According to the folks at Patheos I should post at least weekly, but try as I might, the best I can manage is once a fortnight. A few weeks back I said I was a Slow Man, and sang its praise as a spiritual virtue. If so, then writing once a fortnight is about right. Can’t be slow and write fast.
It’s About Time
Folks of a certain age (like me) remember a cheesy sitcom by that name, but we all know the phrase which means the moment is right. Theologians (which I am) learn to use the snotty term ‘kairos,’ which is Greek for ‘timely.’ It appears 86 times in the Christian scriptures, usually to mean the time when G-d will intervene.
In this post, I mean that we humans are obsessed with time, mostly in unhealthy ways. Our electronic, interconnected, information saturated world makes every second crucial. Stock traders loom over screens looking for the right moment. Gamblers hedge and hem waiting for what they believe is their lucky moment. Employees clock in and clock out, so their employers can calculate to the minute their work and their pay.
Time, we sense, is really the only commodity we have and to waste any is to waste life.
Our Age of Anxiety
Auden wrote the poem that created the phrase, but I feel it, this need to make good use of my time. But as age overtakes me, I face a choice. Shall I speed up in order to use my dwindling minutes better, or slow down so as not to race to the grave?
On the pilgrim path, time is measures in mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights. The world around me – mostly trees, but also birds and other non-humans – experiences time as days and months and seasons. That is how the universe ticks.
No wonder we are so anxious. We have literally lost our connection to the pulse of the universe. That well know Wendell Berry poem instantly comes to mind:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Between a Clock and a Rat Race
Writing this blog means I am still in the world of anxiety. My pilgrim days help restore some of what Berry says, to remember and listen to the slower clock of reality. In between walks I compromise.
Once a fortnight I write something here. Once a fortnight, half a month, is enough. Between the full and the new moon will do just fine.
Nothing I write is new. You can find it lots of place, more famous places, written by more famous names. Not for my wisdom do you come, but to keep company with someone trying to live by the celestial pendulum in a world that seems hell bent on driving off the ecological, political, and economic cliff.
And only about once a fortnight.
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