From the Pastor: I Love the Time Crunch

I sent a birthday card to my granddaughter. She is four. Through this year I’ve watched her language skills go up to the stars. Her physical co-ordination is better than mine since last year. And her growing grasp of the concept of time is a wonder to behold. Yet I know she has relatively little concept of distant future or distant past. That is as it should be. I’d be lying to say I really do myself.

Our life timelines shift constantly with major events and experiences. At the birth of children, we their relatives and friends rejoice in how God weaves promises of the future into flesh and blood new life. With the death of those close to us our perception of the passage of time becomes a mysterious and sacred experience. I have felt it simultaneously as lifting a veil on eternity while bringing down a somber, heavy dark wall—a powerful barrier to any possible further living. And life in the church—this divine and human crunch?

Life in the church has seemed a magnificent spiritual smashing of the incomprehensible distant past into the unimaginable distant future, something like the atom smasher we saw in the movie, Oppenheimer—all the while I believe God calls and invites us lovingly to live in the present. Irony! Living in the present “one day at a time” has long been key to 12-step recovery that has brought new life to so many sufferers from hosts of terrible compulsive addictions. In 12-step recovery participants relinquish imagined self-control to each individual’s “higher power,” defined as that participant chooses. (It works for those in the program. Don’t argue.)

In the church we are nurtured by scriptures, reflections, teachings, affectionate care and leading by people long dead, people decades older than we are, and memories of meaningful experiences and achievements or failures that are the framework of our current lives. At the very same time we do not let the past, if at all possible—despite wise Father Faulkner’s famous dictum that “the past is not dead; it isn’t even past”—defeat our hope and expectation of what good lies ahead as we embrace God’s creative, sacred promise in trust and love. Making any “sense” of the Bible, much less human life, surely requires us to accept what is simply described as “the not yet and the already.” Are you comfortable living in the grip of this “not yet and already?” It can turn us inside out and confound us horribly unless we take spiritual solace in the “one day at a time” of faith life. As a thousand advisors have reminded us, living in the present is the best life. Yet I rejoice that my present is squeezed, hemmed in, held, embraced strongly by a past and a future where believers in God’s saving love has given and will give new life and new hope.

Yours in that faith—

Rev. Howard Reed