Chris Evans spotted that I had written this morning’s Pause for Thought for his show while on a train to Bradford yesterday. I was up there for meetings and hadn’t had time the day before to do the script. So, it was fitted in on the train journey between reading a book manuscript for which I am to write a foreword and reading papers for the meetings ahead.
It’s not always straightforward knowing what theme to pick for these thought pieces. I didn’t know who the special guest on the show was going to be and the heavy themes had already been addressed by other contributors. So, having received a text from my anxious daughter last week asking me when the clocks change (and is it backwards or forwards?), I thought I’d say something brief about ‘time’. I also managed to quote three people: anon, Albert Einstein and African friends:
Someone once said that you can’t change the past, but you can waste the present by worrying about the future. The great Albert Einstein teasingly (but not very illuminatingly) stated that ‘the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once’. My African friends laughingly say that in the West we have watches and clocks, but in Africa they have time.
My point was that time is all we have – it’s precious. As I put it succinctly (we only have 330 words):
I have no idea how much longer I have to live: I might still be going strong at 90… or I might not. I have no idea. But, whenever it happens I want to know that I did my best to use time to the full. Which isn’t a miserable thought about packing life with serious stuff; it’s also about living and laughing and working and playing.
Now, that could be misunderstood. For most of the world’s population life is not very funny, but is a struggle to stay alive. So, am I just being frivolous, over-comfortable and inappropriately hedonistic? Well, this is how I concluded the piece:
We’re heading towards Easter and we will be reminded that Jesus only had around three years of public ministry. But in that time he got a following by people who loved and laughed and partied and wept and suffered and lived life to the full. As a follower of that same Jesus, I don’t think anything has changed.
That is a serious point. One of the questions we are meant to ask when we read the Gospels is who were the people who responded positively to Jesus and who were those who were threatened by him and (ultimately) nailed him? And why? Read the texts and we find that the sort of people who were rejected by the religious establishment welcomed Jesus – maybe they had nothing to lose. But, given the reputation they helped Jesus get (“a glutton and a drunkard” who mixed with all the ‘wrong’ people), it is not surprising that these were the people who knew how to party.
One of the questions I frequently asked of clergy and PCCs was: When do you party? When do you celebrate God, his world and each other? One of the shocking things about visiting some of the poorest people in the world is that they know how to celebrate and laugh and share what they have – which is often time, themselves and the food they manage to get. No anxiety about protecting all their ‘stuff’. (Or queuing for two days to be the first to get the new iPad 2 from London’s Apple Store – when you could probably just walk in tomorrow and pick one up without any detrimental effect on life or limb…)
So, the ‘time’ thing is really just a way of suggesting that we get our lives and busyness into perspective. We aren’t here for long – better make the most of it. I don’t want to reach my death bed and state proudly that (a) I managed never to get tired or (b) at least the house and car were always clean.
PS. A friend once helpfully suggested that the way to remember which way the clocks go is this: they ‘spring’ forward and they ‘fall’ back (as in ‘autumn’). And that was fine until I realized that it is perfectly possible to spring backwards and fall forwards. So, I’m still confused. I think it’s forward and we lose an hour’s sleep tomorrow night.
March 25, 2011 at 8:28 pm
My favourite day is Saturday when I get to do what I want instead of what some one else wants, ie ‘the boss’ at work. On Sunday I can choose to go to church or not, when I go I can encourage others and if needs be get encouraged. God made Sundays to give time for others. Good stuff.
March 26, 2011 at 3:28 pm
Your thoughts resemble those of the Lent Course conducted by Adrian Newman Dean of Rochester and newly announced next Bishop of Stepney.
Quoting a Bishop of Pontefract ( “Black is the Anglican colour of celebration”!!) he taught that we tend to do Lent well but rarely do justice to celebration of the Resurrection.
He referenced the cultural significance of music in major ( Joyful) keys and minor ( sad) keys.
In discussion we remembered that two of the more cheerful songs in John Bell’s Songs of God’s People are “Jubilate , everybody” and ” You shall go out with joy” – both written in minor keys, both distinctly Jewish in feel. Somehow, despite their terrible history the Jewish people have managed to celebrate and dance in the minor key.
I wonder if I shall be able to hold that thought when I visit Auschwitz next week. Tough one that.
March 26, 2011 at 3:34 pm
My granddaughter, just back from working with the children for 2 months in the Nakuru garbage slum in Kenya says ‘We have a joke here in Kenya about time; a white person here is called ‘mzungu’ – it isn’t an offensive term. When we talk about time, and what time to expect something, it has to be clarified whether we mean Kenyan time or mzungu time;meaning, when you say 9am do you mean 9am (mzungu time) or are you going on Kenyan time (meaning it could turn up any time that day). It’s just the laid back culture there.
It sound very unstressful but I guess wexterners find it frustrating.
March 27, 2011 at 6:57 pm
@Martin: I wonder if that was the same Bishop of Pontefract who, in a room stuffed full of pentecostal types, once said, “Hallelujah! as we Anglicans say”?
March 29, 2011 at 4:54 pm
I really liked the bit about not wasting the present by worrying about the future. It reminded me also about what Cardinal Martini–former Archbishop of Milan–defines as a ‘spriitual life’. In my rough translation it goes something like this: “The spiritual life is doing the things of ‘every day’ without trying to prove our ability or our cleverness, without looking for our own little moment of personal glory, but simply immersing ourselves fully in each gesture… Just being there, alert and attentive, as if the action of that moment—opening a door, writing a letter, caring for someone who is sick, celebating in worship–were always the adventure of ‘the first time’.”