The Slow Way Newsletter: On Healing Our Time Sickness
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On Healing Our Time Sickness
Years ago I read a book called Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. In it, Brigid Schulte, a reporter at the Washington Post and a overstretched mom, reflected on what felt like an impossibility of her life: How do you take care of everything and make choices about what to prioritize? The kids, her spouse, the cat food, the doctor appointments, aging parents, a full time job, soccer practice, groceries, and -- is it even worth mentioning? -- rest and play. She wrote the book like a good reporter would, interviewing scientists and people from every kind of socio-economic status, all in pursuit of what I would call wisdom: How do you use time well? How do you trade that impossible feeling of “Overwhelm” for the goodness of priorities, gratitude, and peace?
In their song “Georgia Pond,” the band Johnnyswim has a line that always pricks me whenever I hear it: “Time is the worst kind of friend,” they sing. “Always there till you need it and gone in the end.”
What are we supposed to do with time? Regular Chronos Time, not fancy spiritual time (which I’ve talked about in previous newsletters!). Not the kind of time that pauses and lights up the world, but the kind of time where muffins burn if they bake for more than 25 minutes, the kind of time where your kid does extra push ups if he’s late to football practice. What are we supposed to do about all the bills we’re supposed to pay on Saturday mornings, and the ridiculous amount of dust that gathers on solid surfaces without even trying? And what are we supposed to do about how the weather changes, and days add up, and children’s faces thin and they start wearing jeans after years of sweatpants? (Not because you recommended it, mind you, but because a girl in class said he would look cool in jeans, but I digress.)
If you’re going to write a newsletter about slowness and how moving slowly is a spiritual practice, you have to write about Time. You have to start with Brigid Schulte’s feeling of “Overwhlem,” or what the time scientists she spoke to referred to as “Time Sickness.”
That phrase, Time Sickness, feels deeply true to me. We are a culture obsessed with efficiency, and the quicker we’ve built our machines, the more we require of ourselves. What could it mean to heal our illness, our obsession with efficiency, our long to-do lists and our fears that at the end our lives will add up to two lists: what we accomplished in time, and what we didn’t get to yet?
St. Benedict said there’s enough time in each day for work, for study, and for prayer. I would add in play and rest to that list. But believing there’s enough time? That’s a spiritual practice, that’s a mind-shift. In a culture where we’re all living in “time sickness,” stillness is ultimately a paradigm shift. It is a choice to believe that we cannot actually be healed from our time sickness by fitting more into the day. Our healing comes only from stopping in time, and choosing to see what Richard Rohr calls the Really Real, the truth underneath the surface of things. To step back from the to-do list and see it for what it is, the outflow of goodness in your life. Why do you have a water bill? Because you have flowing water! In your home! Water that your little kitten can drink whenever she needs to!
This is the practice of learning to live in time with gratitude. And the only way to practice that kind of gratitude, the only way to heal from Time Sickness, is to slow down long enough to see the to-do list for what it truly is: a gift. Slowness gives us eyes to see the goodness, even in the midst of life's most mundane tasks. Pico Iyer talks about how when we hustle we know ourselves less. He explains that it’s stillness that allows us to experience, engage with our own lives, to make sense of our feelings.
How do we heal from Time Sickness? We learn to be still, we pause inside of time, we train ourselves in the truth that time is not our master. And we learn to see the Really Real.
This past week I had the luxury of sitting in a theological library with a pile of books beside me, all commentaries on the Gospel of Matthew (nerd alert!), and I was thrilled to discover that the theologian Stanley Hauerwas speaks to time in his commentary on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.
“Jesus’s charge that we are not to retaliate against those who would seek to do us harm---as well as his demand that we are to love our enemies . . . requires the patience that has been made possible by God…” Hauerwas describes God’s patience as being expressed in the actual lives of those Jesus says are blessed in the Beatitudes: “...they are examples of the kind of people who have the time in the unmerciful world to be merciful.”
The kind of people who have time in the unmerciful world to be merciful! Who has time to be merciful in this unmerciful world?! We do. If we choose it to heal from our time sickness, friends.
Hauerwas takes it a little further: “To be a disciple of Jesus, to be ready to be reconciled with those with whom we are angry, to be faithful in marriage, to take the time required to tell the truth --- all are habits that create the time and space to be capable of loving our enemies.”
What he’s saying is that when Jesus sits on that hill in Matthew chapters 5 through 7 and teaches that a life worth living is the kind where we treat one another with goodness, where we forgive, and live without retaliation and violence, where we lift up those who don’t have enough, and value those who the world has labeled value-less. But to do those things, to practice a different way in a world that is pushing us all of down a conveyor belt of fear and self-protection, is to slow down long enough to see the conveyor belt for what it is: a lie.
Slowness is our path to the Really Real. And we take it by learning to be “the kind of people who have time in the unmerciful world to be merciful.” To sit down on the hill with Jesus, acknowledge that we have a whole to-do list that may or may not be real, and choose gratitude, mercy, and ultimately, peace.
a slow practice
I've mentioned several times that I’ve been diving into Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5 through 7, particularly the part of his sermon called the “Beatitudes” or the blessings, at the beginning of chapter 5. Today I’d love for you to take a moment to look at that short passage. If you don’t have a Bible close by, it’s your lucky day because the Internet exists! Yay. You can find the passage here.
I like to think of the Beatitudes as an invitation, and I’d like for you to think of them that way today as well. Take out a piece of paper or your journal and write down a word or phrase for each of the nine blessings Jesus gives in this passage. For example: “poor in spirit” or “meek.”
Now beside each word or phrase I want you to write: “There is enough time for the poor in spirit.” Or “there is enough time for the meek.”
In this practice I don’t think you need to ask yourself yet if you are poor in spirit, or meek, or merciful. It’s enough for you to reflect on the reality that all of these things require space and time. None of these blessings are given to the efficient or those who perform optimally. Jesus in this passage is focused on those the world does not celebrate or award.
Now close your eyes. Take a few breaths slowly. And consider each of those nine blessings, what someone might do or look like who is poor in spirit, meek, merciful, persecuted, etc. Choose one of those nine Beatitudes, whichever one speaks to you most right now in your life and work it into a “breath prayer.”
Breathe in: “There’s enough time in this [unmerciful] world to show mercy.”
Breathe out: “Help me slow down and show mercy.”
Spend a few minutes breathing in and out slowly, repeating these two phrases.
Feel free to replace with mercy with whichever phrase most speaks to you: “There’s enough time in this world of wealth to be ‘poor in spirit.’” Or “There’s enough time in this world of injustice to be hungry for rightness.” Make it your own.