time is of the essence (2)
March 22, 2009
“Smoke, nothing but smoke. [That's what the Quester says.] There’s nothing to anything - it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?”
Ecclesiastes 1:2-3 (The Message)
[If you missed part 1, check it out here)
we have been thinking about time, both our relationship to it and use of it. let's begin today with a slightly different but related question and then come back to our conversation about time.
what is life really about?
a few years ago – while i was chatting with friends during one of our breaks in class at the baltimore hebrew university – when my friend aaron gave me an etrog
[aside: an etrog is an oval-shaped citrus fruit given out during the jewish festival of sukkot (also known to us as the feast of tabernacles) which is one of the autumnal feasts.]
this led to one of those great conversations that i took a lot away from…certainly about sukkot, but in fact it changed my perspective about life. sukkot is said to be the most joyous of jewish festivals, in which the people of God are supposed to purposely include (‘gather-in’) the gentiles to dwell and celebrate with them (ok…tell me that’s not prophetic Kingdom of God stuff!).
my friends at baltimore hebrew also pointed out that when they celebrate the festival of sukkot, it is tradition to read through qohelet, which is hebrew for ecclesiastes. i wondered at this, because at that point my experience with ecclesiastes was that it seemed very depressing…’life is vanity’ and all that jazz.
many contemporary readers of qohelet are left with a depressing/despairing impression of the overall message rather than something uplifting; it also seemed atodds with the joyous nature of the festival of sukkot. yet, the very theme of ecclesiastes is joy from their perspective. ecclesiastes reminds us of the real nature of joy, which is the same as that of sukkot: dwelling together in the presence of YHWH.
thus, apart from Jesus, His Heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit, we might be persuaded that our material possessions, our positions in life, work, pleasure, power…are more important than relationship with each other and with Him; yet too often our life shows those other pursuits are exactly our priorities.
we make ourselves more available to our jobs, careers and possessions than we do to our wives, husbands, children, parents, friends and other persons, even our precious Lord Jesus. we need to change our perspective and our priorities. we need to learn the lesson of qoholet that my friends now remind me of every year: we need to make time for the joy of fellowship in our shared lives…we need to dwell in joy.
commit the insight of qohelet/ecclesiastes to remembrance: The value in living is living!
strip away the illusions! the way of life in which the world trains us in effect say that meaning can be found in power, money, fame, pleasure or industry. ecclesiastes says: celebrate life by living; as i follow Jesus, i say it this way: embrace Jesus and His abundant-living Way; seek the Invisible God while much of the rest of the world prefers to rest in the security of their nip-tuck looks or precarious stock options or big house or whatever makes them feel secure.
which brings us back to time. if life is about living, then how do we redeem time?
sacred scripture speaks of “redeeming the time”…but we may ask: what does that even mean? perhaps there are some disciplines we can put into practice in order to detox from the cultural experience of the worship of time and efficiency and the merchants of time management that have fully commodified time for us (so much so that the language we engage and conceptualize time is as a commodity: we “spend” time, we “lose” time, we can “manage” time, etc.)
what i want to say is that in redeeming time, we free time and free ourselves…take this off the altar of our lives…and one way that i have found helpful is to relational-ize your time and your time management.
now there are many quite useful tools - action plans, activity logs, critical success matrices, etc. - that your garden-variety time management books give you (with the understanding that almost all emerge from a paradigm of the culture of business and ‘busyness’. they are achievement-based, results-oriented; which is what is needed in the business world, yet while useful, perhaps we need some discernment in applying them to our own lives. Remember the subtlety of Jesus: while the public saw Jesus busy all the time, the disciples saw that he arose early or late at night and went of for some un-busy time with His Father.)
thus, while useful for what they are, these tools place the emphasis away from people and toward personal gain, power, check-off lists and inanimate results.
i want to suggest a different way that eventually can make these other tools redemptive (that may sound arrogant, but the word-nerd in me cannot think of a better way to put it); the key emerges from a more ancient relational pattern of being: boundary markers
stones marked the boundaries of land allotted to people in the ancient near east, and specifically in our hebrew scriptures. instead of a hard-and-fast fences or a wall, the boundary marker was there to provoke awareness of where you were…they spoke of something…they witnessed to something…they were part of a discipline of remembrance (serving in some way like the ‘Lord’s Table’; ‘do this in remembrance of me’). Can we imagine an alotted ‘field’ as our life? And then perhaps we can also imagine the ’seasonal crop’ as time that we are harvesting and putting to use in God’s Kingdom? i wonder if it would be helpful to change the typical paradigm of boundaries as ‘fences’ and move on to ‘boundary markers’…take down the razor-wire fences and let people and God into our lives.
boundary markers are signs that make us aware of something…thinking of it this way may help challenge us to raise our awareness, our sense, of time as we practice other principles of time management. for instance, when God gave the hebrews financial management instructions (see Leviticus 19), the paradigm that He seeks to train His people toward is His paradigm of the Kingdom of God…His reign; thus, in terms of Kingdom-economics, one of the instructions was to not reap your whole field, but leave margins as benevolence for the poor and the stranger and the outcast; i wonder if we cannot apply this principle of ‘leaving margins’ in our own ‘time management’, thus intentionally creating marginal space and time for reflection in our daily rhythms, for openness to the marginalized and the stranger and the outcast? Take a moent to linger here and imagine what that might look like in your our ‘field’, your own life.
sacred scripture also gives us a warning at this point. i think the biblical caution regarding people moving the boundary markers of others might be illustrative here as well…people can enter our lives and may move our boundary markers, if we are not careful and discerning, they can take time away from us in an unhealthy way…again, the call is to deeper our awareness. also recall the biblical instructions on gleaning/harvesting your field: do not glean to the margins. therein lies wisdom: save some cushion at the edges of your life;
in the previous post, we spoke of reflection begetting awareness, awareness begetting discernment, and discernment being crucial to preserving the essence of something good. Well, in training ourselves toward reflection, boundary markers can be essential in our discipline of remembrance, provoking us toward reflection, awareness and discernment.
ok, so what would these boundary markers look like?
i’ll answer that question, but you may want to sit down for this one, because the biggest tool, the best boundary markers are totally counter-intuitive to the typical time management tools of our day. i would like to call us to a more ancient paradigm: people as boundary markers…that’s right, people
…lose the inanimate watch/time-piece; place yourself in the situation of ‘not knowing’ what exact time it is; perchance, in this vulnerable position, you just might have to raise your awareness to know what time it is…although you may have to catch the time on a public clock or actually engage someone and meekly ask: pardon me, but do you have the time?
i personally witness that although it may take the disciplines of attention and remembrance, this has made me more aware of time rather than less…i have not owned nor wore a watch since high school (and even then, although i owned one i never wore it)…and yet i don’t miss meetings, am not chronically late, nor does insecurity overwhelm me because i do not know what time it is.
can i get a witness? by placing myself in the vulnerable position of not knowing what time it is, i have found that this supposed weakness has turned out to be such a rich source of strength…(although in the day-and-age of blackberries and cell phones the ‘actual time’ is not far from any of us, in case of an immediate crisis or emergency, etc.)…but the point is to place us in an environment where we are in a place of humble need for other people to make us aware of time…we need to ask for the time (when was the last time someone refused you when you asked: ‘what time is it?’)
[experiment: have you noticed that when you don't know something, you unconsciously raise your awareness of it? for instance, if you are used to having a watch, and forget to wear it, you can become more aware of time, because you don't know what time it is. try this experiment that i have done in the past: try to feel what the passage of time "feels" life. get in a quiet place by yourself and take a time piece with you for reference. sit and seek to spend 5 minutes in silence and solitude...just being...and try to check the time after you think 5 minutes have passed. this practice will raise your awareness of time in an experiential, experimental way. stop and try it right now. how did it go? how close are you to getting it right? what did 5 good mnutes feel like to you? begin training yourself in this awareness and see what the fruit of it might be]
now, i realize, this might be really hard for some people; this is really counter to how the culture is training us, because you might have to put your rugged individualism aside and get off the self-reliant, independent bandwagon, yet doing this reminds me of 2 corinthians 6, when that erstwhile apostle paul says: we own nothing, and yet we have everything.
further, can we see that this reflects the relational aspect of the Trinity? remember what we said about the value of living? relationships are of the essence of our lives; when we ‘relational-ize’ our time and time management, we join our awareness of time to the very essence of our lives…both ourselves within and ourselves in relation to others.
in ‘relational-izing’ your time management, you just might find that:
• you’re more aware of time because you don’t have easy access to find out precisely what time it is;
• humility creates in you the desire to listen to and really hear others, not just talk at them;
• people are quite nice and really friendly and happy to give you the time;
• you might make new friends and neighbors;
• time – hopefully like the truth - is free;
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