Tag: time

Training Champions of the Human Race

David HerbertLeave a comment

Yusra Mardini
Notes for a sermon for Christ the King, Birkenhead, August 14th 2016 (Proper 15C, Ordinary 20C, Pentecost +13)

Have you been watching the Olympics?  It’s too easy to watch too much isn’t it? What have been your highlights?

Did you see Yusra Mardini win her 200 metre freestyle swimming heat? Yusra was swimming for the Refugee Olympic team. She got such a cheer. She won her heat, though didn’t qualify for the semi finals because others had swum faster than her.

Yusra is 18 years old. She was born in Damascus, a Syrian Christian and represented Syria in 2012. Her family’s house was destroyed and the roof of her training pool was blown off. She and her sister Sarah decided to flee Syria last summer. They reached Lebanon, then Turkey, and then boarded a boat for Greece. There were 20 of them in a dinghy designed for six. The boat was soon in trouble with the motor failing after 30 minutes. There were only four swimmers in the boat: Yusra, her sister and two others. They had to get out and pushed and pulled for 3 hours until they bought the boat to shore on Lesbos and the lives of the people on board so saving the lives of all their fellow passengers.

Last August, after 25 days, she arrived in Berlin. She gets up at 4 o’clock every morning to train before going to school. That has been her training schedule. That is how she arrived at the Olympics.

Also in the swimming pool was Adam Peaty, our first swimming gold medal since 1988. He’s from Uttoxeter. He used to be scared of water. You couldn’t tell could you?

Besides his own dedication – his story is one of immense and sacrificial support by his mother, the rest of the family and his neighbours – as they have struggled to make the money to pay for the petrol to get him to his training.

His response to winning: “I’m proud to have pushed the boundaries of the human race.” Are we pushing the boundaries of the human race? And if we are thinking to ourselves how old we are, that we are too frail, there will be the Paralympians coming along next month to shame our outlook. And if we are thinking that we are unfit then we have to open our ears and hearts to the good news that God’s love helps us fit for the kingdom, not our strength.

Are any of you successful athletes? Or maybe you’re not medal winners, but you’ve got a life of achievement because of the work that you have put in – you’ve brought up children, you’ve supported a sick relative, you’ve ….

Or, perhaps more of us are conscious of our failings, the missed opportunities, inability to keep our resolve – losing our way in lives full of regrets. Me too.

 

Our first reading (Hebrews 11:29-12:2) gives honourable mentions to many people – to the prostitute Rahab, to Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets – those who administered justice, those whose weakness was turned to strength, those who endured torture, imprisonment and persecution – destitute, ill-treated, homeless. They are all commended for their faith.

The letter is written in the past tense, but the honourable mention is intended to embrace those who now administer justice, those who endure torture, imprisonment and persecution, those whose faith is commendable. They are all champions of the human race – and we are all encouraged to run with them for a podium finish – at the right hand of God. “Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfected of faith.” (Hebrews 12:1f)

 

We have all been introduced to the pool in our baptism. It might be a long time since we swam in those waters but perhaps it’s worth casting our minds to our baptisms and the call to swim in those waters. That is the training pool for future champions – champions of the human race.

Those who get honourable mentions are commended for the race they ran even though they could hardly make out the tape. According to this letter to the Hebrews, God has planned something far better for us. I don’t know whether any of you have been to the dogs but the greyhounds race after the hare that has been set running. We have Jesus before us, to fix our eyes on, to follow.

Where Jesus goes, our eyes follow. That is where we set our sights. The highways and by-ways, the margins ………… “Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith.”

Yusra Mardini, in an interview this week says that she has been overwhelmed by the support that she has had and that she hopes that she has “opened the world’s eyes to the plight of those who have been displaced” – which is where eyes will focus if they are fixed on Jesus because we know his time was/is for them and those like them who are strangers (even aliens) to the powers that be.

Jesus is the goal, but what about our training schedule?

The words of Psalm 90 shouted out to me this week:

The days of our life are three score years and ten, or if our strength endures, even four score; yet the sum of them is but labour and sorrow, for they soon pass away and we are gone (verse 10)

How soon life passes. Before we know it we are at the end of our days, and we can easily become overwhelmed by the sense of opportunities missed. Life runs away with us. In this context the psalmist prays:

Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom (verse 12). Numbering our days means making our days count, whether we have 3 days, months, weeks, years. How shall we use the time that we have? Shall we train them on the human race we run?

The psalmist continues (verse 15), Give us gladness for the days you have afflicted us, and for the years in which we have seen adversity – a simple plea for a better time than the times wasted or suffered.

Part of my own training schedule is to pick up a poem each day. For me it’s like a protein shake – it builds me up and gives me energy. This poem I picked up this week is by Annie Dillard and is called How we Spend our Days  It is about how we manage our time, structure our time so it helps us keep a good time and a winning time.

How we spend our days
is, of course,
how we spend our lives.

What we do with this hour,
and that one,
is what we are doing.

A schedule
defends from chaos
and whim.

It is a net
for catching days.
It is a scaffolding

on which a worker
can stand
and labor with both hands

at sections of time.
A schedule is a mock-up
of reason and order –

willed, faked,
and so brought into being;
it is a peace and a haven

set into the wreck of time;
it is a lifeboat
on which you find yourself,

decades later,
still living.
Each day is the same,

so you remember
the series afterward
as a blurred and powerful pattern.

So what about a training schedule? (And what would go in that schedule?)

What about aiming for a good time? (And what a good time for you be?)

How about championing the human race and the whole of God’s creation?

 

 

 

Trust in the slow work of God

David HerbertLeave a comment
The 10,000 year clock, part of the Long Now Project

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Here’s more about the 10,000 year clock and the Long Now Project.

The Long Now

David Herbert1 Comment

I didn’t realise just how many ways there are of telling the time until I read Jay Griffith’s A Sideways Look at Time  a few years ago. She drew attention to the way in which the clock came to tower over our lives with an oppressive power which meant that this has dominated the  way of telling the time in our culture. She contrasted this with different ways time is told in cultures that have not fallen under the spell of Captain Clock. For example, she tells of the scent calendars of the Andaman Islands which uses the smell of the flowers and trees to tell the time. She demonstrates how our sense of time separated from our sense of nature. She quotes a conversation with Mateo Jicca, an Arakmbut leader in Peru who complains that “your (westernised) people are all planification and punctuality. In the cities everything has to be at the hour, punto, precise. By contrast, here in the mountains we give things time, sin limitari, without limits.”

His criticism rings alarm bells. It perhaps is true that we squeeze things into our plans, rather than giving things/people the time they need. But then there is a rush isn’t there? We only have “now”, or “just a minute”. We think that “time is running away with us” and that time is scarce as the sands of time run out on us. Why can’t “now” be longer? Why can’t we take longer? Why can’t we be more generous with our time? Refreshingly, there are those who want to give us pause for thought – seconds out.

clock of the long now (prototype)
The 10,000 Year Clock (above) is part of the Long Now Project. It challenges our obsession with immediacy. The clock is designed as a symbol for long term thinking, and is being built inside a mountain in the Sierra Diablo Mountain Range in West Texas. Danny Hillis is the clockfather. He wanted to design a clock that will keep time for 10,000 years and that:

  • ticks once a year
  • will generate a different chime sequence each day for 10,000 years
  • where the century hand moves once every one hundred years
  • and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium

Introducing the idea of the clock, Danny Hillis said:

I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sue that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.

The first prototype of the clock began working on December 31st 1999 in time to display the transition to the year 2000, shown as moving from 01999 to 02000 (because it’s a 10000 year clock). The chime struck twice.

The requirements for the clock include ensuring future generations can keep the clock working with nothing more advanced than Bronze Age tools, and should not contain valuable parts that can be looted. The clock is a shy clock which hides its face. The time it displays is the time asked for by the last visitor. It’s a clock that is locked away, that takes the visitor a day’s pilgrimage to reach. It’s a clock that knows that it will be overlooked in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Stewart Brand, a founding member of the Long Now Foundation,

“Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well-engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic to the public discourse. Ideally it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.”

The photo is by piglicker.

Extra time and the end of BST

David Herbert8 Comments

This is a sermon prepared for some of the good people of Guilden Sutton and Plemstall for the end of British Summer Time.

SS Simon and Jude – Sermon for October 28th 2012.

Well done for remembering to change your clocks!

The question we ask when the clocks change is “Do we gain an hour, or do we lose it?”

Well, this time, we “gain” an hour. We have an extra hour.

What have you done with it?

The same question was raised about the Leap Day earlier this year. February 29th. We got an extra “day”. Many people spotted the opportunity and planned extra events – I finished up with three competing commitments that day. One man used the day creatively. He had lost contact with his brother. He hadn’t seen him for over 30 years. He used the Leap Day as a day for the work of reconciliation.

What have you done with the extra hour?

I hope that some of you managed an extra hour of sleep – after all so many of us are suffering from having too much to do and handle. Phrases that we hear of time and time again are “work-life balance” and “time management”. We find it so difficult to manage time. We are stressed by it – I really do hope that some of you managed to get your own back on time by stealing another hour of sleep.

What do we do with time, and what does time do with us? These are questions I want to focus on.

Firstly, what does time do to us?

The short answer is that he terrifies us. Old Father Time, the Grim Reaper, terrifies us. Change and decay in all around I see.

Time is always running away with us and with our loved ones.

Time, like an ever rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly, forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

The clock is ticking, and we know that there is a countdown for our last chance, whether on the TV quiz show, or the science fiction that the earth is going to be destroyed, unless the superhero manages to “beat the clock”. Wasn’t there a TV programme called “Beat the Clock”?

Time stresses us out. We race against time. Time robs us of our youth, innocence and health and we are left wondering whether there is any point. Try as we like, we can’t manage time and we are left feeling that time is managing us. We are in his hands, and in his hands many are really anxious. What if, all the time, our lives count for nothing?

So, what do we make of time?

Actually, as Christians, we make a lot of Time.

In the Eucharist, in the end, through our faith, in our practice we trust that the One “who changest not” abides with us, even though it is often only change and decay that we see all around.

Our biblical myths of time confront the despair that grips so many. I have been reading a book written in the year I was born – an old book, by Rabbi Abraham Heschel. His view was that Judaism is a religion of time, aiming at the sanctification of time. That view spans both Testaments.

This holiness of time is expressed in the story of creation. Each day is a day because God says so. There is this present moment because God is present.

The work of creation did not finish after the sixth day. The work of creation goes on. Every moment is an act of creation and a new beginning. Heschel writes: “there are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusively and endlessly precious”. This is such a contrast to the way in which time is something just to be killed by those who see no quality time, and who are simply bored by the flatline of time.

Our story of time encourages us to see every moment as significant. But our story of time also gives us the means to survive the times of our life when there is evil, violence, suffering, pain and crying. The Bible begins at Day One. It ends with the Last Day, when, in the end, there will be Shalom, and all will cry glory.

I mentioned the six days of creation. There is also the 7th day which God called holy, and which we are commanded to call holy. This is how we are called to tell the time. Observing the Sabbath is a resistance to the powers of the world, the powers that be, our business and the things that rule our lives “Monday to Friday”. It is a breathing space with strict rules for its protection. There is no work to be done (for some even flicking a switch is too much). One rule is “ye shall kindle no fire” – applied by Heschel to also not kindling the fire of righteous indignation. Sabbath observance demands great disciplines which build up through generations.

Heschel writes: “With the Sabbath comes a miracle: the soul is resurrected.” For him “the world’s survival depends on the holiness of the Sabbath”. The task is how to convert time into eternity, how to fill our time with spirit.

As Christians, we have a different story to tell. We see two different hands on the clock. The hands of Christ crucified, the hands of Jesus risen from the dead.

For us the holy day of Sabbath becomes the holy Day of Resurrection. Each week begins with holiday of the new creation by which all our days are numbered.

The discipline of people like yourselves coming together to celebrate resurrection is making something of time and resisting a tide of hopelessness. By celebrating the Day of Resurrection, by remembering all God’s works of redemption, we make something of time for ourselves and alternative calendar for the world, which can only be good news for all those who have grown tired, or bored, or who are oppressed day by day.

The Bible is more concerned with time than space. It pays attention to generations and events. We follow that tradition. Our year is full of grace as we move from one great celebration to another. This week we celebrate all the saints. Today we celebrate Saints Simon and Jude. We don’t know much about them. We know that Jude write one of the epistles, and that he is patron saint of hospitals, hospital workers, desparate situations and forgotten, impossible and lost causes.

There are many who feel desparate in their battle against Time. They feel overwhelmed and exhausted. They fear the end. They worry they are a waste of time, and feel that time has wasted them. All of us, from time to time, have shared the same despair – but we know there is another way of telling time.

That way is made through the resurrection, through faith, hope and love, and through the practice and devotion of local communities of Christians who tell the time differently – who manage time not by months and minutes, but by eternity and a love that never dies.

The last word belongs to the patron saint of desparate situations and forgotten, impossible and lost causes. In his epistle, Jude addresses people like ourselves – inclined to anxiety and desperation in the passage of time. He writes: “Dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.”

Measurement by story

David Herbert1 Comment

Measurement is part and parcel of the recent Olympic Games. The fastest, highest or most guarantees Gold. But measurement by number isn’t what makes life count.

I am enjoying Organic Community by Joseph Myers. He reminds us of the place of “story”. “Story is the universal measurement of life” and “reducing living organisms to a census count demeans the way we were created.”

Conversations #3

Myers reminds us that “life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the number of moments that take our breath away.” He quotes Peter Block, from The Answer to How is Yes:

The quality of our experience is not measured by the seconds on the clock, but by the timelessness of our experience. We fool ourselves if we ask how long it will take before we know we are, become conscious, identify with our purpose, or remember our own history in  a more forgiving way.

The things that matter to us are measured by depth. Would you assess your humanity by its pace? When I view myself as a time-sensitive product, valued for what I produce, then I have made depth, extended thought, and the inward journey marginal indulgences.

But stories represent a problem for managers. Stories can’t be managed, but numbers can. Myers again: “Churches don’t become legendary in the community grapevine via reporting of numbers. They become legendary through the sharing of their story of mission within the community.”

The photo is from  “camera baba” aka Udit Kulshrastha 

Slow is Beautiful

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John Cage wrote a piece of music called “As Slow as Possible” in 1985. He didn’t give instructions about how long it should ask but envisaged it lasting 30 minutes. It is being played on a church organ in Halberstadt, Germany – and the piece is lasting 639 years! The concert began in 2001 and will end in 2640. The note changed last week and the next change is on July 5th 2010. Several people have made noted in their diary to remind themselves to be there for this notable change.

This is a fascinating project. It depends on orchestrating the different generations. In a world shaped by Jeremy Clarkson, speed and power – at a time when the desire to earn a fast buck has undermined our financial systems like never before – the concert invites us to entertain the idea that “slow is beautiful”. We’re used to thinking about colour setting the tone for a room – but here a note is setting the tone for 18 months at a time. What if it’s a discord? What if it’s spooky? What will that do to the room? Here’s the score and today’s sound!

I’m coming to the end of a chapter of my life before beginning something new. After 15 years in one place means a change of note, or a change of key is long overdue. But it makes me think – maybe I’ve added one note, or two notes to the symphony lived by our parish community. There has been the odd discord and the occasional harmonising, and in the long course of history that recognises us as a grain of sand, one note is perhaps enough to raise the tone.

The architecture of time management

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The rocks, pebbles and sand squeezing into the jar helped me to re-think priorities and time management. The only problem is the emphasis is still on squeezing things in, which still sounds and seems uncomfortable.

I was interested in what our architect Robin Wolley had to say about our church at Duddon. “There’s no space” – it is a craetion of the Victorian age and mindset. We knew that because we had tried the swinging the cat test and it wouldn’t. He went on to explain from our contemporary more minimalist mindset that the important thing in architecture is designing space around the objects. Aha. A light bulb moment.

Trying to juggle responsibilities and priorities – think about them architecturally. Set up the rocks (the important architectural features of my life) – things like prayer, pastoral care, preaching, personal study/learning/development – and give them space, which I will call “frame of mind”. That frame of mind gives me space to walk around the features, see them from different viewpoints and reassess the arrangement of the furniture.

Why did the Victorians leave so little space? Why sit people in rows? Is it to do with controlling people and leaving them no space for their personal initiative. They were after all Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin) and Hard Times (Charlie Dickens). It was perhaps the same mindset which thought busyness a virtue and probably dreamt up the proverb “the devil makes work for idle hands”.