“TO LABOR AND TO WAIT”

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Sunday, September 17, 2006

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

Waiting. It is one of life’s great annoyances. Curiously, it is also (or can be) a religious discipline.

It is interesting to me that the experience of waiting has strong roots in many religious traditions. The ancient Hebrew Scriptures are filled with flowery language about waiting for the God to lead the Jews out of bondage or waiting for the Messiah to come and establish justice. The Christian scriptures were written by followers of Jesus who were waiting for his imminent return, expecting the Second Coming to arrive during their lifetime. Eastern reincarnation religions, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, teach patience as among the highest virtues, for it is a long road to enlightenment, and it can take many lifetimes to get there. Perhaps the discipline of meditation is simply preparing us to cope with such a long wait for nirvana.

Whether it be the coming of the people to the Promised Land, or the coming of the Kingdom of God, or the second coming of Christ, or the gradual coming into spiritual enlightenment, many religions center around the issue of waiting for future glory.

Waiting, though, is not my strong suit. The long and the short of it is that I don't do waiting well. But I am surprised by how much my life is saturated with waiting. I am not a particularly pleasant person while standing in line, unless I have reading material to distract me. I wouldn’t dare step foot into the Bureau of Motor Vehicles without something to read in my hands.

Waiting is not something I look forward to with much relish. My calendar tells me not so much what I'm supposed to do, but rather what I'm waiting to have happen. Calendar events say, “you’re going to have to wait a while for this.”

Here’s an odd phenomenon: When looking at a calendar for some special event in the future, waiting seems to take forever during the wait; but then when the event finally arrives, the time seems to have flown by.

One common example of this is pregnancy. Anyone who has been pregnant or who, like me, experienced pregnancy vicariously, knows that those nine months are excruciatingly slow. But after the event of birth happens, looking back on the nine months doesn’t seem so long after all.

It is as if time filters through a warp of some kind, so that “future time” is substantially slower than “past time.” Future time is both qualitatively and quantitatively different from past time. Waiting seems to stretch it out.

I have long been interested in the topic of time. I know this is not the sort of subject that enthralls everyone, but I challenge you to find another topic that carries with it, simultaneously, so much common sense and so much mystery, something so easily understood and so utterly puzzling.

There is a certain elegance to time. It is predictable, mathematical, and dependable – yet it is also mostly illusion, a grand metaphor to describe our experience. There is really no such thing as a minute or an hour – these notions are simply mental gimmicks we've invented to help us deal with our experience. No one has ever seen or touched a minute. Time is a devise created by human beings to make sense out of our experience. Minutes and hours are, in that sense, artificial, yet there is nothing more real in our experience than the passage of time. There are few concepts more down-to-earth or practical than that of how time works.

The way we understand time, however wrong it may be, makes sense. There are sixty seconds in a minute, twelve months in a year, one moment predictably and inescapably followings another, and each moment in time is sequential and without any variability. That is how we experience time, and these notions of time are extremely practical and intelligent, and are vital in helping us to grasp reality. There is only one problem. These notions of time aren't true. Other than that, they are quite excellent and extraordinarily useful ideas.

The truth is more contrary to our experience: time, as we normally think of it, is a construction of our imagination. Time does exist, we are told, it just doesn’t exist the way we think it does. Something else is going on.

In the twentieth century, science made discoveries about time that are completely at odds with our everyday experience. In his very popular book A Brief History of Time physicist Stephen Hawking publicized the strangeness of time.

Here’s something strange they tell us about time: time passes at a different rate here on earth than it does in space. Earth time is different from moon time. Which is different from Mars time, and so forth. Time is also different depending upon how fast you are traveling through space.

Here’s something else that is strange that they tell us about time: There once was a time when there was no time at all. There may come a time in the distant future when time will again disappear, and there will be no time. Time, in other words, is not infinite.

Here is something else that they say about time: the arrow of time that we experience going forward may, in fact, in some subatomic contexts, go backward instead. The future may in fact not always be after the present.

So time isn’t necessarily what we think it is. The predictability of time, the uniformity of time, the inflexibility of time that we experience is imaginary. Stephen Hawking said it concisely with these words: “The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time!”

When Einstein was asked to explain the special theory of relativity, he once answered this way:

"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes; when you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours. That's relativity."

So the way we experience time is largely in our minds, they say. But it doesn’t stop there. There is also something imaginary about the way we experience matter. Matter isn’t quite what we understand it to be in our day to day experience.

Matter is constantly in flux, always changing. All matter, whether rocks or trees or gasses, is constantly in motion because the atomic particles that make it up is constantly in motion. The Rocky Mountains are constantly in motion, constantly changing, though it may take tens of thousands of years for humans to observe that change. They move and change just like the Ohio River, only quite a bit slower.

This wooden pulpit in front of me is constantly changing, though we imagine it to be thoroughly inert and unmoving. But its molecules are busy as I speak, and in countless ways that are not observable to us, this pulpit is a different pulpit now than it was when I began this sentence.

Everything in the universe is in constant change and motion, and our perception of completely stable matter is an illusion. Just like our experience of time, our experience of matter is imaginary.

So is there anything, pray tell, that is not imaginary? Isn't there anything that is real? The answer, say the scientists, is yes. What is real, the only basis of reality is the combined relationship of space and time, something they have labeled "space-time." (The word “space” in this label is used to describe what we commonly think of as “matter”: anything that has substance.)

Time cannot exist independent of space, and space cannot exist independent of time. Putting it a bit differently, time cannot be measured or have any meaning without its relationship to space, and space cannot be measured or have any meaning without its relationship to time.

Hawking points out this relationship in discussing the speed of light. The speed of light, it appears, is probably the only constant in the universe. Everything else changes based on the perspective of the observation. The idea of "speed" includes both time and distance, and therefore the speed of light becomes the rule stick for measuring both time and distance.

Without space (without matter) time would not exist. Without time, matter (or space) would not exist. So time is measured by its relationship to space, and space is measure by its relationship to time. This is why we can say there was a time when there was no time, because before the "big bang," there was no space; and neither time nor space can be defined without reference to the other. And, should the universe, billions of years from now, begin to reverse its expansion and contract and eventually collapse into itself, time will cease because space will cease.

Without space, time is not real. Without time, space is not real. The only thing that is real is the single concept of “space-time.”

At this point I have pretty much exhausted my ability to understand, or even my ability to pretend to understand, these peculiar scientific mysteries. I suspect there are people here who could do a better job than I can. The basic point of bringing this up, though, is that we are told that we can no longer think precisely about either time or space, but rather of "space-time."

It has been less than a century since Einstein first suggested this, and we haven't had time yet (if you'll excuse the expression) to internalize it. It will probably be many generations still before we, in our popular imagination, can think meaningfully about "space-time" and all its implications. After all, it took many hundreds of years before people could internalize the idea that the earth is a sphere, or that the sun is really a star like any other star, or that the earth rotates on an axis. The thinking we are being asked to alter is at least as radical as those ideas.

At this point, I want to bring us back, for one last time, to the idea of waiting. If time, as we experience it, is imaginary, then can we also say that waiting, with which I am so often uncomfortable, is also imaginary? Can I simply ignore my experience of waiting since time isn’t real anyway? What a relief that is! The conclusion seems inescapable.

We all know it doesn’t work that way, though. To speculate on how it might work, I ask you to us your imagination along with me for a moment. What if waiting has a partner that makes it meaningful just as time has a partner that makes it meaningful?

But what of the experience of waiting, of waiting for time to pass. If time has its partner, which is space, does waiting likewise have an indivisible partner? I suggest it does, but such a suggestion, as I'm about to make, is not in any way a scientific claim.

I come upon the partner to waiting not through science, but through poetry. Please don't ask me to prove anything I'm about to say; I will decline to do so. But I offer it because it provides, to me at least, an intriguing parallel with the scientific theory of "space-time."

When I say I come to this through poetry, I mean that literally. I refer to the closing verse of Longfellow's "Psalm of Life":

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

Could it be, I ask metaphorically, that what time is to space, waiting is to laboring? Could it be that our labors and our waitings are two parts of a whole, and each can only be adequately measured in terms of the other? Could it be that there is something artificial in waiting without labor, or laboring without waiting? Just as there is something artificial about time without space, or space without time.

I spoke of how future time seems quantitatively longer than past time when we look at the future while waiting for some event to happen. Could it be that the future seems so distant because it is empty of our labor, and the past seems so near because it is filled with our labor? And rather than us waiting for the future to happen, could it be that the future is waiting for us to fill it with our labor?

At this point, my speculations are getting even further a field than I'm comfortable with, so let me come back to the beginning premise – that to wait and to labor are indivisible partners, like space-time, rather than separate and distinct activities.

We labor toward a future because we know that we have the capacity to shape that future before us. But we simultaneously wait for that future, because we know the future is not completely in our hands, but takes on its own shape as well.

In the reading from John Ruskin Clark, he points out the ultimate unpredictability of the future, saying, "We cannot anticipate all contingencies; we cannot pin our hopes for the future upon knowing exactly what it will be like." This is the part of the future for which we must wait rather than labor. But Clark goes on to emphasize the human creative capacity, and says, "Human beings have flourished and spread over the planet through our ability to make innovative responses to new and various conditions." This is the part of the future for which we must labor.

Whether we are awaiting a birthday or an election or a vacation or peace on earth, we labor with confidence that our efforts will make the future better than it would otherwise be, and we wait – we wait with faith in that future, knowing that the forces outside of our control, the fates if you will, can accommodate us within its design.

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All of you must know the real reason for my topic this morning. This congregation is in a waiting mode right now. All of us are anticipating the completion of our building renovation project. The construction project has made things inconvenient for us for a few weeks. We have inadequate bathroom facilities. There are no offices and now only limited classrooms, not accessible from this building. The building is crowded on Sunday.

But those hassles are not the major frustration. What is most difficult, for me at least, is the waiting. As I said at the beginning, I don’t “do” waiting well.

But this particular form of waiting, it seems to me, is well balanced by an extraordinary amount of labor that sustains it. Countless hours given by hundreds of people in planning, fundraising, designing, and just “roll-up-the-sleeves” working have sustained the wait and given it tremendous value.

We are waiting, in fact, for the fruits of our labor, and that makes the waiting both urgent and meaningful. Longfellow’s poem, “The Psalm of Life” suggests that working and waiting are a formula to fill the future with meaning. The poem is all about how the present prepares for the future:

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints in the sands of time.

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

I’ve always like that line: “(leaving) footprints in the sands of time.” What we are waiting for is to see those footprints we will be leaving. When I hear of a work crew here packing up the pods of storage, they are working to make footprints for the future. When volunteers come to paint a walls in the R.E. room or library, they are working to make footprints for the future. When it was reported last Wednesday at the Board meeting that pledges on the Capital Campaign seem to be coming in as hoped, that report bodes well on the footprints we are leaving.

The great philosopher and psychologist William James once said that,

"The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it."

That is what we are waiting for here. To see the footprints that will outlast us as a community. It is the greatest use of life there is.

So we labor and we wait. Both take a certain effort, if sometimes only emotional effort.

Religions, as I say, have often made “waiting” an important tenet. Waiting for the Kingdom of God or waiting for Christ's return. There is something religious to waiting, I think, for it acknowledges that our power over the future is limited. However, waiting must involve laboring, just as time must involve space, and religions ought not to embrace waiting for a future without simultaneously encouraging our labor to shape that future. "Future Glory," for which much of religion waits, will not come without present labor.

We labor toward a future because we know that we have the capacity to shape that future before us. But we also labor for that future, because we know the future, though not entirely in our hands, is largely what we will make of it.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.