Making Peace with Time

This is a sermon I gave this weekend for my beloved and busy congregation in northern Virginia. By the way, if you like the idea of a meditation bell on your computer, here’s another posting with some links.

Peace to you,

Rev. Laura

***

The readings:

From “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” by Tim Kreider

Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. They schedule in time with friends the way students with 4.0 G.P.A.’s make sure to sign up for community service because it looks good on their college applications. I recently wrote a friend to ask if he wanted to do something this week, and he answered that he didn’t have a lot of time but if something was going on to let him know and maybe he could ditch work for a few hours. I wanted to clarify that my question had not been a preliminary heads-up to some future invitation; this was the invitation. But his busyness was like some vast churning noise through which he was shouting out at me, and I gave up trying to shout back over it…

The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college — she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality — driven, cranky, anxious and sad — turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school — it’s something we collectively force one another to do.[1]

Luke 10:38–42

…Jesus entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Zen traditional

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

The sermon:

Martha, Martha, busy with many tasks.
Worried and distracted by many things.
Imagine Martha today,
waking up to the beep beep beep of her alarm clock.
Shaking off the fogginess of sleep,
she’s already thinking of what she has to do today.
Her iPhone is charging on the night table.
She gives her work email a quick check as she brushes her teeth,
just to see what’s going to be facing her today when she gets in.
Twenty more emails since she checked last night before bed.
An average morning.

Martha glances at her calendar and to-do list—
oh, that’s right, that report is due today—
gotta try to get that done before lunch.
But, wait, she’s toggling back to email and there’s a message
from someone asking for a meeting at 11 a.m. today
if at all possible—um, OK, that’ll have to work.
Maybe she can write the report in that half-an-hour window
between appointments in the afternoon.
If she’s not still drowning in emails, that is.

Martha sighs and thinks maybe at least she can stop by the gym
on the way home from work, catch a little personal time that way.
But wait a minute,
no, tonight’s the night she and Mary
are having their new rabbi over to dinner.
She’s got to stop by the store and pick up a few things for dinner.
And the house definitely needs vacuuming,
and she’s got to clean up all those newspapers all over the table.
Just thinking about it all is triggering a headache again.
It’s only 6 a.m. and Martha is already exhausted.
And maybe you are too?
So many of us feel forced by our work, our family commitments,
to rush, rush, rush all the time.
We feel we have no time, we have to keep moving.
We have to squeeze in the maximum amount of productivity
or life will fall apart, right.
Email, Facebook, Twitter, texting:
all demand our immediate response.
Our work cultures expect everything to happen now,
or, better yet, yesterday, right?
When this is how it is, slowing down is dangerous.
Stopping to smell the roses,
or to feel your own heart beating, is seditious.
Time is for rushing, always.
Time is our enemy.

And, ironically, many of us who have lots of free time,
people who are retired or unemployed,
may feel that the joy of relaxed time to spare
is poisoned by shame that we’re not busier,
not being more productive.
And meanwhile our working friends and relatives race around,
a little bit jealous maybe,
and almost definitely too busy to get together
more than now and then.

It’s not this way in most parts of the world.
Today, among the major industrialized countries,
only South Koreans work more than we do.
And it hasn’t always been like this for us.
We didn’t use to have to work so much, not most of us anyway.
Can you believe: on average, middle-class Americans with paid jobs
worked about 650 hours more per year in 2000 than in 1970.[1]
Assume you’re that average middle class worker.
You started with a 5-day, 40-hour workweek.
650 additional hours more per year
means you are working 2½ more hours per day, every single day.
Twelve and a half more hours every week of work,
three additional months of work per year,
displacing family time, downtime, fun time, sleep.

This isn’t just a personal issue;
it is a systemic problem that pervades our whole country
and especially our centers of power like this one,
our own Washington, DC.
So I do want to push back a little on the reading we heard today
by Tim Kreider. He suggests we ourselves
are complicit in our extreme busyness:
“it’s something we collectively force one another to do.”[2]
He’s not wrong.
But that collective “we” is very hard to tame.
I look to Rabbi Arthur Waskow,
who says it’s wrong to treat overwork and burnout
as a personal choice,
or as the result of individual incompetence and confusion.[3]
It’s a systemic problem.
The collective weight of our culture
is trying to force us to work harder and harder, faster and faster.
Those of us who have jobs are told to feel grateful.
We look over our shoulder at the shadow of unemployment and hunker down and keep working.
Another hour or two or three at the office, at home after dinner.
It’s just how it is.
Right?

No. It isn’t “just how it is.”
It hasn’t always been this way.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Overwork is a political issue, a systemic issue in our society today.
It will not be resolved any time soon.
We need a long-term solution—I do believe this,
and I don’t want us to lose track of that political frame.
But here we are today,
this is our life in this moment,
and I hope we can all learn to move more gracefully, freely, skillfully
in the system we have
so that we’re not miserable waiting for the world to change.
In fact, until we learn how to function joyfully
in the work world we have,
until we can touch an inner spaciousness and freedom in ourselves,
we will never have the vision or the stamina
to transform our society’s culture of overwork
and bring it into line with the yearnings of our souls.

So how do we do it?
How do we find that place of spaciousness inside?
So many of us are deeply tired of being Martha all the time,
worried and distracted by many things.
Underneath it all,
barely beneath the shiny surface of our smartphone screens,
we long for rest, don’t we?
We crave spaciousness.
To have enough time,
a pace to our days that is graceful and grace-filled—
time enough for what is needed—
isn’t this what our minds and hearts and bodies are craving?

We long to be Mary,
the Mary who sat down with her teacher
and drank in words that felt like living water.
The details of her practice don’t matter.
You know what it is for you.
You know what gives you life and restores your spirit.
Maybe your inner Mary gets up an hour early each day to meditate,
or takes yoga three times a week.
I hope she feels restored by coming to worship here too!
Maybe she walks in the woods
and savors the shimmering green-gold air,
Mary who knows what it is to be still and free and at peace.

We long to be Mary
but here we are, Martha, scrambling and frantic and busy,
keyed up and tense and deeply angry
at the world for forcing this pace upon us,
angry at ourselves for letting ourselves be forced.

So what do we do?
Do you remember: Martha says to Rabbi Jesus,
“Don’t you care that I’m working myself to death
while Mary’s just sitting there? Tell Mary to help me!”
The cry of desperation and anger:
we’ve all been there.
And Jesus’s response—this is the tricky part of the story:
“Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.
Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

Now I just have to ask you:
Is it just me or does Jesus totally not get it?!
Imagine Martha running around making salad, setting the table—
she wants time just to sit and and relax and talk with Jesus too,
but Mary is no help at all,
and if Martha stops for a moment,
there’s going to be no dinner for anyone.
This is one desperate, frazzled, angry soul.
And the best Jesus can do is tell her
Mary was smart to snag her cushy spot on the couch?!
Are you kidding?

I’ve got to say, on the surface of things, if you read this story literally,
I do not get it.
On the surface it sounds like Jesus is saying,
the best way to live is to spend all your time in spiritual practice,
listening to spiritual teachers like him, or meditating, or praying,
or whatever your practice is.
And if that’s all he’s saying,
then I’d have to say, his answer is hopelessly inadequate.
It’s all very well to feel inner peace while we’re at church
or in meditation or whatever.
That’s great. I hope you will, I really do!
But we’re supposed to chuck the rest of our lives,
our responsibilities, our work, our relationships,
and meditate 24/7?
For most of us, that makes no sense.
We have to find a way to live the rest of the time too.

However:
I like to give Jesus the benefit of the doubt.
I honestly don’t think he’s that clueless.
So let me tell you about the way this story really does
make sense to me.
My dear colleague Larry Peers once told me,
one way to understand scripture is to ask yourself,
what would it mean if it were a dream?
And in fact just the other night I had a dream that gave me a clue
to the story of Mary and Martha.
In this dream, I dreamed I was myself, talking to this other woman,
and at the same time I was the other woman too.
It’s hard to explain what I mean—in the dream,
it’s like I was both of them at once,
two consciousnesses at the same time.

I woke up and immediately thought of Mary and Martha
and my friend Larry’s advice
to interpret scripture as if it were a dream.
So what I’m playing with right now is this:
what if we can be Martha and Mary both at once?
Can we resolve those two images into one,
Martha running around with many tasks,
Mary seated at the feet of the master,
both simultaneously present inside of us—
so that even in the midst of all our doing and our busyness,
there is a still center inside us that is perfectly serene,
relaxed, grace-filled, at peace?

The Buddhists tell us this is possible,
this is the path.
Before enlightenment, they say, chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Before we find our way to peace and insight,
we move through our tasks worried and distracted.
Chop wood, carry water.
Check email, make dinner.
Too much to do, competing demands,
we just want to make it all go away sometimes!

But when we touch peace inside ourselves,
when we learn how to feel space inside ourselves,
when we remember to breathe,
our list may be just as long
but we can move through it differently.
Chop wood, carry water.
Check email. Make dinner.
All the time carrying that inner spaciousness everywhere we go,
through every moment of our lives.

In the last few months I’ve added a couple of practices
to my own daily routine that I’ve found really helpful.
Simple stuff.
Beginner stuff, really!
I’ve never been much of a meditator, but I’ve been trying out
five minutes of mindfulness meditation a day,
sometimes at home, often at church in the middle of a busy day.
It helps. It calms me down.

I’ve just installed a meditation bell on my computer too.
It rings every hour or so,
and every time I hear it I’m trying to set down what I’m doing
and take three mindful breaths. Just three.
It’s amazing how much that tiny little break
gets me out of my running around
and helps me touch stillness inside. It feels really good.
You may have your own practices that help you too.

Me, I’m still a beginner on this stuff.
But let me tell you something that’s emerging for me as I practice.
Tim Kreider says we use our busyness to mask our fears
that our lives are meaningless and empty.
I would go farther. Honestly, I’ve started to realize
that I experience my own busyness
as an attempt to ward off death.
I’m discovering a strange little unconscious script that goes like this:
If I never stop doing, never stop being productive, maybe I will never have to die.
Or this one: If I work hard enough it’ll be like extra insurance
so that when I do die it’ll be extra-okay. I will be safe.
This is the script I feel operating in myself sometimes.
Maybe you know it too.
Yet, ironically, when I can get out of the mode of anxious working
and get back in touch with a more peaceful place within myself,
the fear dissolves too.
There’s a softness and a peace there that does me good.

So now I am imagining Martha and Mary,
both of them sitting on the couch with Rabbi Jesus.
Dinner’s made and served, they’re sipping decaf now,
and, what a nice surprise, here’s the Buddha knocking on the door!
They welcome him in, smiling,
hand him a cup of tea (he prefers green tea, you know),
and their after-dinner conversation goes something like this:
There is only one thing needful. Wherever you are, be there.
Remember to breathe.
Chop wood, carry water.
Check email, make dinner.
Rest.
Remember to breathe.
You carry your peace inside you, always.
Time is no longer your enemy.
It’s a gift.
This moment is the gift.

Thank you for this time together.
May it be fruitful for us all, and for our world.
Amen.