Time
"Time, time, time . . . See what's become of me." Neil Simon
I saw an article on Yahoo! with the headline "Traffic costs billions of hours a year." To me, that's a pretty ridiculous understanding of time and who it really belongs to. It seems like so many of the stories I have read of people who really changed because of something say that that event changed how they looked at "time" or "their time." I am told that other cultures do not consider time the way we Americans do. That we have a fundamentally different understanding of time.
As I think about our franticked scramble to master every minute of time and manipulate it towards acheiving all our goals, as I ponder my own looking at the watch with anxiety as I try to get some place "on time", as I see people unable to let things develop in time, I think we've got a serious issue. I'm going to the Land of the Lost Minute in New York City tomorrow, and I have a feeling that time will be a big presence there in my week. On the one hand, we will be trying to make sure that we comply with the time to get to where we want to be, while the other competing desire will be to get outside of it and get lost, forgetting "the time." It's difficult to live with these conflicting pressures. You're either scrambling toward one direction or the other. That strikes me about the American way of life. People seem to be running either one direction or the other, trying to lose weight or trying to forget about the diet, working hard or convincing ourselves that there are things outside of work that are the most important things, etc., etc., etc. All this suggests to me that we don't have slightest clue how to "manage" our lives. Perhaps as Jesus looks down and observes, he thinks the same thought he did when he noticed that "the people were like sheep, harassed and helpless."
Harassed. That would be the word I would use. Responding to voices that set up this vision of either all reward or all punishment. The American people strike me as always responding to some unseen voice that drives this kind of behavior. We can't really be happy with either place we end up, it seems, so it is an endless running to one or another extreme.
Helpless. That's really what it is. Behind the running and rhetoric of having it under control is a scared little child who can't find his mommy.
And the next word is Compassion. That part of Mark says that when Jesus saw this situation, "He was filled with compassion" (NIV). Literal translation: "He was moved in the intestines with compassion", suggesting a gripping, deeply moving emotion of concern and care.
Harassed. Helpless. Compassion. Kyrie elision.
I saw an article on Yahoo! with the headline "Traffic costs billions of hours a year." To me, that's a pretty ridiculous understanding of time and who it really belongs to. It seems like so many of the stories I have read of people who really changed because of something say that that event changed how they looked at "time" or "their time." I am told that other cultures do not consider time the way we Americans do. That we have a fundamentally different understanding of time.
As I think about our franticked scramble to master every minute of time and manipulate it towards acheiving all our goals, as I ponder my own looking at the watch with anxiety as I try to get some place "on time", as I see people unable to let things develop in time, I think we've got a serious issue. I'm going to the Land of the Lost Minute in New York City tomorrow, and I have a feeling that time will be a big presence there in my week. On the one hand, we will be trying to make sure that we comply with the time to get to where we want to be, while the other competing desire will be to get outside of it and get lost, forgetting "the time." It's difficult to live with these conflicting pressures. You're either scrambling toward one direction or the other. That strikes me about the American way of life. People seem to be running either one direction or the other, trying to lose weight or trying to forget about the diet, working hard or convincing ourselves that there are things outside of work that are the most important things, etc., etc., etc. All this suggests to me that we don't have slightest clue how to "manage" our lives. Perhaps as Jesus looks down and observes, he thinks the same thought he did when he noticed that "the people were like sheep, harassed and helpless."
Harassed. That would be the word I would use. Responding to voices that set up this vision of either all reward or all punishment. The American people strike me as always responding to some unseen voice that drives this kind of behavior. We can't really be happy with either place we end up, it seems, so it is an endless running to one or another extreme.
Helpless. That's really what it is. Behind the running and rhetoric of having it under control is a scared little child who can't find his mommy.
And the next word is Compassion. That part of Mark says that when Jesus saw this situation, "He was filled with compassion" (NIV). Literal translation: "He was moved in the intestines with compassion", suggesting a gripping, deeply moving emotion of concern and care.
Harassed. Helpless. Compassion. Kyrie elision.
posted by David at 1:48 PM
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