Thoughts Negligible

When I have nothing to do, my days are measured in rain showers, breezes, breaths, words, affections, pages turned, not minutes, hours, seconds, femtoseconds. And on those days I live quite differently. But why?

I remember growing up in a Pentecostal church and waiting for the rapture. Not one Sunday could pass without reference to the good old day that would come, when the pathetic troubles and quibbles of this temporal life would end. “What a day that will be.” I’m wondering now why I was never offended by the fact that no one wanted to stick around and hang out with me. Chopped liver. I always heard that the rapture would happen in our lifetime (I think every Christian since the patristic age has heard the same). We were pilgrims, and pilgrims want nothing more than to move past the present. Pilgrims don’t enjoy the scenery, they kill all the natives and build shopping malls. Right?

I was always feeling confused and guilty for wishing to stick around for my driver’s license, maybe a beer, a wife, and love. How could I be so selfish and blinded by this world and its evils! I remember waking up one summer day, much like today, and being sure Jesus had come back. Call mom. No answer. Call a friend. Nothing, but how did he go without me? Finally, I reached someone who I was certain would have been gone if Jesus had split that eastern sky. I was safe . . . for now. But if Jesus didn’t come back this rainy summer day, I don’t believe he ever came at all.

But where did this leave me? Loathing what this world had to offer. Our other-worldly longing was not appreciation for what was to come. It was escapism. It saw evil in the world and said the world needed destruction. But why did we never think of what God saw at one time: “And God saw that it was good.” In the end, I think it was sin, for God fashioned the world and mankind, his work of creation beautiful and loving: How could we hate this? And what would be the consequences of our hate? I fear we will see this only too soon.

In Genesis 1, something other than the earth and the heavens and all that dwell therein was created. Time beeped like a stopwatch into existence. Eugene Peterson shows me that six times sections of creation are introduced with “And God said . . .” and each time it is concluded with “And there was evening and there was morning . . .” On the seventh day, “seven” is emphasized three times, and it introduces the passage instead of ending the day. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 7 7. The first six days are split further into two groups of three. The first gives form to pre-creation chaos (the tohu), the second is the filling of the void (the bohu). Rhythm. Further, the third day of the three-day set makes up a double creation: 1 2 3/3 4 5 6/6 7 7 7. Speak the text aloud and you can feel the rhythm, the assimilation, the unity. There is a cadence: one two three three, four five six six, seven seven seven. Rhythm! 7 days, four times matches the phases of the moon in its 28-day rotation. Repeated twelves times gets the earth and moon around the sun. Seasons burst forth from Rhythm, in step with something set forth in Creation.

But we are set in Rhythm as well, sixty or eighty or a hundred times a minute our hearts beat. We can do nothing but acquiesce and go forth, in cadence. The rhythms slow but do not stop. Creation was not called forth out of the abyss with lambasting cacophony, but musical regularity and beauty. The Rhythm of our lives is set, we must but fill in the tap with lyric and melody. We are punctuated by that great entrance, a timpani perhaps, ex nihilo and swelling crescendo, and we go out with the clap of decrescendo, moving softly into oblivion.

Time has even been stamped with divinity. But today the fecundity of Rhythm is sacrificed to the gods called Efficiency and Punctuality—and Escape. Soon I will be asked to heed the clock again, but will I remember to call upon the creativity of the moment, of each second, so that Christ would work in me, to join in God’s creative task? “These are our few live seasons. Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present,” says Annie Dillard. Every year a leap-second is added to the real time to fix for earth’s lack of punctuality. Our planet can’t even keep up with us! Time is not the problem; our obsession with numbers is. But Jesus splits the eastern sky daily, hourly. He has come back, he holds the curtain between heaven and earth open so that the Kingdom can come. Or he rips it. And that Kingdom will not come if the little Christs are looking only upward to a Mansion Over the Hilltop, ignoring a scattered Babel. Whether it be through busyness, laziness, or ideology, the only thing that separates heaven from earth is ourselves.

Further reading: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: a conversation in spiritual theology by Eugene Peterson