Advent. Time

It’s but a stream I go a-fishin’ in, as Thoreau put it, but what is time, really? The meaning of being? That’s what Heidegger thought. Part of a continuum with space, according to relativity. That thing I waste too much of. That thing that gets shorter every day as I grow older and closer to the end of my experience of it. That container for the presence of God.

I’m not sure what time is, but I know that today it’s passed swiftly and disjointedly by as construction activity swirls around – and through – my study at Burke. On the drive in this morning I heard a snippet of a story on the radio about the emerging market for devices that connect to our brains. A critic questioned the wisdom of such technology when existing tech has led to an average attention span of about 40 seconds when browsing the web. The information technology that has become ubiquitous in our lives over the past 20 years has effected the way we process the world, and constant distraction is one recognized result.

If we are constantly distracted what are we missing? Suffering the the opportunities to bring comfort? Injustice and the opportunities to address it? Challenge and controversy and the opportunities to engage them?

Perhaps that’s part of why I chose the decidedly unwise practice of writing each day this Advent. For at least as long as it takes to write a short blog post I am focusing just on putting some words on screen. It may not be much, but at least it's focused for some time.

It would probably be a deeper practice if I wrote these ponderings by hand. It would certainly be deeper if, instead of blog jottings, I picked up pen and paper and wrote verse. But I really don’t have time to do that every day during Advent when the church is under construction, literally, and we’re trying to hire new staff and I’m a long, long way from know my way in this new time.

Time, then, is the thing I don’t have enough of, but what I have is rich and full. So, I’ll take the time to pause, look out on a beautiful sunny winter day, and give thanks.