I had a siege of COVID this year on my birthday. It was my backwards birthday present. I don’t think I have ever been so wretched. And as I felt myself being pulled down and down, my mind was filled with apprehension. Is this IT?
Well, it wasn’t IT, as it turned out. My frontwards birthday present was that the siege was fierce, but short. And my brush with mortality had one valuable byproduct–it set me thinking about the psalmist’s words–“So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart” (NRSV).
It is just as well to confess the obvious, beloved. We can all look back upon a wilderness of wasted time. We have treated it with the most shameful prodigality—we have dropped it like small change and then not bothered to bend over and pick it up. We have frittered time away as if it were worth nothing, when it is the most precious thing we have.
Instead of using them we have frittered away the precious hours on trivialities. We have not focused our attention on what is crucial. Instead, we have allowed ourselves to be “distracted from distraction by distraction” as T.S. Eliot puts it in his “Four Quartets.” We have listened to the commotion of random voices and the insistent ringing of the cell-phone, while much of life has escaped us.
That’s bad news for us all. But there is good news too, beloved. We all have some time left in our pockets to spend better. And we have an instructor ready to show us how. “Teach us to count our days. . .” –the psalmist says. The Spirit of God is our teacher, beloved. She is the only source of wisdom, that insight into how to conduct ourselves, not wasting more time regretting what we have already wasted, but using all the time we have left rightly.
So count your days. Count your days so you can make the hours count for something. It is easy enough to delude ourselves with the illusion that their number is infinite—but it isn’t. A cool appraisal of the limitedness of our time is the door by which we enter into the very heart of wisdom. And in the heart of wisdom, we find that good news–There is still time to do what needs to be done. IT is not yet.
I’m not talking here about playing games with our mortality–picking out our funeral hymns or selecting the dress we want to be buried in. Do we want to be cremated or buried in the ground? And where will we be put? The answers to all those questions that can wait for the emergent occasion. If you don’t have a plot when you die, they’ll find somewhere to put you, beloved.
Of course, it is a good thing to get the loose ends of your life tied up–the unsaid words said–the unwritten letter written and posted. If there is never enough time to accomplish all those chores completely, it is still worth trying.
But entering in the heart of wisdom means more than tying up loose ends. It is a conscious preparation for what is coming to us all. We often use the noisy distractions of our lives to hide from Eternity. But it is always there, in the offing. And time spent well is time spent looking toward the horizon of our lives. None of us has all the time we need to be who we are. There is an emptiness at the end of our lives that only Eternity can fill.
But Eternity can only be comprehended in stillness. As Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese monk and Zen master, wrote, “Sitting is an art. The art of resting first. It is very important to learn how to rest.”
We need to sit down and enter into the heart of wisdom and rest there—quietly rest and experience time passing–that is what I am doing right now as I write and what you are doing presumably as you read—reflecting upon the shortness of our borrowed time, not to do more, but to do less. . . less, but better.
In the heart of wisdom less is always better than more. Rest is always better than activity. The horizon is always what really matters, not what is going on around you. Keeping your eyes upon eternity means living fully in the now–keeping our eyes fixed upon the offing—upon the horizon of your being. And for Christians the horizon of our being is always the Cross of Jesus Christ. It is the symbol and substance of Eternity. And our longing is to enter fully into that eternal reality.
When we do finally do that, our wasted time will mean nothing—swallowed up by love, together with everything else. But in the meantime, we are responsible for the gift of time that we have been given—either large or small.
We can never possess too much of it. We never really possess time at all, strictly speaking. It is a loan from which the Lord expects a return with interest, as the stories Jesus told constantly remind us. All time is borrowed time. And only when we run short of it, only when realize that we have hardly any change left in our pockets to feed the parking meter, only then do we begin to realize how precious a thing our borrowed time is. Every moment of it is a golden legacy. And we have all frittered away a fortune.
But don’t fret too much about the time you have wasted, beloved. It will be forgiven, like everything else. Just do better now. Rest in Eternity. And anticipate that explosion of Reality, that last surprise to which the hours of our lives are counting down–the Moment that has no end. It is coming to us all, swiftly or slowly, but I assure you when it does come will be worth the wait.
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