It's Time

So I've been musing on any different aspects of our health, wellness and wholeness (HW2) both communal and personal. This musing has not just been in this Blog, but in my "day job" as well as in my spiritual life. One aspect of our dis-ease as humans keeps coming to the forefront - that of our view of time. I was reading an interesting chapter in James Bryan Smith's book "Good and Beautiful God". Did you know that the clock was invented by monks who were dutifully trying to keep track of both their work time and their worship time? It wasn't until a few centuries later that the clock began to take over our lives and we started to live by it rather than by the amount of daylight (the electric light bulb furthered this process).

I find it fascinating that an invention which fostered better worship by those dedicated to it was, over time, used against just such a practice. How we humans can mess things up! Efficiency versus meaning all over again - we have to produce so much in a given amount of time or else we fail and suffer consequences. But what does all that devotion to an idol (a clock) get us? We get stressed out, we become more anxious than we ever were, we focus on tasks rather than relstionships, we beocme human do-ings rather than human be-ings. A spiritual axiom is that idol worship always demands blood sacrifice - and we have been bled almost dry by this idol!

It is a delicate balance to hold this tension between being and doing, between efficiency and meaning. However, we have gotten too far out on the efficiency side of life and have forgotten the meaning side. What does it mean that we are engaged in a certain activity? What does it mean for us to be spiritual people in a secular world? What does it mean that as a society we allow 45 million human beings (just in the U.S.) to live below the poverty line? What does it mean when we are so busy doing stuff that we haven't time to develop meaningful relationships with those around us?

All of this lack of meaning plays havoc with our HW2. When we don't take the time for meaningful relstionships, the health and wellness that we seek are impossible to find. We seek ever faster ways to prepare ever less healthy foods to eat "on the run" while we cram ever more activity into our lives. Mr. James Bryan Smith states, "It's no wonder that we have the attention span of a ferret on a triple cappucino." (Nice imagery, huh?)

So, slow down and take a deep breath, find some quiet in your busy day, don't answer the phone or your Blackberry e-mails for a few minutes. Focus on a beautiful tree, or scene; focus on a favorite memory; read some scripture; listen to some soothing music, etc. Try every day this week to just "be" in the midst of all of your "do".

I wish you much peace,
Dan