time is of the essence (1)
January 21, 2009
This post is written by my good friend Steven Hamilton, our first guest blogger. I met Steven several years ago when we (Vineyard Central) hosted a gathering called Mayhem — yeah, we were enthralled with Fight Club — at which Brian McLaren spoke. But I really got to know Steven over the course of the first 6 months of 2008. He was one of 21 participants in our School of Spiritual Direction.
There are so many things about him that I came to love. First of all, he’s one of the most active people I know: a husband, father of 3 young children, a full-time government employee in D.C. (The National Archives), and a pastor with the Central Maryland Vineyard. He also happens to be a powerful voice against modern-day slavery, building awareness of the issue, serving on task forces, and working toward the passage of state and national legislation. [You can find him in the video called Love Justice. (Look for the cool guy with the shaved head.)] I wish I had half his energy. Second, he’s got a healthy sense of humor. It’s nice to be with people who know how to laugh. But what I love most is that in spite of his active, demanding life, he’s deeply reflective. Let me amend that. I think that his commitment to living reflectively has led to his rich, active life.
It’s easy to be busy. But it takes hard work, great courage and careful discernment to be busy in the right ways, especially in our day. I think Steven shows us the right was to be “busy.”
You can find him posting regularly at his blogsite Verve and Verse.
+ + + + + + + + + + + +
“There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven” — so says the wise Qohelet in what we call Ecclesiastes 3.
i’m not sure how the wise one of ecclesiastes was raised, but my mother was an efficiency expert for a large corporation, so i was raised in what was possibly the most efficient household on the planet. there were, of course, very good and bad things about this, but one of the best is that time management was ingrained in me to the extent that it became second-nature … i didn’t just think about efficiency; i lived efficiently.
as i reflect on this second skin of mine, i realize that, in effect, my mother modeled the awareness of time, and i was trained into it. she created a rhythm of life, and i lived in that rhythm. undergirding this rhythm was was her finely-tuned awareness of time. there are hard-and-fast tools to use to better manage the precious time we are given in this age, but i would say awareness is the essence of superior time management … ah, but i’m getting a little ahead of myself.
… let’s start with the rhythm of life:
in the book Timeshifting, stephan rechtschaffen insightfully shares what he calls the process of entrainment: we have a tendency to align our personal rhythms with those of our environment.
“… [We are] embedded in a world and a culture with fast-talking, fast-driving, fast-fooding people and advertisements that drive us — shaping our lives for us — and we are susceptible to get caught up in it in an undiscerning way.”
it’s easy to lose touch with the simple awareness of time and plunge into the frenzied charge of lemmings rushing for the cliff-edge and tragedy. i’ve found myself doing this on almost a daily basis in commuting to work in the washington, dc area. i get on the highway, and fairly soon i’m zoning out and going the ‘speed-of-traffic’, which in my area of the world, is much more than the posted speed limit. in fact, just the other day, i found myself going 85 mph without trying or thinking about it.
so we surge and then crash, surge and crash in a repetitive, destructive cycle of living that conforms to the powerful tides around us. we are quite literally trained toward them. So our “entrainment tendency” creates a vicious slave-master relationship that limits our perspective to such an extent that we no longer believe we actually have time to stop, discern, reflect and consider whether our lives are mistrained
as i mentioned before, my mother was a corporate efficiency expert and she brought her job home with her. what her job typically entailed was shadowing people and then suggesting ways for them to be more efficient, either time-saving steps, re-ordering processes, or altogether new structures and rhythms of work. because of her influence i became — and this is amusing to me now — the most efficient room-cleaner on my street. i would clean my room, then go to a friend’s home to ask them to play, and if they had to clean their room before they could come out and play, i would jump in, organize the activity and presto-chango, lickety-split, the job was done and we were out and free.
yet, while my mother gave me an awareness of time and the gift of efficiency, i also see clearly that she sometimes went too far and sacrificed quality on the altar of efficiency.
and this now brings me to pot pie.
i love pot pie, and there are certain elements of pot pie that can be sacrificed to save time without losing ‘pot-pie-ness’, yet others are non-negotiable and require you to take your time. they require you to be “inefficient.” for instance the flaky crust and the cream sauce are non-negotiable. and while you can get frozen chicken and frozen vegetables to make the cooking process more efficient, you all but kill a pot pie if you use them. the last time my mother made pot pie for me, she sacrificed — for the sake of efficiency — all the stuff that makes pot pie, well … pot pie. Instead we got some two-bit knock-off that barely gets by under the name of ‘pot-pie casserole.’
it was awful.
reflection begets awareness. awareness begets discernment. and discernment is crucial to preserving the essence of something good. it keeps us from sacrificing quality on the altar of efficiency.
but is it possible to turn the values of our culture around to our advantage? eugene peterson seems to think so (and i agree!). in his book The Contemplative Pastor, peterson makes the point that the organizational calendar for keeping appointments has become sacrosanct in our culture. if you say you have a ‘previously scheduled appointment’, no one questions it. they won’t even think of treading over that holy ground and asking, “who are you meeting and why?” so peterson cleverly advises us to use the planning calendar as a tool for becoming unbusy, for pulling out of the fast lane and scheduling time for reflection and contemplation. you break out of time so you can come back into time correctly.
Jesus had a different understanding of time. it was grounded in how he understood his work and what he thought about life. his perspective on time was often at odds with the understanding of those around him. their urgencies were almost never his. he clashed with prevailing notions then and clashes now with 21st century American notions of time. a clear example of this occurs in the the gospel of john, where it says Jesus lingered where he was and delayed for a while before going to help the deathly ill Lazarus, “the one that He loved”. All his disciples thought he should have acted with a greater sense of urgency.
Jesus invites us into a fuller awareness of time, one that allows God to be expressed in us and us to be expressed fully in this world. To acquire it will take the discipline of “unbusying” ourselves so that we have time to reflect. a sustainable faith embraces and creates space and time for what matters most: distinguishing the ‘important’ from the merely ‘urgent’. given this …
-
how can we begin to steward our lives and “redeem the time”?
-
how can we mature and raise our awareness of something that to us is quite like water to fish?
-
how can we become wise with the time given us without sacrificing quality on the altar of efficiency?
I hope you reflect on these questions and join me for a concluding post on the essence of time. your comments are welcome!
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 3
December 19, 2008
Reflection … an antidote to hurry
Look at how the lilies grow (Matthew 6:28)
If you’re going to enjoy a painting you’ve got to set aside time. You must not expect that you can take a fleeting glance and reach a conclusion, any more than you can just look at a book’s dust cover …. When I’m filming, in between times when they’re setting up for the next work of art, I’ve got to sit somewhere and often I’ve been I’ve been parked in front of something that I would not have looked at twice. But forced to sit and contemplate it, I begin to warm up to it and it opens up to me …. It might never be something that we would choose as our first love, but it can speak to us. It’s that giving time, looking at art peacefully, that matters. Crowded, noisy museums are not conducive to this kind of looking. I forget who it was who said that the necessity for appreciating art is a chair — which I always have, you see, because I go round in a wheelchair. So I really look. (Sister Wendy Becket, nun and art critic, from an interview in Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion)
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. (Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now)
Consider the following statements of Jesus taken from Matthew’s narrative of his life:
Look at how the birds don’t plant or harvest… (Matt. 6:26)
Look at how the lilies grow… (6:28)
The kingdom of heaven is like a farmer who planted seed… (13:24)
The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed (13:31)
The kingdom of heaven is like yeast (13:33)
The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that someone discovers hidden in a field… (13:44)
The kingdom of heaven is like a pearl merchant on the lookout for choice pearls… (13:45)
The kingdom of heaven is like a fishing net… (13:47)
The kingdom of heaven is like a person who brings both new and old from the storehouse (13:52)
The kingdom of heaven is like the owner of an estate… (20:1)
This generation is like a group of children playing a game in the public square… (Matt. 11:16)
Jesus, like all those around him, saw birds every day. He saw flowers, watched fishermen haul in nets, heard of people winning the lottery, knew of people who owned lots of property. But he had cultivated the practice of doing something that few people then (as now) almost never make room for: he considered the significance of what he experienced as it related to the work of God. Everybody saw birds and flowers, but Jesus saw how they reflected God’s provision. Every household was familiar with yeast and its qualities, but Jesus saw how it reflected the hidden, subversive and viral nature of God’s kingdom.
He regularly took the “brute facts” of his day and mined them for their divine significance. And in each case he paid attention to one feature of what he saw. We like to believe that we can notice many things at once (and we may even take a certain degree of pride in our ability to multi-task), but it’s a frustrating and inefficient way to go through life:
Despite our subjective feelings to the contrary, actually our brain can work on only one thing at a time. Rather than allowing us to efficiently do two things at the same time, multitasking actually results in inefficient shifts in our attention. In short, the brain is designed to work most efficiently when it works on a single task and for sustained rather than intermittent and alternating periods of time…. But despite neuroscientific evidence to the contrary, we are being made to feel that we must multitask in order to keep our head above the rising flood of daily demands. In essence, the brain has certain limits that we must accept. (Richard Restak, M.D., The New Brain)
Think of time as soil, attention as water, and quiet as sun. Allowing ourselves these three, we’ll naturally grow. Like Jesus (and many others who have lived wisely and courageously), we’ll notice what’s in front of us and be able to relate it to God’s work in this world.
But we’ll only notice if we slow way down and shut way up. Rituals like Sabbath-keeping (or creating mini-sabbaths throughout each day) give us that opportunity. So do reading and lingering over Scripture. We let our imagination “image” the scenes and then think about the significance of those scenes. (My friend Larry Bourgeois refers to this and other “slow-downs” as spiritual loitering.) But even staring at a painting, watching kids play, admiring a tree for several minutes or thinking about the food in front of you are invitations to reflect.
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 2
December 17, 2008
Single-Mindedness … an antidote to schizophrenia
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. (James 4:1-8, NIV)
Jesus doesn’t’ mince words about what’s required to follow him. It is to “lose our lives.” For those who follow him there’s a clear expectation that we’ll follow his agenda. (Matthew 7:21) And when James blasts out the encouragement: “purify your hearts, you double-minded,” he’s reiterating the kind of attention and focus that undergird the Christian life. A “double-minded” person suffers from a type of schizophrenia, a rupture of the person. There’s a bi-polar quality to life, exhibitied by conflicting allegiances and multiple masters.
As Christians, however, we’re to turn our hearts fully toward God’s will in order to become single-minded. This is what’s meant by the call to “purify” ourselves. This may be the single most important base for discipleship. Jesus asks, “Are you in or out? Coming with me or staying behind. Make your choice and be aware of what the choice entails.”
Modern life, however, does anything but encourage single-mindedness. The multiplicity of distractions available to us in our time is nothing short of astonishing. If we are going to follow Jesus faithfully in this whacked out modern life, we have to find a way not just to turn down the volume, rise above all the nonsense and keep our eyes fixed on Christ.
There are two spiritual disciplines that seem especially appropriate for our day. They inoculate us against distraction and hurry. They’ve always been useful and a part of the lives of mature Christians, but because of the ethos of our culture, maybe we need to give them more attention than usual. The first of these is recollection., the subject of this post. The second, the subject of tomorrow’s post — if tomorrow should come — is reflection.
Recollection … an antidote to distraction
Be still and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)
I wonder what Aldous Huxley would say if he were alive now in the 21st century. It seems almost quaint when he talks about the radio — this was written over 60 years ago — but if you understand it as “aural bombardment” in general, then there’s a takeaway for us:
The twentieth century is, among other things, that Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio [what would he say today!] is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow…. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions — news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where…the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears…to the ego’s central core of wish and desire…. All advertising has but one purpose — to prevent the will from ever achieving silence…. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving. (Aldous Huxley)
The Practice of Jesus
Read Mark 1:35, Mark 6:31 and Matthew 14:10-13 and it will become clear that Jesus took time for recollection, which literally means “collecting again” or “bringing to mind again.” Think of the imagery behind the word recollection. You have the picture of someone picking up pieces that have become scattered and putting them all in one place. This is what we do in recollection. We take the scattered elements of our selves and our days and put them back into a whole piece. We remind ourselves that we belong to the Lord, that he loves us, that one thing matters, that we’re here to receive and dole out love.
Recollection is the precursor for reflection. We first have to gather the scattered elements of our selves and life before we can think about them. It’s like doing archeology. You’re digging around and come across a bunch of pottery shards embedded in dirt. You carefully extricate them, clean them, and put them together on a table. Then you carefully examine them and figure out what goes together. Eventually you might get a pot. But there’s no examination until there’s some sort of collection. Re-collection starts when we stop. Re-collection sets the stage for reflection, but the two dance together. If we practice recollection at regular intervals through the day, we train ourselves to return to God. Those stopovers on our daily journey might revolve around fixed-hour prayer. They might involve two or three scheduled breaks in our day just to sit still, be quiet, and pray silently. Journaling might also help us. What you do specifically is almost inconsequential in comparison to simply doing something. The truly important thing is to act courageously and wisely by carving out moments to step off the path, silence the noise and listen for a moment with God to your life.
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 1
December 16, 2008
Purity of heart is to will one thing. (Søren Kierkegaard)
[Your heavenly Father] will give you all you need from day to day if you live for him and make the Kingdom of God your primary concern. (Matthew 6:33, NLT)
… a doubtful mind is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. People like that should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. They can’t make up their minds. They waver back and forth in everything they do. (James 1:6-8, NLT)
Don’t make room for the world, for your unbridled passions, or your laziness. Words aren’t enough to claim the kingdom of God. It takes strength and courage and violence. You must violently resist the tides of the world. Violently give up all that holds you back from God. Violently turn your will over to God to do his will alone. (François Fenelon)
Single-mindedness, recollection, silence and reflection are foundational for developing a mature, durable spiritual life. There is, in fact, no mature conversation with God and no deep understanding of his created order that occurs without them. They form the backdrop, context and the ground for our discipleship. In their absence we can only expect an abstract babbling about God, a kind of virtual experience of the divine based on the acquisition of religious information rather than direct experience of the Holy One. Without them we have the semblance of power, but certainly not the real deal. In short, we can’t afford to lose them.
But in fact we are losing them. Of course there has never been a crowd stampeding to God or rushing headlong to the practices that help us draw close to him. The majority has always been content to travel effortlessly along a broad and comfortable highway leading to an equally broad gate. Jesus was quick to point this out. (Matt. 7:13) But there will always be holdouts, people who want the less traveled and bumpier road despite the difficulties involved. We, like our ancestors, can still find that narrow road today. But whereas in the past the effort to find and walk it well took all our efforts, today it seems to take more than all. We look in our travel bag for the items of single-mindedness, recollection, silence and reflection only to find that the supply is low, that someone raided it in the middle of the night and left us in short supply. Welcome to modern life.