“If we could waste time with out injuring eternity” – Henry David Thoreau
Last week I camped in Colorado’s wilderness to clear my head from a cluttered and chaotic life. Accompanied by a good friend, we began the hike at 6 am intending to summit a 12,000 ft pass early enough to evade deadly electrical storms in the afternoon. We reached the summit quicker than expected and were greeted with warm sapphire skies, the still rising sun low on a craggy horizon. We were making good time and trudged on into a vale of Aspen and Doug Fir that led down to our destination. When we reached camp I turned my cell phone on, hoping to get the time. The vertical bars that normally indicate coverage were gone: No Service. After I drove a stake into a sunny patch of dirt to try calculating the hour and staring at its shadow, I realized the soil was not going to produce numbers to help out. No ticking of a clock, no outside contact with the world through a television, I sat back and dazed at swaying treetops, acclimating to the pace of a new environment. It then dawned on me that time -as far as a number game goes- is a social ordinance, not a natural tempo. My friend, who observed my brief moment of panic, said casually “If we could only waste time with out injuring eternity.” Introspecting for a minute I faced a question that I often don’t take time to ask: What is the best use of time?
This humorous circumstance is reminiscent Lewis Mumford’s claim that when the clock was invented it turned us from time-keepers to time-savers and finally, into time-servers. Consider how minutes and hours, days and weeks, affect our interactions with other people. Meetings with loved ones or friends immediately get slotted into a block of time and as that time evaporates, anxiety rises and pressure to be at the next place presses in. Because our lives are counted up numerically, we should be conscious and proactive in prioritizing the events that compose life. This is not to say that the invention of the clock is a detriment to society, but that its place on our wrists and walls has become a deified symbol that -as I experienced- gives too much meaning to the day.
Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death that “the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God,” and that “Perhaps Moses should have included another commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.” If there is no system of prioritization in life, then the clock, although providing structure, cheapens our interactions with each other and God.
For those who have spiritual lives, the object of attention tends to be something invisible. As Christians, our spiritual focus is on Christ; unseen but internally dwelling. This truth about spirituality makes fostering such a life incredibly difficult with out a disciplined organization of time. Because the minute tallying clock confines our lives, there is a need to weed out the things that encroach on the Holy; the quiet moments where His Word is heard. With out proper time to heed His still, small voice, our ears will deafen in the Divine conversation.
This morning I browsed some blogs and read a post where the author describes how much time is spent in front of the TV which, after introspecting and evaluating unmet inner needs, they cut the television’s cord and chose to abstain for 31 days from its talking heads and constant output of information. With the post was a cartoon of a man genuflect in front of a television set. I was reminded of another cartoon from Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin, in his pajamas holding a bowl of mush, walks up to the television and says:
“Oh greatest of the mass media, thank you for elevating emotion, reducing thought and stifling imagination. Thank you for the artificiality of quick solutions and for the insidious manipulation of human desires for commercial purposes. This bowl of lukewarm tapioca represents my brain. I offer it in humble sacrifice. Bestow thy flickering light forever.”
As he speaks he is also prostrate before the TV. The scene that follows depicts a dark room where a mother stares with a groggy and confused expression at the bowl of tapioca in front of a glaring television with no one around. We laugh at the author’s social critique for its poignancy and truth, admitting with a sense of guilt that we waste copious amounts of time in front of the tube, and that the images of a man and a boy bowing as to a god is entirely accurate of the place we’ve given the TV.
In 1985 Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death as the television was gaining momentum in society. He addresses the potentially dangerous impact that television will have epistemologically, cognitively and spiritually on the contour of societies landscape. He draws a line of evolution, from reading to watching, by pointing out that since the Israelites days, the Judeo-Christian God “…was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking.” He concludes that, “Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.” Have the Clock and TV become such deified icons?
While the definition of who or what God is differs culturally, we agree that whatever shape or form God has in an individual’s life, it competes for full attention; the center of existence; the thing around which we order our time. And it appears to me that God knew humanity was prone to be preoccupied with instant gratification: The immediate image to touch and worship, instead of devoting time to quiet mind and spirit; the personal passion of Christ.
Postman correlates televisions ability to grab our attention through images as informative entertainment to the opening of a cultural chasm void of literacy, introspection, critical thinking and time management. It appeals to a culture whose schedule is out of control. When you have a society bogged down with over-loaded schedules full of vain activity due to an inability to prioritize, you have a people whose minds and souls are too willing to accept easy information and cheap entertainment. When one can turn the TV on and simultaneously do chores or converse with family while not missing a beat of the universes drum, it further devalues time as an asset worth managing.
It is no surprise then, when put into nature, whose daily habits are still dictated by seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, that I wander about kicking stones and scratching imaginary itches. It is the outward scratch of an Eternal itch within. That consciousness is only tapped into when my senses cease to be tantalized by constant stimulation. It therefore becomes easy to blame society, as if I were merely a Pavlovian dog and not a sovereign creature of God.
It is this point of difference that makes any outward blaming totally null. In his book Guilt and Grace, Paul Tournier says:
“We see many people who are perpetually lamenting the lack of time, with out ever seriously considering what sacrifices they could make to remedy the situation. They accuse civilization, modern life, the motorcar, machines, all the things which have been invented to save time, as if they were the victims and not the culprits…we allow ourselves to be swept along by the current of life instead of resisting it by the reform of our own lives, and that the problem is a personal rather than a social one”
Of 168 hours a week, perhaps 40-50 is tied up in making a living. Now examine that phrase: making a living. We are bound to finality; we have a beginning and an end; and through out this journey we have an opportunity to determine what is worth living for. Moses, in the 91st Psalm, reflects on our span under the sun in “seventy years – eighty for those who are strong” and ask God to “Teach us to count up the days that are ours, and we shall come to the heart of wisdom.” Wisdom, the apogee of existence to the Hebrew, the ability to determine daily what is worthy of ones life, so that by its end they can know that they lived life, not as Thoreau saw, as men living lives of quiet desperation, but living it to its fullest.
What is it about numbering our days that leads to Wisdom? When Moses uses that word, the common meaning is to obtain the skill and understanding to prioritize ones life. But Wisdom is deeper than the calculus that goes into planning a day. In Psalm 8, Wisdom (memra) speaks and says “From everlasting I was set, from the beginning, before the earth came into being. The deep was not, when I was born.” It doesn’t take a theologian to understand that it is Christ speaking. He is the Wisdom of God. Now consider John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word: the Word was with God and the Word was God.” There is a parallel between Wisdom and Word here. The Greek word John uses is Logos, which during that time implied “world-reason,” the spiritual substance that sustained the Cosmos; Divine logic; Wisdom. The implication, from Hebrew practicality to Greek philosophy, is that in order for things to be sustained and endure (literally Cosmos) there needs to be organization and prioritization. John incarnates that concept and gives the world an axis to revolve around.
The informative and religious culture during Johns time can be seen in the Aeropagus of Acts 17, where Athenian intellectuals and neighboring cities gathered to discuss the latest trends, philosophies and social news; a sort of ancient CNN and Fox news network. It was here that one could see almost any deity as palpable image. Paul the Apostle was invited to speak, seeing he came with an odd and bold philosophy. Paul points out that, as he browsed the gods and observed their religious sophistication, he came across an image with the inscription: To An Unknown God. These sophists of the Aeropagus were sensible enough to erect an image to a deity that they had not heard been acquainted with in order to not offend it. “In fact, the unknown god you revere is the one I proclaim to you” said Paul. Then, in his precise manner divulges the Logos; incarnate Wisdom; Jesus Christ.
Our culture today is no different. Postman warned that the rise of images would eradicate the need for words and that the velocity of information that flies through the tube would condense time into a vapor void of worth. Men and women cease to value time and critically filter the information that is so readily available, sugar coated as entertainment, they will inevitably create a pantheistic society with gods so subtle, the most devout Christian would worship it.
How can time be spent -not wasted- so as to not injure Eternity? With that in mind, remember that Christ said he came to give life abundantly. If this is so, consider what images and voices we plug in daily that imposes on the Eternal Word? How valuable Wisdom is today as our senses are bombarded on every front offering quicker and easier ways to be satisfied. Time is our limited gift, to pursue the Wisdom of the Word.
The time I spent watching finches flutter icy winds, the lake lapping at a verdant shore, and the sun, keeping its course like a champion finishing a race, giving the world another day, I wondered if God is still most visible in the small print of those Holy pages as in the whisper Elijah heard out side the cave in the wilderness, within the simple wisdom of Nature, where maybe time –if taken- leads to Christ.
Perched on a log as the sun sank behind a massive peak, I resolved that time will have to tell.
