Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Time and the Soul

Reverend Alicia McNary Forsey, PhD
March 18, 2007
Palo Alto, CA

The captain’s voice came over the intercom. If you are sitting on the right side of the plane, you can see the Grand Canyon from your window now. I was in luck. Not only was I seated by a window on the right side of the plane, it was my favorite time of day — the brief few minutes of last light as the sun sets, when everything bathed in its light shines. Everything is more beautiful. The world seems to glow. Part of its beauty is in the knowing that it is so fleeting, to be wholly appreciated while it lasts. Like a butterfly with a life-span of two days, a shooting star that is here and gone in a few seconds or a bolt of lightning that cuts across a dark sky in a flash of extraordinary brightness and energy.

I looked down from my window into the vastness of the Grand Canyon, which is so ancient it causes time to stand still. It belongs in the realm of eternal time — the same kind of time upon which the Great Sphinx fixes her steady gaze.

The beauty of what I saw through the window filled me with awe. Time, thoughts about home life, work that was waiting to be done … everything receded into the background — paled in comparison to the incredible sight I was witnessing.

I could see the depth of the Grand Canyon. I could feel its depth, the peaceful still point that reminded me of my own transience while at the same time reassuring me about what feels everlasting. The most unforgettable aspect of the sight was seeing the many layers of earth and stone and matter that make up the walls of the Grand Canyon. I never knew that these layers — each representing thousands and thousands of years of life on this planet, were so varied in color. Brown, yellow, gold, grey, violet and more, and each a different width. I knew there were remains of times unknown to recorded history within the layers of this place that had opened to the sky, and now, to me.

I felt so small in comparison to the greatness of what I saw — so tiny in comparison — which is not a bad thing — it is good to remember that there is something bigger than a human individual, something incomparable to our brief little lives on this planet. We are not that distant from the butterfly when it comes to our time here, not if we consider the big picture of what has gone before us and what will come after — we are a wink in the eye of the everlasting.

This is cause for a kind of sadness and a kind of liberation, a kind of freedom. I am not so important that I have to be at every meeting, have to fill up my calendar in order to be important. I used to think that was true. Now I don’t. Now I just hope that I can figure out how best spend what time I have, sometimes busy — living in time that is fleeting, and sometimes observing, reflecting, going deeper through the layers of my life’s experience.

And this is where the illusive soul can be cared for — in that deeper place. Cultivating the soul doesn’t need a trip to the Grand Canyon. It needs the kind of time that encourages us to go deeper, which might lead us to find peace just sitting quietly with what we once thought simple or mundane. This is very difficult if we keep to busy, busy lives.

While on the plane flying over the Grand Canyon I realized that the gentleman in the seat beside me had not had a chance to see the full view, so I turned to him to ask if he would like to do so. He was completely engaged with his work on a laptop computer. He had a thick stack of charts piled up beside the laptop. When he saw me looking over at him, he took it to mean that I was curious about his work. With a burst of enthusiasm he began telling me that he worked for a large company that distributed cereal products. He thought I would be especially interested in the chart he was working on, which was an accounting of how many foreign objects had been found in which cereal products. The list of foreign objects was divided into what type of object was found, all based upon customer complaints. This information was valuable and necessary. Profits would suffer if the company had to enter into litigation. I didn’t want to be rude, but I also didn’t want to hear about what sort of stuff customers were finding in their cereal. By this time, the Grand Canyon had been left behind us. The cereal man returned to his work without a clue about what he had missed.

Now, every time I make an appointment, every time I say “yes” to a job of any kind, a social gathering, lunch with a friend — I am making a decision about what I want to do with my life. I am giving away, or selling a piece of my life. This is what philosopher Jacob Needleman tells us in his book Time and the Soul. Our time IS our life. He reminds us that our time is all that we know that we have in any given moment. If we let our time go to anything out of a sense of duty, a wanting to be liked, a drive to be highly regarded, to live in a prestigious neighborhood, to make more money than we really need — if we trade our time for these kinds of things we may be compromising the quality of our lives.

If we never take the time to be with the quiet within ourselves, to let the still point take us deeper, then we feel distracted, feel as though we are not quite connecting with others, engaging with the world. Taking back enough time — pulling it away from over-busyness, we increase the odds of finding the depth we all have within us. Or, stated another way, we increase the odds of living a soulful life. Like the Grand Canyon, we are mysteriously deep and capable of incredible beauty, creativity and generosity of spirit. The more depth we can find, the more meaning we will find, the more we can see out the window, the more we can appreciate what we see, the more we can appreciate daily life and the small things that are everywhere around us everyday.

You know, time as we understand it in western culture is not necessarily the same as time in other cultures. Time is not an objective reality that exists independently of our thinking - an entity that demands the same response from all people in all cultures. No doubt many of you have traveled to places where time is not observed in quite the same way as you feel it here, where punctuality is not an expectation and the flow of daily life includes a nap after lunch, late nights in comfortable company and every possible excuse to celebrate a holiday free of work.

Immanuel Kant is the philosopher who modestly suspended all metaphysicians from their task until they could come up with a better explanation than his regarding space and time. I don’t know of anybody who has managed to find a better explanation within western culture. Kant said that we must order our experience through the lense of space and time or all would be chaos. Without my glasses of space and time I could not discern the order of this room. I would see colors and forms, but would not have the means to organize them into distinct rows of chairs with distinct individuals sitting on them, and so on. The time that we live by is linear and always progressing. This is not necessarily a negative thing, but as we mature we tend to try to pack more and more into the amount of time we are now dividing into microseconds. A bicycle racer may loose a race by a fraction of one second. They may know they are losing before the race ends, because the computer on the handlebars of their bike is tracking their time against other competitors. We have gone from a new year being a new starting line, to a day being a new beginning, to every minute counts, to a microsecond culling out the losers.

This is where I am: The First Unitarian Church of Palo Alto. I arrived here after six months of doing little more than reading, research and writing, with almost no social exchanges, few phone calls, no alarm clocks. This is a busy place. At first I was a little overwhelmed by the busyness. It wasn’t only because of all the activities. I see you are a program size church, and that what you offer to members is outstanding. I think it must be challenging for members of the church to keep a balance between being busy on Sunday on the one hand, and experiencing a soul-filled moment on the other. I see the challenge of having so many activities, even though fine activities, taking place so close together, or even simultaneously, on a Sunday. If Sunday is to be the day you set aside to find a moment of quiet, an opening up to your own depth, the peace of stepping aside from distractions — then I wonder about all the activities. I wonder how you arrive at the choice of how to spend your time. What is most likely to invite a still, peaceful moment within you?

When you were a child, did you ever lie on your back in the grass and watch the clouds pass? Then try to imagine what each one resembled? Or, some similar way of spending time. If so, I doubt that you were worried about a deadline, a meeting, or even how much time you had before you needed to go on to the next activity of the day. As we mature and fill up our time, it tends to feel like it is speeding, and we have to run to keep up with it.

Are you running to keep up? Do you feel the depth of your being? Your depth, synonymous with soul, is, on the surface, the easiest to ignore because it is difficult to keep it clearly defined and prioritized in our thinking. But if it is ignored, the soul will find a way to interject itself into your life, like weeds in a garden. The Zen Master Roshi Zuzuki would call the distractions that prevent you from reflection, observance, peaceful stillness “Mind Weeds.” These weeds may strangle what you seek, may interfere with your ability to understand your own depth, which leads to anxiety, insomnia, addictions, nightmares, unhappiness.

When something gets in the way of allowing your life to feel like YOU own IT, pull some weeds, and then some more — until the garden is thriving, colors glow, and the stillness you can find within yourself brings you peace.

 

Reflection: Time and the Soul