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The Gift of
Time
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The
Rev. Naomi King
River of Grass Unitarian
Universalist Congregation
Plantation, Florida
August 24,
2008
©
2008
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Story for All Ages: Erica Meade (2007)
“The Key Flower”, The Moon in the Well. NY: Open Court Press. Adapted.
Who here
would like a golden key flower so as to enter into a cave of wonder and
delight at any time? This is a story about discovering the key to what
really matters in how we spend our time, that real wealth is a place of
wonderment and gratitude. All of life is a gift. Today is a gift.
Yesterday is a gift. Tomorrow is a gift. But how do we trust the gift
of this day?
Practice.
But how
do you practice – building your capacity – to trust the gift of this
day? The inability to trust the gift of this day – that fleeting
sense of wonder of the present of this present moment – dispels hope
and invites despair, frenzy, and dissatisfaction. But to grow our
capacity to trust the gift of this day depends very much on how we
approach our time. Jack Kornfield and Christina Feldman retell a
Sufi story about our human tendency toward approaching all of life as
something to be consumed, and of being consumed by this approach our
selves. I have updated the story like this:
The animals met in assembly and began to
complain that humans were always taking things away from them.
“They
take my milk,” moaned the cow.
“They
take my eggs,” cackled the chicken.
“They
take my body for dinner,” bubbled the fish.
“They
take my remains to make their work lighter,” breathed the dinosaur.
Finally,
the snail spoke. “Ahhhh, but I have something they would certainly take
away from me if they could, something they want more than anything
else. I have time.” [i]
We may
complain that we need more time, but it isn’t time we want so much as a
different approach to it. Yes, I can groan about needing a twenty-fifth
hour in the day or a fifty-third week in a year, but I have discovered
that I find something to fill my time. More time means more activities.
I’m as much prone to needing to feel busy and useful as most of us
here, and there’s something that is strange and looked upon as
wonderful in our society about the person who has no time for anything
that really matters. This makes me wonder about how society endorses
our priorities and approach to time. You know what I mean when I speak
about the things that really matter, that stuff you want people to
remember about you, that stuff that makes the world a better place than
when you arrived in it, that stuff that brings more hope, more love,
and more joy to the present and the future. But when time is a precious
commodity to be consumed, how can we grow our trust in the gift of the
day since there seems to be no gift in it at all, but rather a series
of tasks and commands and shoulds? For time to be a gift, we have to
reclaim our authority – our authorship – of our lives, and that takes
practice.
Ahhhh.
There’s that pesky “p” word I’m always using again: practice.
60 seconds in a minute.
60
minutes in an hour.
24 hours
a day: 8 for work or school, 8 for spiritual practices, going to/from,
exercise/play, home, family, friends, 8 for sleep
7 days in
a week:
5
working/school days in a week
2 days
for spiritual practices, rest, family & friends (1 day for home,
friends, sports, games, community; 1 day for rest & spirit &
family)
A week
with a Sabbath day
What is
it about a Sabbath day is the practice – the golden flower key – of
growing our trusting in the gift of this and every day? What is a
Sabbath anyway? A Sabbath is a movement out of the regular movement of
time and a movement in the regular approach to time. It is both
recognizing that our work truly is never done and trusting that the
world will not halt if we set down our work for one. It is a practice
of wow, of wonderment, in all the beauty and miracle and delight of
this life. It is a practice of thanks, of gratitude, for this precious
day, this amazing gift. I think about a Sabbath as a day when instead
of working or going to games, we focus our hearts and spirits on two of
the eight basic forms of prayer – a day for practicing thanks!
and wow! (Remember the key to the 8 basic forms of prayer: yes,
no, please, thanks, sorry, why, when, and wow!)
You know,
practice makes perfect. And we at River of Grass love perfect. We
tend to learn that lesson of practice making perfect at a very young
age. When you were younger, did any of you have to do as I did, in
practicing the writing of thank you notes? In practicing saying
“please” and “thank you”? I was not always glad of the practice then,
but as I have grown older, and I am increasingly grateful that my
family insisted on that practice of setting aside time and finding a
way to genuinely express my gratitude. That required practice taught me
some very valuable lessons about spiritual practice. I learned I could
not just write the note as though I were grateful: I had to feel
grateful before I could begin the ritual. So I would sit sometimes and
think about something I could really appreciate about what I had just
received. For example, I once received a sweater, but I was not
appreciating any part of it. I sat with that sweater for a long time,
before I realized that there was this really pretty green fleck in the
tweed that reminded me of a favorite moss covered rock. So I wrote
about that. And as I was remembering that wonderful moss covered rock
and the time I enjoyed there, I thought about the fact that I had seen
this sweater being made and how long it took and how happy the person
knitting it had looked, and maybe that, too, was like my time on this
rock, and so I wrote about that as well. I followed one feeling and
association to the next – until I had truly entered a place of
thankfulness, even of wonder, that here was this person who could find
pleasure in making me – me! – something and that they would share their
rock experience and just give it to me – me! Imagine that! You cannot
disentangle the feelings of gratitude and wonder – they go together –
and this is why they are necessary to practice together as forms of
prayer and in all of our spiritual practices.
A Sabbath – a day of gratitude and wonder
– has something of the feel of this poem by Li-Young Lee, called “From
Blossoms”, which I encountered in Roger Housden’s volume of poetry
called Dancing with Joy (2007) New York: Harmony/Random House Books.
[ii]
[poem
shared]
When we
set aside a day from our brief weeks for keeping a Sabbath – a day of
thanks and wow – we are moving ourselves out into the eddying currents
of trust, trusting the gift, trusting that this moment and this day
matter, trusting ourselves to a practice and to being clumsy with it at
first and finding our way by trial and error and persistence. But most
of us begin in the place of asking “Why should I have this practice?”
Trusting the gift of a day sounds lovely and poetic and yes, I’d like
more joy please, but surely that’s possible without…a whole day.
Perhaps it is possible without a whole day, but I have not found it to
be so, and I can only offer and teach what I have learned. I have
learned that I cannot stint on my time in practicing gratitude and
wonderment, because when I do, I lose track of gratitude and wow and
become brittle and ungrateful and incapable of wonder. I
become….bored…cynical...everything appears to become filled with irony
and false. All of that suffering because I lost track of thanks
and wow, because I lost track in the press of things of what really
matters. So I ask you who say to me, “surely not a whole day, who are
you kidding? how often do you feel full of gratitude and wonder
all day long? How many days of the week do you begin the day in this
place and keeping yourself there? In observing a weekly Sabbath,
we take a day we cannot afford to take – and also day we cannot not
afford to take -- and we hallow it, we honor it and we sanctify it and
ourselves, practicing the trust in the gift, the juicy goodness, the
impossible blossom, the skin, the shade, the sugar, the days, the
jubilance, when we practice keeping a Sabbath.
What are
some ways to practice keeping a Sabbath?
I have a
Sabbath basket and a Sabbath box. The Sabbath box is the place where I
put certain things away, to return to them after the Sabbath: my
computer, my work, and a piece of paper with my worries and cares. The
basket [displayed] is where I keep my things I use to specially enter
and honor my Sabbath. [Some items in my basket, shown and spoken
about: silly head bobble to bring me immediately into joy;
special shawl to wear while I am praying; my Sabbath spiritual text,
which is different from my working copies; my chalice & candle, my
Sabbath cloth for the table, my Sabbath chocolate.]
What do
you do to put down your regular work? What do you take up to call you
back to thanks and wow? What harm will it really do you to commit to a
month of Sabbath-keeping and try these practices out, putting together
a Sabbath basket of those special items that help you practice
gratitude and wonderment, and putting your work into a Sabbath box.
Other
practices you can try that I have personally found helpful:
1. Before I moved to Florida, I didn’t
know this Sabbath keeping practice. But now I have had this experience,
I can share it with you: On the Sabbath, make yourself really still and
wait for the house gecko. Have a conversation with it. Isn’t it
amazing? How it runs? How it sticks to walls? How it is constructed?
Say “thanks” to the house gecko for eating bugs in your house. Say
“wow” in wonder of it.
2. Find
something natural and beautiful like a flowering orchid, or a green
parrot, or a smooth stone. Spend time with it. When you’re bored with
it and find yourself wanting to go on, find something new and
interesting you hadn’t considered. Ask yourself the why and how of that
something natural and beautiful until you can honestly feel the “wow”
well up and after that the sense of “thanks”.
3. Adopt
a family ritual around the beginning and end of the Sabbath. Choose a
song, prepare a special cloth, light a candle in your chalice, and have
a special food chosen by the family. Make a ritual about naming a “wow”
moment from your week and something for which you are thankful. How
many times can you go around the table or the seating area? And if your
family is far away, who are your friends with whom you can remember the
Sabbath – look around here.
These are
practices that help you rediscover the gift of time. They are practices
of attention, of wonder, of gratitude, of joy. They are spiritual
practices. They are deeply human practices. They are
uncomfortable practices. They are extravagant practices and
countercultural ones. But they are at the very heart of hope and love
and joy. You can have the same resurgence of beauty and joy as the poet
Mary Oliver Mary Oliver writes of one of her Sabbaths encountering the
sacred with the space of time [“The Swan” shared]. [iii]
How shall
you reclaim heaven?
60 seconds in a minute.
60
minutes in an hour.
24 hours
a day: 8 for work or school, 8 for spiritual practices, going to/from,
exercise/play, home, family, friends, 8 for sleep
7 days in
a week:
5
working/school days in a week
2 days
for spiritual practices, rest, family & friends (1 day for home,
friends, sports, games, community; 1 day for rest & spirit &
family)
Every second precious. Every minute and
hour and day a present to be unwrapped. Wow! Thanks! How will you
practice?
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[i] Adapted from Jack
Kornfield & Christina Feldman (1996) Soul Food: Stories of the
Spirit and the Heart: Harper San Francisco: 313
[ii] Li-Young
Lee, “From Blossoms”, Roger Housden, ed. (2007). Dancing with Joy: 99
Poems. NY: Harmony/Random House: 37-8.
[iii] Mary
Oliver, “The Swan” Housden (1997): 54-55.
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