When Gulliver washed up on the Lilliputian beach, their king sent his agents to reconnoiter, instructing them to examine Gulliver carefully, and to return with a full report on any weapons he might be carrying that would jeopardize Lilliputian security. Having pinned him down, they rifled through Gulliver's pockets. Three unusual items were unearthed, none appartently dangerous, but each decidedly foreign and therefore fascinating. The first item was a great carpet, its length and breadth sufficient to span the grand hall of the royal palace. This, of course, was Gulliver's handkerchief. The second item of interest was a mighty instrument, with poles distended from it the size of the palisades before the royal court. This was Gullivers' comb. The third item was even more baffling. Deep within the recesses of Gulliver's vestments, the king's agents discovered a great engine, one that made a noise like a waterfall and was covered with a clear but impenetrable shield, precluding a direct examination of the monstrous figures on its face. This was Gulliver's watch.
In reporting their findings to the king, the Lilliputian investigators proposed that the third of these strange objects must either be a favorite pet that Gulliver brought with him from his own country, or his god because he consulted it so often.
This morning, on the cusp of a new year as marked this weekend by Rosh Hashona services, and counting down to the advent of a new millennium, I shall dedicate the next twenty minutes to the subject of time.
My slated subject is summer time. Every week throughout the summer something, often a major news story, suggested a sermon, and so I decided I would save them all and elegantly weave them together my first Sunday back. But as the weeks went by, often very pleasantly, the sermon kept getting grimmer and grimmer. A plane crash, an earthquake, a murder, more evidence of bigotry and racism, all capped off by what already seems an interminable race for the presidency and a preposterous race for senate here in New York, and my sermon showed every sign of devolving into a screed, a threnody for summer. Those of you who came looking for bread would have been pelted with stones. Not a good way to begin a new year, not to mention ending an old millennium.
And then I got to thinking. Two things were missing in my summer ruminations. First, how fleeting, ephemeral and therefore precious time is; second, the depth dimension of time: call it eternity.
Throughout the fall, we will be grappling with important temporal matters in this congregation, more intensively than an any time since the Civil War, when All Souls was the centerpiece of the Sanitary Commission effort, our minister and lay people raising 6 million dollars to provide succor to the wounded on both sides. Our gun control task force, Racism (or Journey toward Wholeness) Task Force, Nuclear Disarmament Task Force, AIDs and Children's Task Forces (with more than a dozen hands on outreach programs between them), not to mention the launch of our Lifelines Center, the most ambitious project launched by this congregation in more than a century, insures that our congregation will be fully engaged in the pressing issues of the day.
But before we plunge in, I want to invite you to catch your breath. Think about time, the time of our lives, a bit more reflectively.
Time is strange. It can stop and it can fly. Its passing makes us older, but our experiences can rejuvenate us. We can kill time, but when we do we do more damage to ourselves that we do to it. We can spend time until it runs out. But we also can invest it and, when we do, it pays enormous dividends.
One religious thing we do with time is ceremonially to mark its passing. It happens in every faith, and has since the beginning of recorded time. No tradition marks the passing of time more profoundly than the Jewish tradition. Not only did they choose the right month, unimpressed by old superstitions concerning the death and rebirth of the sun. They also mark the new year with a profound appreciation for those who have struggled before us, our loved ones, lost parents, departed mentors, and for the force of nature itself. The days of awe remind us of both. First, that without memory, community and history, in the human world there can be no new beginnings. Second, that nature renews itself yearly: in the fruits of the earth which now we prepare to gather in harvest, and by the turning of the seasons.
During the days of awe, we are charged to reflect on our past and commit ourselves to the future. We read and then write our own names once again in the Book of Life. First comes Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world; then Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement. In between, the book of Life is open, not only for inspection, but also for revision. We have all done things we should not have done, and things we should have done have begged our doing. As we review the book of Life, we cannot help but confess our failings. And that is good, but only because the book is open for revision. The fates are not in charge. We can write a new chapter, one that follows the old but not slavishly, more in the sense that wisdom grows, both out of dreams and out of ashes.
What I'm talking about is this. We can part the clouds, reset broken clocks, jump not back or forward but three squares higher or deeper, stop time and enter a new realm, a kind of eternity, where length is suspended in depth, and we brush against an angel's wing.
In Dante's Inferno, one distinguishing feature of the damned is that, although they can see the future, they are unable to see the present. This is true of all but the false prophets. In the eighth circle of Hell, where Dante finds Diviners, Astrologers and Magicians, all of them have their heads turned backward. They can see neither present nor future, only the past.
As for us, we too reinvent the past and invent the future. We look back longingly on things that were not nearly as good as we imagine them to have been and look forward with fear and longing to a future we fabricate from both. The only place we can live fully and authentically is in the present, which offers us the only opportunity we will ever have to fill time/space with our love and our life. We can't invent the present, only encounter it, and live in it and love in it, and fail and recover in it. The present is where time and eternity meet.
Right now, this very minute, the world is remaking itself. Each recreation, as with each new day of creation, is fraught with peril and opportunity. There will always be darkness, and it's hard to get the balance between light and darkness right.
I especially like the first four sections of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis. In three of them g\God creates light. It takes four days before there is a proper balance between light and darkness. Still the darkness remains, in the firmament, between the waters, in our own lives. But you notice that God doesn't just create light, and there is light. God keeps toying with the balance. Our lives are like that. We keep toying with the balance. For me, the lesson of these first few sections of the Bible is that at the end of each one of them, God says, "It is good."
How do you balance the light and darkness in your own life. Is it through the prism of the past, happiness lost or stolen from you, a reminder that everything we wanted to do and everything we wanted to be has not come to pass and it is our own fault, or the fault of the fates, our parents, the color of our skin, our gender, our sexual orientation, the economic strata into which we were born? Each reflects on who we are, as do the forces of society, the vagaries of history, the whims and trenchant prejudices of the times. It is no better to balance our life's fortune in the future, mortgaging the present for some big break, spinning life's wheel, playing life's lottery, double or nothing, all too often nothing, because we tend to want to be who we will never become, to do what we cannot do, to have what we will not have, not in this lifetime anyway.
As for the present, that, I believe, is where God shines through, focussing the light, trying to get it right, creating and re-creating ourselves God's hands and eyes, God's marble and God's clay each carved and molded by the spirit of life, the higher power, the ground of our being, being itself, offering a strength beyond our own to tap when our own is not enough, which is always.
The place that God emerges in our lives is not out there, but within us and between us, in the eternal present, wherever the creative spirit moves and breathes. The spirit of God emerges in loving relationships, none of which is perfect; in art; in service to our neighbor; in moments of mystical union when the many become one: not mine, not yours, but ours.
Let me close with a mind game. I invite you to play it with me, even to let me know sometime over the next few weeks what you come up with should you choose to play. First a little background.
In early winter, right on the turning axis of the new millennium, in our lovely church garden we are going to erect a friendship and memory wall. This is a place, where we can remember and honor our loved ones, and be remembered by them either during the course of our lifetime or after we die. Either in the cornerstone of this wall or buried in front of it, we the congregation will place a millennial time capsule. Working together to come up with a representative selection of All Souls artifacts, we will place there telling tokens of our spiritual commitments, emblems of our chosen legacy, an aspirational gift to those who will follow us through these doors over the decades to come.
So I want you to begin thinking about this. Send in your ideas. We'll put together a group from the congregation to cull from them and have a great ceremony to mark their dedication.
The mind game, however, is this. Take the same idea and think about it in a personal way. Four months from now, on the last day of this millennium, what would you place in your own time capsule? Remember, one hundred years from now your great great grandchildren or those of your closest friends will gather to open your gift to them, the essence of your being, of your priorities and values.
Think about it. Would you put in a hundred dollar bill or a Susan B. Anthony dollar? A book you wrote or a simple love letter? A diamond brooch or a pressed flower? A set of moral instructions or a recurring dream? A picture of you with the president or a picture of you as a baby playing with your parents in the sand?
Think of five things for which you would hope to be remembered. I know it's not easy, but I'll give you a hint that works for me. Tap the present and the present past, tap moments when you are or were yourself most fully present, start with love, end with love. Don't try to impress. Don't try to be clever. Strip off the layers of pretense, so often born of insecurity. Go to the finest places within your heart.
How about a cup of tears when your father died, or when your daughter got married? Think about an embrace that while it lasted lasted forever. Or when you helped a stranger who never knew your name. Or a lifetime friendship, that grew and grew with every passing year.
Remember, time capsules have nothing to do with the future, not really, They have to do with eternity. This too, in depth and essence, is what our religion should be about. Copyright AllSouls 1999.
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