You hold a grand-child for the first time, overwhelmed by such awe that tears slide down your cheeks - and Time stands still.
You spontaneously and thankfully hug that old maple whose leaves burn breath-stopping, brilliant scarlet in Autumn - and, suddenly feeling one with it, sensing its wisdom and age envelop you, - Time stands still.
Yet at other moments, Time seems to rush by in a fast-moving current and there's not enough of it in which to fully live. Ann Voskamp once used to wake from nightmares feeling ready to die; now she wants to embrace even more time as she discovers gratitude for her life. She's seeking to write down a thousand gifts in her life (see two previous blog posts), which she's discovered are gifts from God. But Time is still a frustrating Mystery to her. Doing dishes at the sink, she laments,
"After that night of the nightmares, I had said it, that I didn't need more time to do or see or experience anything more. But look at the remains of a morning and it's obvious I'm craving it deep: more time to manage just the life I already have. The work, the kids, the meals, the laundry, the ministry, a life so full it can seem empty. And then, on top of all that, who has time to take on yet one more thing and keep a gratitude journal, count gifts? Who has time to tally up one thousand of them? Can our time-crammed lives handle yet one more thing? I drain the sink, exhausted....
"They say time is money, but that's not true. Time is life. And if I want the fullest life, I need to find fullest time. I wiped a water spot off the tap; there is a reflection of me. Oh yes, I know you, the busyness of your life leaving little room for the source of your life. I'm the face grieving.
"God gives us time. And who has time for God?
"Which makes no sense." (from Voskamp's "One Thousand Gifts.")
Ann watches the burial of a Pastor from a distance, and wonders, "What was the Pastor's most profound regret in life?....It's the weight of regrets that weigh a coffin down."
The weight of regrets... I look at the photo above, the young hand next to the old hand, and now my hand is old. "The time is now....Tomorrow is promised to no one." How our lives change if we live in the Now, if we take the chance, if we live life to the full! What's the enemy of living in the Now? Busyness. The busyness that keeps us from really SEEING the faces around us, the busyness that prevents us from making the best, most heart-felt decisions about how to spend our precious God-gift of Time.
Ann hears the voice of another Pastor, speaking his litany of his regrets:
"Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of all the rushing....Through all that haste, I thought I was making up time. It turns out I was throwing it away." (Mark Buchanan, ""The Rest of God: Restoring Your Soul By Restoring Your Sabbath.")
Ann looks at her own life and realizes she's an amateur at this spiritual way of life. She's still learning. Now she's suddenly seeing the hurts that come to her, her farmer husband, and her children from her compulsive busyness:
"From the time the alarm first rings and I stir on our pillows touching, stretch over his bare back and check those relentless hands keeping time on that clock. The time, always the time, I'm an amateur trying to beat time. The six kids rouse. We race. The barn...and hurry. The breakfast...and hurry. The books, the binders...and hurry! In a world addicted to speed, I blur the moments into one unholy smear. I have done it. I do it still. Hands of the clock whip hard. So I push hard and I bark hard and I fall hard and when their wide eyes brim sadness and their chins tremble weak, I am weary and I am the thin clear skin, reflecting their fatigue, about to burst, my eyes glistening their same sheer pain.
"The hurry makes us hurt."
What is the antidote to the addiction of busyness? What inner attitude in us can heal the pain in the world caused by our mindless busyness? I think of my sister Linda, who has many disabilities, but, even more, always seems to have enough time. We enter Buffalo State College's Rockwell Hall's theater, walk down the aisle to our seat to see my high school age grand-son Stevie perform in the musical of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." A young black man, a high school student, voice musical with the accents of Africa, leads us to our seats. He is shy and nervous; I smile at him. Linda does more. She stops. Asks him, "What is your name?" Surprised and happy, he stands still and tells her. "Well," and she says his name, "You're doing a great job." He lights up. His back straightens. He moves away, more confident.
Later, I tell Linda, "How kind you were to him. You made him feel wonderful." She shrugs. It's what she does with her time: asking names; stopping to visit; really seeing the person in front of her. And, busy, impatient me, sometimes I am annoyed by what she does. But she is right. Time slows for Linda into Holy Experiences.
For when we mindfully enter into the experiences we are living now, we are contemplating them through the sacred eyes of our souls. We enter into our souls and Time slows for us. We step out of Time into the Timeless. Ecclesiastes tells us, "I have considered the task which God has appointed for men to be busied about. He has made everything appropriate to its time and has put the timeless into their hearts/souls..." God lives in us, God outside of Time, Creator of Time, and His Presence within us is eternity itself. When we mindfully, consciously, enter the moment, we enter our souls to step into the timeless. God is there: in our souls, and in the moment. Ann says,
"Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: When I fully enter time's swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the current with the weight of me all here. I can slow the current by being all here. I only live the full life when I live fully in the moment. And when I'm always looking for the next glimpse of glory, I slow and enter. And time slows....This is where God is.
"In the present. I AM - His very name. I want to take shoes off. I AM, so full of the weight of the present, that time's river slows to a still....and God Himself is Timeless....This is supreme gift, time, God Himself framed in moment. I hardly breathe...and time is only of the essence, because time is the essence of God, I AM. This I need to consecrate: time."
Kiss a lover; kiss a child; kiss a beggar; kiss a flower - kiss with attentive love, and Time slows so we wade in eternity, spell-bound by sheer thankfulness. Cry over cancer devastating your physical self AND breathe thanks for the drug in the IV dripping miracle into your body, God alive sitting with you in that chemo chair.....Cry over the pain of the knee replacement and see God in the eyes of the physical therapist, offering exercise that's a slow, sacred, strengthening moment that brings you back to yourself.....Laugh with the woman at the Food Pantry as she chooses her food, big-eyed child hiding behind her skirts, and the moment elastically stretches so you feel as if you've known each other since the day she came to our country from a land where her life was useless, precarious...
And the strangest, most miraculous thing is that this hastening and slowing of time is scientifically true. Sr. Ilia Delio tells us that for three hundred years, scientists believed Isaac Newton when he conceptualized that "Space...was an empty stage on which the drama of physics played out, a constant emptiness everywhere and at all times. Time, too, was constant. No matter where one stood in the universe, time flowed at the same rate." But then Albert Einstein came on the scene and discovered that "Space is not an empty stage, nor does time flow at a fixed rate. Rather, space and time form a single continuum, each relative to the other. Space and time can shrink or expand depending on the relative motion of the observers who measure them." The Theory of Relativity! ( from Delio's "Making All Things New.") Now if our motions slow down as we enter the moment, time slows down with us and for us.
It's God multiplying time for us, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes for the child who trusted him to do the right thing with them. Ann says, "I redeem time from neglect and apathy and inattentiveness when I swell with thanks and weigh the moment down and it's giving thanks to God for this moment that multiplies the moments, time made enough."
I ponder this, sitting with boring bills on my lap, dreading and resenting taking the time to write the checks to pay them. Then I suddenly realize my thankfulness.... "Thank you God, as I pay the gas bill for the gift of heat in my house; thank You as I pay National Grid for the electricity in our house; there are people in our country who have neither heat nor light today. As I pay my charge cards, I thank You for the wonderful memories these purchases evoke - the dinner in a restaurant, the book for my Kindle bought on Amazon..." Strangely as I nestle into God-time, Time becomes Timeless, serene.
Staying calm during her children's arguments, Ann says,
"I soothe the cheek of the mad-fisted child. I give thanks for that one curl that always lies on his forehead, beckoning invitation, and him held close in the arms, I know it. That life is so urgent that it necessitates living slow.
"It's only the amateurs - and that I have been and it's been ugly - who think slow and urgent are contradictory, opposite poles.
"He lays his head on my shoulder. I stroke his hair, wind my finger round that curl. I can feel the heat of his cheeks. I can feel time's current in my blood ease...meander. Is this what the life experts know?
"That in Christ, urgent means slow.
"That in Christ, the most urgent necessitates a slow and steady reverence."
Mother Teresa understood that living in the moment means taking your time with everyone since everyone is a sacred gift from God. She knew that urgency is slow encounter, greeting others with reverence.
"Through the way in which (Mother Teresa) greeted people and paid attention to them, she changed the atmosphere in every room she entered. I will never forget how she herself would always fetch extra chairs to make sure that everyone had somewhere to sit. And when you visited her, you always had the impression that she had been waiting for no one else.
"During my first encounters with her, I attributed this to the fact that I was in the entourage of a Bishop. But in fact she greeted everybody with a beaming smile, regardless of rank or social status. I experienced this later with several people whom I took along to see Mother Teresa, whether for morning Mass or for a short conversation. Some of these people even wanted absolutely nothing to do with the Church. Nevertheless, they were enfolded and warmed by their first encounter, so that everything that was cold in them melted and they emerged from the conversation, sometimes after only ten minutes, completely changed." (Leo Maasburg, "Mother Teresa of Calcutta: A Personal Portrait.")
May you discover that if you search for God with thankfulness, gazing with the eyes of your soul at every moment of your life, you will move into the timeless. Live in the moment, and time will slow enough for you to reverence your life in the Light of eternity.
Busyness ends in nothing. Hurry empties the soul. Wherever you are, be all there, present to God within you and God in the moment before you. Consecrate God's precious gift of time to you - and for you. You, God's Beloved.