I am — a producer, a worker, someone who gets things done." Or we could wake up and linger in bed, or in a comfy chair, for just a few minutes and receive the gift of the day by thanking the One who created it. I have spent quite a bit of time in Benedictine monasteries, and every morning prayer begins with this verse from the Psalms: "Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall declare your praise." It is a wonderful way to begin the day. Doing so subtly communicates to our soul: "This is who I am — a child of God, who has received the gift of another day on earth from a generous hand."
I know some of us have a longer morning ritual, involving meditation, prayer, or journaling. Setting aside 30 minutes for this before we begin our work is a wonderful way to orient ourselves in time. But even if we don't have that much time, we only need a few minutes to be thankful that we have woken from another night. We only need a few minutes to mentally go over our day and offer up what is coming to God. I have a couple of prayer books for morning and evening prayer that I like to use, and they take only a few minutes to pray. In the past, I have sometimes put on a CD with a song that reminds me of the gift of the day, or I've sung the hymn from our hymnal, "Each morning brings us, fresh outpoured, the lovingkindness of our Lord." A well-known theologian says he always makes the sign of the cross over his body in the morning, to remind him of his baptism. Obviously, there are many small but real ways to claim the day as God's day and to remember that it is a gift.
How we end the day is also important. A prayer said or hymn sung as darkness descends can allow us to surrender the day's events to God's care — all that went wrong as well as all that went right. For awhile, I used to practice a short version in the evening of what is called the "examination of consciousness" prayer. I simply reviewed the day and thanked God for its blessings and then offered to God any parts of the day in which I felt out of right relation with myself, others or the earth. Eugene Peterson, a Christian spiritual writer, has adopted the Jewish practice of seeing the day as beginning at dusk, rather than at dawn. "Perceiving a day's beginning at the darkening point teaches us something about who we are as human beings," he says. "We go to sleep, and God begins (God's) work." God is growing the crops even before the farmer is up and knitting together the wound before the clinic opens. When the farmer and physician awake, they will join in (God's work)."
While I think it is particularly important to be attentive to how we begin and end the day, at these "hinges of the light and darkness," many of us also desire to have stopping points throughout the day where we change our pace. I know many of you use your lunch hour to refresh your spirit in some way: taking a walk, soaking up some sun. Adopting the Slow Food philosophy of making and consuming our food at a relaxed pace can slow down the day and connect us with our bodily selves and the world of nature. Taking ten minutes to eat our lunch without also working on the computer, cooking our dinner meal from scratch — all are ways of savoring the day.
The week. I'm not going to say much about the week, because I believe that Rabbi Angel said it all last week. The greatest gift Jews and Christians have in terms of shaping and sanctifying our week is the gift of Sabbath, of dedicating one day to God, a day of refreshment, of joy, of reconnecting with what most matters. Rabbi Angel said that she always tries to spend some time outside on Sabbath, or perhaps read poetry. I know one woman whose criteria for practicing Sabbath was simply, "Not doing anything I don't want to do." So, if writing a letter to a friend seemed appealing, she would do it. If not, she wouldn't. The point was to free herself from the world of obligation for just one day, and savor the gifts of creation.
Finally, the year. One of the main gifts that the Christian tradition can offer us in shaping the year is the liturgical calendar, the cycle of seasons and feast days that make up the Christian year. Instead of a calendar that flips relentlessly forward, punctuated briefly by Hallmark holidays and celebrations of national pride, the Christian tradition sees the year as a circle that celebrates the work of God in history. Instead of beginning with the bubbly gaiety of New Years', the Christian year begins with Advent: with our longing for light in the midst of darkness, for something new to come into our tired world. That longing turns into the celebration — not that Santa Claus is coming to town — but that God is here with us in the midst of our darkness. The year continues through Epiphany and into Lent — the season we now find ourselves in — a time to take stock and reflect more deeply on our lives. Lent culminates in the astonishing feast of Easter, the ultimate affirmation that life is more powerful than death. We celebrate Easter for 50 days until Pentecost, the day we proclaim that the Divine Spirit swept into the world via tongues of fire, and that this same Spirit somehow animates even us today.
Then we enter the long stretch of ordinary time, the long days of summer and fall, when we simply live our lives as ordinary people trying to follow the movements of this Spirit, trying to bear witness to the Light. And, finally, as we enter the dark time of the year again, we find ourselves once again longing for something new to come into our tired world. And so the circle turns again.
I did not grow up in a tradition that observed the liturgical cycle, and it was a gift to me when I came to this congregation and first encountered it. It gave me a rhythm of feasting and fasting, of letting go and starting afresh not given to me by regular calendar time. I also loved the way the liturgical cycle connected me to the cycles of nature for, of course, this liturgical year was first dreamed up by people who lived much closer to the earth than we do. And so, as spring bursts forth in new life, we celebrate Easter, and as the darkness deepens in December, we recall the birth of the Light. Of course, many religious traditions offer this sort of deep connection between cyclical time, nature and spirituality. But this is our tradition, handed down for thousands of years, and it is a rich resource for shaping our year.
In addition to this cycle, of course, are our own personal feasts and fasts: birthdays, anniversaries of loss and joy. Celebrating and noting these occasions well and with intention is a good way to claim the sacredness of time. Finally, I like something I read from Waverly Fitzgerald, the author of Slow Time that I mentioned the first Sunday of Lent. Fitzgerald began noticing that during different seasons of the year, different aspects of her own self emerged. She began planning her years' work around the seasons. So, for instance, she knows that she is most productive in the fall and spring, and so she uses those seasons to do big, creative projects (like write books). In the summer, she is more likely to be scattered and restless, and so she focuses more on relationships during this time. And, in the winter, she finds herself needing to hibernate — to sleep more than usual, to scale back activity, to incubate ideas and dreams that will come to fruition in the spring. "How do the seasons affect you and what is your relationship to them," she asks. "How could you plan your life so that you are not treating yourself like a machine that has to behave the same way no matter the set of circumstances?" These questions, it strikes me, are a good way to give sacred shape to our year. Even if our jobs or family life do not always allow us to live just the way we want, asking the questions makes us more attentive to the different seasons and may help us understand just why it is so difficult to keep up our usual pace, say, in midwinter.
The writer of Ecclesiastes famously says that there is a season for everything, and a time for every matter under heaven. Perhaps that should be the motto of the Society for the Deceleration of Time, for this simple truth from an ancient book is an antidote to the cult of speed. So may we go slow when we want and need to go slow. May we go fast when it is time to do so. May we find our own sacred rhythm for our days, weeks and years and, thus, more fully receive the gift of time. Amen.
[1] From In Praise of Slowness: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed.