MAD HATTERS AND AIRLINE CHATTERS

 

Kenneth Beldon

August 20, 2006

My fellow traveler's inquiry gave me pause, using words I knew, but phrasing that took a second to recognize.

In proper Queen's diction, the woman in the security line in back of us asked, "So, you are returning from holiday, are you both?"

I blinked, and after translating her word from English into American in my mind, I stammered, "Yes, yes, we're on vacation."

This past Monday my wife and I were returning from Vancouver on our honeymoon when I was asked this question. And thinking about it, what a better thing it is to be "on holiday" than it is to be "on vacation". Vacation derives from vacate—connoting an absence or a loss. But holiday, well that's just the compound of "holy day", and our recent wedding and honeymoon was all about the presence of holy things, of joy, and peace and satisfaction.

I think that from here on out I would tell people that I'm going on holiday instead of vacation if it wouldn't sound so pretentious coming out of my American mouth.

Returning from our honeymoon, the term holiday really did fit better than describing our time away as a vacation. The truest holidays lead us back into the everyday-ness of our lives with a greater sense of meaning and purpose, re-oriented once more to what matters. It is in the day in day out of life over time that we are transformed, and only in ordinary time does a wedding unfold into a marriage.

Holidays ought to be like road signs, blinking symbols steering us back toward a meaningful life. Short of that, holidays are just dead ends, leading nowhere but to waiting for the holy season to come round again, next year, confusing us with the message that the spiritual life is only present when something really out of the ordinary is happening. This is a kind illness of the spirit, the belief that something big has to be happening for something meaningful to occur.

I heard this spiritual dis-ease in the voice of a man with whom I once stood on line waiting for another plane. As far as I could hear, this was the 3rd flight he was attempting to make. I could understand his desire to get home and I almost felt compassion for him.  

Almost, except that he was making the kind of airport small talk that I wish would become extinct: first he complained about the lines through security while also making inane jokes unworthy of even the most trite stand up comic about body cavity searches, and hoping he would get the sexy female TSA agent instead of "some dude" to do his. Sigh.           

Then he lamented that if he actually boarded the plane, they would probably just give half a can of soda. He reminded me of an old button I saw when I was a kid that read, "The more I complain the longer God lets me live." I don't believe that anyway, but certainly not in this guy's case—for you to be accorded the extra to time to carp, I have to belief your complaint has to rise above the level of clichŽ.

He would have been completely insufferable, but there was one thing he said that struck me, and made me pity him a little. He said that while he was waiting he couldn't sit still, he wandered over to other concourses, he rode elevators up and down and escalators back and forth all in his attempt to make time move more quickly. Anything to do, he recounted, anything, because you gotta', as he kept repeating, "you gotta' find a way to kill the time." He was like that old Disney version of "Alice in Wonderland", the character on the way to the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, worriedly hurrying, warbling in his agitation "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date. No time to say hello, goodbye, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!"

It took some restraint on my part to ask him why he didn't just sit down and read a book, or strike up a conversation with a neighbor about something else besides his travel travails, or meditate, or write the first few lines of his version of the Great American Novel. I almost asked him why he couldn't try changing one little letter in his mantra about time and everything might seem different to him. Why, instead of trying to kill the time, maybe he might try to fill the time instead.

But, the world is not my pulpit, and its brazen for me to think he might want a lesson, and also there's one other reason I didn't ask him, and it's basic self-psychology: some part of him was certainly also a part of me. His impatience, his desire to rush to the end, his inability to just wait it out and cope, and in coping maybe even find some enjoyment and meaning, well, that's me as well at times.

Sort of like in the film When Harry Met Sally. Remember that scene where Billy Crystal's character says that he always reads the last page of a novel before he finishes it?

That way, he says, in case he dies before he comes to the end of the book, he will know the conclusion. I must admit that I tried this once after I saw the movie. Only once, because even though I can't remember what book it was, I do recall it was the most unsatisfying read of my life: knowledge of the finale obviously ruined any sense of surprise that the book held. Better to risk not knowing the end than to forgo the excitement of the beginning and the middle.

Of course Billy Crystal's character was a caricature of a neurotic so obsessed with the ending of things that he was willing to exchange the uncertainty of the plot for the unenthusiastic knowledge of its conclusion. In many ways, his was a character unable to deal with the prospect of grief, of investing his time and love into something and then having it come to an end.

Think about that moment when you are reading a really good book, not just an everyday read, but one of those few that ingrain themselves into your soul. There's always that moment when you look down and see that the pages that you are holding in your left hand are so much more in volume than those that your right hand pins back.

The story is coming to a close, you can feel, it is literally a tactile experience, with every turn of the page, you are one step closer to the end. This is welcome on the one hand, because you want to know how the story reaches its final resting place. But, there's also that sense of loss, that this book that has fed you, nurtured you, inspired you, will soon be over.

From time to time, when this happens, I will purposefully slow down, wanting to savor as much as I can, my last few moments with the words and people on the page. I don't want to let them go. When I think about the end of Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, or The Plague by Albert Camus, or Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, it was almost an ache, a physical urge not to let go. But there's a great deal of beauty in that urge as well, because in it we honor the passing of something we love.

Stories take time to reach their end, and so we ought never rush to the conclusion, like Harry in the movie, nor deny the power of a book's ending by failing to follow through to the finish. That's my literary sin. If you look around my home, you'll see probably half a dozen bent open books. Some just starting to collect dust because they've been immobilized in the same position for so long. I don't like endings. But, from time to time, I see one of these books and I hear its call. Enough with denial, time to finish.

Maybe by now it's clear that I am talking about much more than the conclusion of a novel, what I'm really talking about is the end of things in general, which is really a question of our attitude toward time.

Listen to people, or yourself, speak of time: you'll probably hear some apprehension, even dread, as if it is a standard that can never be met, a test that we can never pass, that time runs out, time runs down, time justÉ runs, and we might never be able to catch itÉ On and on and on.

Think of the most common way of expressing that we have a pressing commitment to fulfill before time runs out: deadline. Deadline. Literally, something will expire; something will end.. So much of the way we think about time is focused on its coming to a close, as if time were an arrow shot from an archer's bow that inevitably will slow down and cease to go forward. And in a certain sense, this is true, the locomotion of our lives will someday stop; some of us coming to a slow and then slower and then gentle put down, and some of will be plucked from midair, seemingly when we thought we should still be gathering up speed.

But to view time only in the light of its ending, we center only on the target, and not on the flight. This sort of thinking means we can never focus on the time that we have, only the time that is passing us by. The clock will always be much more a curse than a gift when experienced in this fashion.

A different, better way to experience time is summed up by the expression, "You don't sing a song to get to the end." Similarly, we don't live life best when we're counting it down.

Denial and haste are the twin fruits of the seed of fear. Often, we either avoid or seek to rush past what we worry about. Driven by fear, we are like a car whose tank is run down to empty, pushed to its maximum and then left by the side of the highway and abandoned. Driven by fear we squander who we are and what we have.

It is exactly this miserable way of life that Jesus is imploring us to avoid in the gospel reading this morning. Jesus invited us into a life so abundant that we can't help but give ourselves away in love, for from the fullness of uplifted hearts blessings will flow naturally. But a squandered life is a burden to the one who gives and the one who receives it.

"By worrying, who has ever added to their span of daysÉ?" Notice Jesus didn't specify planning or preparing or thinking about the future as the ailment. When I stand in that airport security line, I'm banking on the hope that there are people smart enough and prepared enough to have envisioned what any terrorist might try to do. But my worry doesn't bring security. Anxiety is ultimately non- or counterproductive.

A healthy attitude towards what may come is incarnated in the community from our other reading. Nothing is every absolutely completed in time, and this liberates us to live fully in the way that C.S. Lewis meant when he wrote, "For us, there is only the trying, the rest is none of our business." The rest that is none of our business is what we attempt to know when we are anxious about what time holds for us.

We want to know what's in store, but there's really just one way to relate to our future well.

To make the transformation of ourselves the stuff of our life, to bring to reality what we had thought could be only fantasy we need to start somewhere. And that place is from here, from this present moment, not in the remembered past or in the hoped for future, as much as both looking back and peering forward help to create who we are and how we live. But that process takes shape only if we look about at what surrounds us, and realize that the survey we take from this place now will not yield to us everything we need to know, not all at once. Only in the fullness of time can we put the pieces together.

And just as we begin to fulfill our hopes for the future by starting with the foundation of where we stand at present, we can overcome our fears about the future not by denying that we are afraid, not by pretending our worries don't exist, but by learning to replace the questions that begin with the words "What If?".

Simply put—the more time we spend worrying "What If?" the less dedicated are we to knowing "What Is". Religion, at its best, turns our hearts not to hazy dreams or horrible nightmares, but to an honest examination of what our lives actually are. True faith bids us to awaken from fear or fantasy and look at who we actually are. Jesus implored his followers, who very often did not get the message, to arouse themselves from their self-induced sleep. The Buddha literally translated means "one who is awake."

Fear, just as much as false hope, robs from us the portions of life over which we can exercise some control (but not absolute, not complete), but some measure of authority. By looking at what is, we begin to take responsibility for what we can shape, and begin to make peace with what lies beyond our control. By knowing what is, we start to pay attention to the life that we are living. By being aware of what is, we sleepers begin to awake.

Our faith tradition says that most important religious question is not "Were You There?" as the great old gospel song asks us, as in were you there among the chosen when the truth came into being in some past moment, and not "Where will you be?" when the world ends with bang or whimper, but that the question that matters most is "Are you here?"---

If you are here, not waiting for the arrival or the departure of your life, not wanting to kill the time you have, but instead fill the time you've been given, then there will always be time enough for what you want to do. For nothing fully done ever started too late.

Now, in this moment, for this time being, do you live fully with your sorrows and your joys and our triumphs and our tragedies, and do you seek to render grace for grace, blessing for blessing, and love for love. And so this is my wish for you, that when you're asked the question "Are you here?" that you are able to answer "YES" from the depths of your spirit.

Amen. May you live in blessing.