The Killing of Time

Read this.

Read this, read this, read this.

It is long, but READ IT.

The following is a passage from Frederick Buechner's book The Hungering Dark. The chapter is titled "The Killing of Time" and it has spoken to me deeply on several occasions. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do. (Apologies for typos.....I couldn't find this anywhere online so I typed it all myself)

"I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." ~John 11:25-26

We all suffer to some degree from deafness, are certainly at best hard of hearing. We find it very hard to hear what other people are saying to us, either hard in the sense of difficult or hard in the sense of painful and sometimes hard in both senses at once. Somebody comes up and makes a remark about he weather, let us say, and all that we are able to hear or all that we allow ourselves to hear is someone making a remark about the weather. "Looks as though we might get some rain" is all that gets through to us when what he is really saying, of course--and sometimes we know this and somtimes we do not--is maybe, "I'm lonely. Be my friend. for Christ's sake. Speak," or maybe, "I know you are lonely." And in our deafness, our only response is to say, "Well we could certainly use it," and then we indicate that we have plenty of our own work to get on with. The truth of it is that if you really listen to another person, whether on the surface he is talking about the weather or predicting the outcome of the World Series or even preaching a sermon, if you really listen, you begin to realize that what he is really talking about is himself. He is saying, "Love me" or maybe "Hate me" or "Pity me," but always he is saying one way or another, "Listen to me. Know me." Only most of the time people like you and me are deaf to this. We hear only the words. We hear only what is most comfortable to hear. But once in a while, by the grace of God more often than not, we hear scraps at least of what people are actually saying.

My wife and I were buying groceries one day and I was on one side of the store and she was on the other, and over a shelf of breakfast cereal and cake mix I said, "Don't forget the cream," and she said, "All right, but don't you forget you're trying to lose weight," and I said, "Oh well, you only live once." And then it happened, this thing that broke for a moment through my deafness. The store was nearly empty so that the woman at the checkout counter had no trouble hearing us. It was a hot, muggy afternoon, and she had been working hard all day and looked flushed and hectic there behind her cash register and the racks of Life Savers and chewing gum and TV guides, and when I said, "Oh well, you only live once," she broke into the conversation, and what she said was, "Don't you think once is enough?" That was it.

It was a mild jest and I laughed mildly and so did the boy carrying up some empty cartons from the cellar, but it was also very much not a jest because I had a felling that what by some rare chance I had happened to hear was a human being saying something like this: "People come and people go, most of them strangers. I'm sick of them, and I'm sick of myself too. One day's very much like another." What i thought I heard was a human being saying, "I'll live my life out to the last, and I expect to have good days as well as bad. But when the end comes, I won't complain. One life will do me very nicely." Then somebody plunked a bottle of something down on the counter and the cash register rang open and the check-out clerk with with her hair damp on her forehead said, "Don't you think once is enough?" Jesus said, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me though he die, yet shall he live." It was life and death that she was talking about too, her own life and her own death, and by some fluke I happened to hear her despite that hardness of hearing that we all share. Even the Lord Jesus Christ somehow made himself heard that steamy August day among the detergents and floor waxes. "Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die." "Don't you think once is enough?" the woman said.

There are so many things to say, of course, One thing is that whether one life is enough or not enough, one life is all we get, at least only one life here, only one life in this gorgeous and hair-raising world, only one life with the range of possibilities for doing and being that are open to us now. Wiliam Hazlitt wrote that no young man believes that he will ever die, and the truth of the matter, I think, is that is true of all men. Intellectually we all know that we will die, but we do not really know it in the sense that the knowledge becomes part of us. We do not really know it in the sense of living as though our lives would go on forever. We spend our lives like drunken sailors.

The drive to one place from another place, for instance--an hour, two hours, whatever it is. You think of it as kind of a necessary evil that you have to endure in order to get wherever you are going, and you turn on the radio if you are, or if you are not driving maybe you take a nap or read the billboards, to "kill time", as the saying goes. And what a grim saying that is if you stop to think about it, because the time that you are killing, of course, is your own time, and there is precious little of it at that. One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can. Yet I do not believe that the woman at the checkout counter was any rarity. The world is full of people who in one way or another are by and large merely "getting through" their lives, who are killing their time, who are living so much on the surface of things and are so bad at hearing eachother and seeing each other that it is little wonder life seems enough to them more than enough: seeing so little in this world, they think that there is little to see and that they have seen most of it already so that the rest probably is not worth seeing anyway and there is nothing new under the sun. There are lots of people who get into the habit fo thinking of their time as not so much an end in itself, a time to be lived and loved and fulfilled for its own sake, but more as just a kind of way-station on the road to somewhere else, to a better job or the next vacation or whatever, and all the interim time that remains to be killed starts looming up like a great mountain that has to be climbed, so that if there were a little button somewhere that we could push to make it disappear all at once, I am not sure how many of us would have the strength not to push it.

But there is no such button and we all tend to look for other ways to make the years go fast, that terrible kind of phrase again. You often hear the advice that if you keep busy, it will be over before you know it, and the tragedy of it is that it is true. Life is busy. It comes at you like a great wave, and if you handle things right, you manage to keep your head above water and go tearing along with it, but if you are not careful, you get pulled under and rolled to the point where you no longer know who you are or where you are going. Life is a very busy affair, and in many ways that is a fine and proper thing, but there are other things about life that are also fine and proper.

Late one winter afternoon as I was walking to a class that I had to teach, I noticed the beginnings of what promised to be one of the great local sunsets. There was just the right kind of clouds and the sky was starting to burn and the bare trees were black as soot against it. When I got to the classroom, the lights were all on, of course, and the students were chattering, and I was just about to start things off when I thought of the sunset going on out there in the winter dusk, and on impulse, without warning, I snapped off the classroom lights. I am not sure that I ever had a happier impulse. The room faced west so as soon as it went dark, everything disappeared except what we could see through the windows, and there it was--the entire sky on fire by then, like the end of the world or the beginning of the world. You might think that somebody would have said something. Teachers do not usually plunge their students into that kind of darkness, and you migh have expected a wisecrack or two or at least the creaking of chairs as people turned around to see if the old bird had finally lost his mind. But the astonishing thing was that the silence was as complete as you can get it in a room full of people, and we all sat there unmoving for as long as it took the extraordinary spectacle to fade slowly away.

For over twenty minutes nobody spoke a word. Nobody did anything. We just sat there in the near-dark and watched one day of our lives come to an end, and it is no immodesty to say that it was a great class because my only contribution was to snap off the lights and then hold my tongue. And I am not being sentimental about sunsets when I say that it was a great class because in a way the sunset was the least of it. What was great was the unbusy-ness of it. It was taking unlabeled, unallotted time just to look with maybe more than our eyes at what was wonderfully there to be looked at without any obligation to think any constructive thoughts about it or turn it to any useful purpose later, without any weapon at hand in the dark to kill the time it took. It was the sense too that we were not just ourselves individually looking out at the winter sky but that we were in some way also each other looking out at it. We were bound together there simply by the fact of our being human, by our splendid insignificance in face of what was going on out there through the window, and by our curious significance in face of what was going on in there in that classroom. The way this world works, people are very apt to use the words they speak not so much as a way of revealing but, rather, as a way of concealing who they really are and what they really think, and that is why more than a few moments of silence with people we do not know well are apt to make us so tense and uneasy. Stripped of our verbal camouflage, we feel unarmed against the world and vulnerable, so we start babbling about anything just to keep the silence at bay. But if we can bear to let it be, silence, of course, can be communion at a very deep level indeed, and that half hour of silence was precisely that, and perhaps that was the greatest part of all.

I said, "You only live once," and the woman said, "Don't you think once is enough?" and in a way she was right. In our semideafness and semiblindness, in our killing of time, our boredom, our thirst for the dream of tomorrow and our neglect of the miracle of today, to the degree that this or someting like this is our life, once is certainly enough. But in another way, a thousand lives do not seem enough, not when we are really alive, and I wonder if there is any particular confusion about when we are really alive. I suspect that the truth of it is simply that we are alive when, instead of killing time, we take time. When in the midst of tearing around in our busy-ness trying to do something, we stop once in a while and just let ourselves be something, be who we are. When by unclenching our fists, we give life a chance to do something with us. When we take the little piece of time that we have in this world and pay attention to what it is telling us, not just to what it is telling us about the beauty of the sun as it sets, God knows, but to what it is telling us about all the wildness and strageness and pain of things, the tears of things, the lachrimae rerum, as well as the joy of things.

If the time that lies ahead looks like a great mountain that must be climbed, rest assured that is just what it is, and that is good. It is good to climb mountains, and the view from the top is good, and so is the climbing itself lots of the time. But there is more to our time than the mountains. There is our spirit, our intuition as well as our reason, the wisdom of the flesh as well as the wisdom of the mind. There are our dreams to listen to as well as our transistors and there are games to play as well as work to be done. There is our occasional gift for being silent, by ourselves and together. And unless all of these things are happening, we are less than alive.

We are really alive when we listen to each other, to the silences of each other as well as to the words and what lies behind the words. "Looks as though we might get some rain," somebody says. Speak to me for Christ's sake. Know me. "Don't you think once is enough?" I'm bored and tired as hell, if there's such a thing as hell. A cup of cold water. We are really alive when we are together as human beings, when by sunset or daybreak or by the fluorescence of a grocery store or the shabby twilight of a church the walls between us crumble a little. (Read that line again)

What I try to avoid because the world has become so threadbare in our time is that we are really alive, of course, when we manage somehow to love--when we love the mystery and beauty and terror that loom vast just beneath the air we move through, when we begin to hear a voice not just in the setting sun but in the earthquake, in the silence, in the agonies of means well as in their gladness. We are really alive when we love each other, when we look at each other and think, "Grace and peace be with you, brother and friend." When there is such life as this, once is not nearly enough.

Yet it is all we get--with these chances to be truly alive, this kind of life to love with. Then there is death, the final deafness, the final blindness, the final separation from each other and from God which with part of ourselves we have always wanted. Unlike the great oriental religions, Christianity takes death very seriously, which is of course why it also takes life very seriously, why there is such urgency about living it right and living it now. In the New Testament there is no doctrine of endless rebirths on the great wheel of life, no doctrine of a soul which by its nature cannot die. On the contrary, by our nature we do die, as Christianity sees it, with our bodies and souls as inextricably one in death as they are in life.

But if death is the end in Christianity, it is not the final end; it is the end of an act only, not the end of the drama. Once before out of the abyss of the unborn, the uncreated, the not-yet, you and I who from all eternity had been nothing became something. Out of nonbeing we emerged into being. And what Jesus promises is resurrection, which means that once again this miracle will happen, and out of death will come another realm of life. Not because by our nature there is part of us that does not die, but because by God's nature he will not let even death separate us from him finally. Because he loves us. In love he made us and in love he will mend us. In love he will have us his true sons before he is through, and in order to do that, one life is not enough, God knows.

So back to the grocery store again and the tired lady behind the cash register. Back to each other again and to the mountains we have to climb this year and every year. Back to the time again that will kill us finally better than ever we can manage to kill it. Thomas, doubting Thomas, was the one of the Twelve who asked the question that must have been on all of their minds. "Lord, we do not know where you are going," he said. "How can we know the way?" And Jesus said, "I am the way and the truth and the life."

Well, and we none of us know much about where we are going really, not in the long run anyway, beyond the next mountain. We keep busy. We climb. We learn. We grow. Hopefully. But we are going, I believe, much, much further than at this point we can possibly see, and in everything we do or fail to do, much more is at stake, I believe, than we dream. In this life and in whatever life waits us, he is the way; that is our faith. And the way he is, is the way of taking time enough to love our little piece of time without forgetting that we live also beyond time. It is the way of hearing the lives that touch against our lives. It is the way of keeping silence from time to time before the holy mystery of life in this strange world and before the power and grace that surround us in this strange world. It is the way of love.

I'm Sorry

Folks,

I apologize that there hasn't been an update in a while.

Basically, I haven't felt like blogging.

And since it's MY blog, I don't have to.

But I'll be back soon, I promise.

The Artentist