Unitarian Universalist Meeting of South Berkshire

 

 

May 4, 2003

 

 

“Time and Eternity”

 

 

Rev. Kathy Duhon

 

 

            My daughter Anna was in Portugal for Spring break, and she wrote a beautiful essay for a creative writing class at college about an aspect of that trip, called “The Flow of Captured Time.”  Here is a part of her story:  “I missed my plane back home to the United States because time suddenly skipped an hour forward.  We had been for a week so lost in the Portuguese countryside that our watches were all that anchored us to the procession of hours.  Time expanded like a field of wildflowers in long walks over the hills to cobblestone villages and olive trees, two thousand years old.  We spent afternoons gathering wild asparagus . . . .  We slipped into village restaurants to eat meals of wild boar, new olives, and blended country cheese, … .  Emerging from the countryside, we did not know that the clocks were to be put forward.  In the airport in Lisbon, half the clocks were still not changed.  I missed my plane.  I was exuberant …[with] this gift of time….”

            Time as a gift, time that can skip forward, or expand like wildflowers – we all know this sense of the elasticity of time, even though, when pressed, we admit that time is an orderly and precise march of seconds and minutes and hours.  Time is the evenly divided pace of the orbit of our planet around our sun.  I remember the challenge of Dr. Mae Jemison, a Dowmel Lecturer a few years ago, who is an astronaut and a scientist, when she said that there are 86,400 seconds in a day and we have to decide how to use them.  Usually, though, we don’t experience time so linearly. 

Time can drag or fly; time is thrown away or guarded preciously; time is controlled or savored; time is lost or robbed or borrowed or captured.  We might think at one point that “time is money”, and later, that “time heals all wounds”.  The poets write much about time, and I learned recently that it was one of the two most popular subjects for songs, along with love.  When time feels slow, it may be because someone is waiting impatiently, or, because a wonderful moment seems to last forever.  Time may even seem to stop when something extraordinarily good, or bad, is happening.  When time seems fast, it may be because we are living a rushed and stressed life, or, time could fly by when we are having a relaxed vacation.  One of my favorite expressions of our strange and variable relationship with time was captured by a founding member of this congregation, Joan Ackermann, in a poem she wrote about my brother Brad just after he died:

                        He was a genius with time;

                        Could bend five minutes into half an hour,

                        Be two hours late in a minute.

 

            What we experience with time is our relationship to one another and the world in terms of the duration of our being, a matter of profound importance.  Time is an essential dimension used to describe our world, but it is totally different from the other dimensions that seem neutral, like height or weight or density.  Time is both measurable on the clock, and defies measure; it is a perceived reality affected by many factors, not unlike love or truth.  How we encounter time is dependent upon the individual – his or her personality, lifestyle, age, the choices he or she makes, etc., and also upon the influences of society.  What our culture, including our religion, believes about time helps determine our experience of time.

            Our society is fast-paced and driven by a need for immediacy – from fast food to instant Doppler weather to stories that are concluded in only half an hour on T.V., punctuated with advertising messages that, in a matter of seconds, fuel consumerism.  Our computers are faster, but our time getting to work is longer.  We live in a society that seems to be trying to forget the past and steal from the future, while not being able to enjoy the present. 

            Our society has a very different approach to time than cultures in the past.  We are most familiar with our Western civilization, and what UU writer Alice Blair Wesley calls the Triumphalism of the West.  She sees a forward looking linear progress through time, where significant beginnings are believed to lead to triumphant endings.  I place the beginnings of Triumphalism with monotheistic Judaism.  God not only creates, but enters time, and assures that a good end-time is coming.  Despite chaos and pain and judgment, time is on the march, from the Paradise of the Garden, to the Peaceable Kingdom. Christianity certainly furthers this concept of time, believing that Christ will eventually conquer all evil, and the Kingdom of God will prevail.  When society still seemed to mess up under Christianity, though, reforming groups declared new beginnings when ‘true’ Christianity was re-established, and eventually evil would be conquered. 

Enlightenment made light of religion, but kept the same understanding of time – the new reign of reason, civility, and equality would conquer evil eventually.  The Romantics looked to natural humanity and simple living, the Communists looked to materialism and the triumph of worker’s needs and rights, the humanists to the flowering of the human spirit, and it has all been straight line, linear plots to a triumphant conclusion.  The American civil religion of progress and possibility is in the same family – in time we all, or at least our progeny, can achieve the dream of success and happiness, life lived large, and liberty.  Triumphalism helps us bear the current time, and gives us hope and a reason to work toward the future good time, for it is truly coming.

Do we still have a triumphant view of time?  Hardly.  We have gone from belief in a good end time to fear of nuclear holocaust, and other modern scientific apocalyptic visions of bad endings for our time, to not much vision at all about the meaning of the time we live in, nor future hope.  Triumphalism failed.  It is as if our society does not care or even want to know what came before or lies ahead.  Not totally, of course, for we do not have a monolithic culture, but after the recent decades of both horror and increased knowledge of extreme danger to our world, we seem to have mostly lost our millennia old, overriding view of triumphalism, of progress onwards and upwards forever.

Triumphalism is rooted in an omnipotent view of God, or at least of ourselves, or of Nature, or the Universe.  What triumphs?  An all powerful God or an empowered humanity triumphs, or natural good wins out, or the Universe provides.  God or Christ or Reason or Science or Nature or Education or Economic Wellbeing will surely triumph in the end, it has been believed, for each of these concepts are endowed with power, great power.  Our understanding of omnipotence in God, ourselves and our world has been shaken in recent times, but these doubts did not start with the huge problems of the last few decades. 

A shocking thing happened in early Unitarianism, beginning with William Ellery Channing, when he admitted that God was not omnipotent, and we were free to resist the good, and to do evil.  Rabbi Kushner seconded this theology much more recently in his famous book, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People:  God is not all powerful, but rather all loving, Kushner argued.  Everything is connected, so triumph over evil is not inevitable in a world of free will with a non-omnipotent deity, but that does make the end of the story necessarily confusion or worry or pessimism.  We can make choices for the good, and time can be lifted up.  Alice Blair Wesley writes, recasting William Ellery Channing’s beliefs:  “The faith we hold fast has also been able to work mightily and to bring forth fruit in us who believe.”

If we have let go of triumphalism, at least we may bring a sense of willpower and co-creativity to the process.  What we have begun, and what we have inherited from the past, is not moving inexorably toward a triumph over evil in the end, but that is a possible outcome, which we can help to further along the way.  Perhaps we have grown more wise as a people, and we can deem this a growing up of humanity:  we have a clearer understanding of who we are and what our world is about and how we relate to the Holy.  We have put behind us the polyanna vision of the good ending and the warriorlike image of triumph, in favor of a more realistic approach, but it doesn’t have to be a less hopeful one.  Our experience of time needs to acknowledge that the future is grown from the present, that this process is both evolutionary and co-creative.  Though rottenness is always with us, we can help to generate the flowers, partly from the decay of the world around us, and also from our own inner resources, and from the gift of grace.  We can help replace tirumphalism with generativity, an alternate way of viewing and experiencing time that also has roots in the Judeo-Christian traditions, and in other religions.

Besides replacing triumphalism with the generative process, we need to replace the linear view of time with a spiral.  We realize that time doesn’t simply play forward on a straight line in one direction.  Our souls orbit a bit, sometimes encircling the same stuff over and over, until we really get it.  Time is as much about cycles and seasons, those images that come to us stronger these days from a more earth-centered spirituality.  Generativity embraces destruction and winter and death, but continues to press forward through the ages, with hope and faith in the ongoing possibilities for growth and goodness.

Triumphalism has been a legacy of religion that impacted our society greatly, and in many positive ways – it allowed folks to live in bad times and to know that a greater power would necessarily bring them to a good end time, but it is bankrupt now.  Generativity can help folks live through hard times with hope and courage to work toward a good end time, without becoming disillusioned or discouraged by the occasional downward spirals of life.

Triumphalism isn’t the only concept religion has brought to society about time.  Religions have taught a universal wisdom that needs to find new expression in every age, and as Unitarian Universalists, we need to bring this message forward as well.  The center of this understanding about time is that we cherish and honor the past, live openly and wholeheartedly in the present, and hope in and work for the future.  Simple, but not easy.

There is one more religious concept about time that I don’t really have time to consider fully, and that is eternity.  Eternity and Infinity cross over in meaning and are a bridge between religion and science.  They both refer to that which cannot be counted, measured, understood, or limited.  In terms of time, that eternal or infinite duration may be about the age of the universe, or the mystery of God, or the longed for life beyond the biochemical one which we know is completed with death.  Jewish and Christian Triumphalism assumed that time as we know it would end at the beginning of the Reign of God, that eternity would be experienced differently than we experience daily life.  After the triumph of the good, progress would not be needed.  Eternity, by its very nature, is not something our brains, which like to name, categorize and count, can really comprehend.  It is a large concept rooted in a hope-filled experience of time.  Eternity draws us forward, and centers us in its midst. 

We don’t talk much about eternity, and I haven’t much to add about this area of faith and mystery today, but we do recognize the unmeasurable, nonlimited, and mysterious quality of time when it touches the sacred.  The other ways of experiencing time:  chronological, linear time; generative, process time; and cyclical, seasonal time, are joined by transcendent, revelatory time.  Religions notice holy time at their foundations, as well as sacred times in individual lives and the experiences of their communities, and religions look to other breaking through times in the future.

Are we time-bound creatures, or time-endowed beings?  How we center ourselves determines how we experience time.  Can we cherish and honor the past, live openly and wholeheartedly in the present, and hope in and work for the future?  Next week, when we lift up the gift of motherhood in a special time, or in three weeks, when we celebrate our coming of age class, can we sense the sacredness of the time and brush eternity in the gathering of our congregation?

May the future we generate flower with promise.  May the gift of time expand and fill you with the exuberance of Spring eternal.  Amen.