First Parish Unitarian UniversalistThe Great Gift of Time
A sermon preached by the Reverend Diane Teichert
First Parish Unitarian Universalist - Canton, MA
January 5, 2003
This past Friday morning, I was out on the conservation land with our dog, Oliver. “This is like doggy kindergarten,” I observed to the three other humans as our four dogs cavorted (or not, in the case of Oliver, who far prefers his Frisbee to most any other canine). Two of the dogs, including mine, are only four years old, but of course in a dog’s life that makes them teenagers. Yet, somehow, they all were all acting more like five year olds. Anyway…
We’d already commented on the impending snow storm. I was the loner, the only one who delighted in the prospect. You know how they always announce the larger snowfall for “north and west of the city”? Well, we live right there on that first north and west hill, and I guess these other dog-walkers weren’t relishing that fact as much as I. So, yesterday, as I shoveled and shoveled that absolutely beautiful but heavy wet snow, I remembered my delight the previous day!
Anyway, on Friday morning, I’d just resolved that Oliver and I should head home for breakfast when my neighbor asked, “How were your holidays?”
“Oh, wonderful!” I exclaimed. “So relaxed, this year!”
“Relaxed?” another dog-walker exclaimed incredulously, making clear I was the loner once again. “I never heard anyone use that word to describe the holidays!”
“Did you see the editorial in Thursday’s Globe, the one that said…” and she went on, but I lost the thread of the conversation, being somewhat distracted by my loner status and the memory of previous holiday seasons not relaxed at all!
The one who asked me about my holidays sauntered off with his dog before I could ask about their holidays. And the rest of us headed home with our dogs in the other direction.
Later in the day, I found Thursday’s paper in our recycling stack, and there was the editorial, headlined “The Daze After,” “The Daze (spelled d-a-z-e, not d-a-y-s) After.” It began, “What day is it? Are you sure? These weeks of holiday Wednesdays can jumble the mind as well as the calendar, making a person who has taken a little time off here and there feel like a car with a bad transmission.”
The great gift of Time…that was the gift of the holidays to me, this year. Looking back, I can see how that gift was made possible in part by our family’s plans (or, more to the point, lack thereof). But, it wasn’t a gift I planned, or asked for, or even consciously knew I wanted. And, yet, the gift of Time was mine.
The gift of Time is always ours, everyday, in every moment. Yet, how often it is that I do not open that present, or even acknowledge it has arrived. Is it that way for you sometimes, too?
I’ve recently read a novel in which the passage of time has an unreal quality to it, a fullness, somehow similar to the holidays for me this year. Unreal, but not “dazed” as in “what day is this?” that dizzying disconnected-from-oneself-and-the-usual-flow-of-the-work-week kind of feeling described in Thursday’s editorial.
When I say the passage of time has an “unreal” quality to it, I mean as in not-normal-- normal being the way ordinary life so often feels rushed, too many things to do in too little time, and vaguely unsatisfying.
The author is Wendell Berry, whose poems appear five times in our hymnal (once set to music, even) including as the Meditation I read this morning. The novel is Jayber Crow, the title being the main character’s name.
I read it for my most recent UU ministers’ study group session, the theme for which was “road trips.” If you’ve read the book, you’ll wonder as I did at first, how it could fit the theme of “road trips” because in Jayber Crow’s entire life, he (a barber in rural twentieth century Kentucky) hardly travels fifty miles from where he was born.
Not seventy pages into the book, though, the road trip emerges—it’s his entire life, which to him is like a path, a journey. And by the way, should you want to read Jayber Crow, even though I will tell you a lot about it this morning, there’s a lot I won’t be telling you—like about his love life—so go ahead and read it!
Writing from the vantage point of old age, reflecting back, Jayber says of his life,
“Now I have had most of the life I am going to have, and I can see what it has been. I can remember those early years when it seemed to me I was cut completely adrift, and times when, looking back at earlier times, it seemed I had been wandering in the dark woods of error. But now it looks to me as though I was following a path that was laid out for me, unbroken, and maybe even as straight as possible, from one end to the other, and I have this feeling, which never leaves me anymore, that I have been led, [though] there is no proof.” (p.66)
After spending most of his childhood in an orphanage, then a couple years in seminary (thinking, apparently mistakenly, that he had the calling to be a minister), and a few years barbering and auditing philosophy courses at the university in Lexington, at age twenty-three Jayber finds himself returning to Port William, the Kentucky hamlet where he was born.
He observes, “I had never thought of going back, and…yet this feeling came over me that I had strayed back onto the right path of my life. It was as if in all my years of wandering, even when I had been the most uncertain or lost, I had been crossing back and forth across my path…” and, now, heading home, he was back on it again. (p. 86).
And, so, he passed the time (or it passed him) from 1937 to 1969, as Port William’s only barber. Remaining single, he was never fully integrated into the community. But, as a barber, he watched everything and knew nearly everyone. Not just all the boys and men, being the only barber in town, but also the mothers of young sons in need of haircuts. He knew most of the other women, too, albeit indirectly, through the confidences shared or not shared by their husbands, boyfriends and lovers as they sat in the barber’s chair.
Though modern times were happening all around Jayber, his life remained simple, uncomplicated by family ties or many material possessions. His work as a barber plus his side jobs as the community’s gravedigger and the church sexton gave him satisfaction and just enough income, but did not cause stress. Uncomplicated and not stressed—his life differed a lot from mine and the lives of most people I know.
In that simplicity, he had the time for reflection, friendships, and appreciation of the beauty of the natural world around him, plus he had the inclination of spirit to use his time in those ways.
Maybe its that simplicity and having the time for reflection, friendship and appreciation of the natural world that makes the passage of time in Jayber Crow’s life seem so unreal, so unlike ordinary life. As I think back on these most recent holidays, I realize that’s why they were so relaxed: there was time for reflection, for family and friendships, and for appreciation of the snowy world around us.
How sad if we experience such fullness of time only on holidays and then only if we have not overscheduled our time off!
Of his life as a journey Jayber says,
“Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led—make of that what you will.”
In 1969, when he was only 55, Jayber left his barbershop and his little apartment above it for a no electricity, no running water shack down by the river. The State health inspector had come by and threatened to close his barbershop down if he didn’t put hot water in and a toilet upstairs. But he was afraid to increase the price of a haircut when so many people’s farms were going under, and he didn’t think there was a future in barbering worth the cost and trouble of all that new plumbing anyway, because he could see that going to the barber was on its way out and going to a hair stylist was on its way in. And, he had no interest in learning to “style” hair!
So, he closed up his shop, rented out the apartment above it, and moved to his buddy’s old river camp on the edge of town. And that’s where his journey continued, presumably until he died.
After living by the river for many years, he mused,
“I can’t look back from where I am now and feel that I have been very much in charge of my life. Certainly I have lived on the edge of the Port William community, and I am farther than ever out on the edge of it now [being on the river]. But, I feel that I have lived on the edge even of my own life. I have made plans enough, but I see now that I have never lived by plan. Any more than if I had been a bystander watching me live my life, I don’t feel that I ever have been quite sure what was going on. Nearly everything that has happened to me has happened by surprise. All the important things have happened by surprise. And whatever has been happening usually has already happened before I have had time to expect it. The world doesn’t stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think. And so when I have thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have been only on the edge of it, carried along. Is this because we are in an eternal story that is happening partly in time?” (p. 322)
Do you feel you live on the edge of an eternal story, part of it and carried along by it, as he says? Or are we in complete charge of our lives, determining our plans? Do you feel you are on the edge of your own life even, not drifting, but carried along? Do you feel at all “led,” as he intimated earlier?
What do you suppose he means by “an eternal story?” Is it the ongoing story of creation—that is happening only partly in this time and mostly in a much fuller sense of time that we can hardly imagine? The world doesn’t stop, he says, just because we need it to stop for a while. It goes on, eternally.
Yet, experiencing the great gift of Time suggests that we can indeed hit the pause button, like over the holidays or on Sunday morning, and stop the world for a bit. Is that so, or is he right that the world does not stop?
Maybe it’s not what I said a moment ago, that it was the simplicity of his life and that he had the time for reflection, friendship and appreciation of the natural world that made the passage of time in Jayber Crow’s life seem so unreal, so unlike ordinary life.
Maybe what it really is is this: maybe it’s his awareness of an eternal story… that gives rise to the fullness of time in Jayber Crow’s life. Something larger than himself, something in which he is participating, but not determining.
An eternal story, the great gift of Time with a capital T. Something larger than ourselves, in which we may participate but cannot control. Something which both empowers and humbles us.
We can’t all be, nor do we all want to be, bachelor barbers in rural Kentucky, living the good and simple life. Some of us must bear and raise the next generation. Some of us must produce and sell the goods and services that Jayber’s neighbors bought even if he didn’t. Some of us must influence the decision-makers and some of us must be decision-makers.
So, I don’t at all mean to romanticize the lifestyle of Jayber Crow, or of my quiet and quite domestic holiday season.
And anyway, even Jayber Crow dealt with the moral issues of his day. For example, in 1942, he was twenty eight—too old to join the army for adventure; too young to have reason not to. He considered maybe being a conscientious objector.
“As I saw it, I had two choices: to fight in a war and maybe kill people I wasn’t even mad at and who were no more to blame than I was, or take an exemption that I really didn’t believe was right either and couldn’t believe I was worthy of. I couldn’t imagine what lay beyond either choice.” (p. 143).
Once he decided that his duty was to share the fate of Port William’s young men, even though it meant military service, his head cleared (p. 144). As it turned out, the army doctor found a heart murmur and he was disqualified from serving, though he shared the town’s grief for its dead and its joy when the rest returned.
I think, though that his, ours, or anyone’s ability to grapple with and act on the moral issues of the day is greatly aided by having a sense for the fullness of Time, an eternal story, by having some awareness that both empowers and humbles us.
My brief enjoyment of the great gift of Time over the holidays quieted my anxiety about the moral issues of these times, even as it ignited a calmer sense of urgency and created energy for re-engaging more purposefully.
To list those issues, even just a few of them, is to re-invoke that anxiety: the threat of war by the U.S. against Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the fear that threat is raising among Muslims in many countries, the eroding of freedom at home especially for the foreign born among us, the nuclear threat posed not just by North Korea but also by Israel and our own country, the ongoing violence between the Israelis and the Palestinians, simmering conflicts in the Congo and Venezuela and other international hot spots that are on the periphery of my awareness, state budget crunch impacts on the poor, frequent shootings in Boston just up the road, and so on.
But, let’s not invoke anxiety! Better to dispel it by making time for reflection, family, friendship and appreciation of the natural world. In its place we may find a calmer sense of urgency and energy for re-engaging more purposefully. There is time, the great gift of Time.
These thoughts about Time and the fullness of time brought a familiar quote to my mind: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” These words were written by the 19th century Unitarian minister and abolitionist of Boston, Theodore Parker, during the struggle to end slavery in this country. A century later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr often quoted Parker’s words. They were an expression of King’s deep faith that freedom, love, and justice would someday prevail.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” What will we do with that great gift of Time? Will we circle round for freedom, as in the anthem this morning? Will we love our enemies and our neighbors as ourselves? Will we lend our weight to bending the arc toward justice? What will we do with the great gift of Time, this year?