Image
At the beginning of each atrium year, I cut up the leftover Sierra Club and Marian calendars that tend to multiply in my mailbox to give the children some nice pictures to paste onto the front of their atrium folder for the coming months. (FYI: In case you were wondering, young children love pasting. I’m not kidding. LOVE it.)
This year, I was totally cracked up to discover six-year-old R’s folder. Instead of choosing to feature a Madonna and child or a glorious autumnal sunset, he’d glued the pictures in such a way that his whole folder was covered with their backsides – i.e. empty calendars. The Blessed Mother had had her nose glued down so that the empty grid of July could strut its stuff. Wish I had a picture of this to show you.
All I could say to him was, “R., you must really like time."
He looked at me as if I’d had special access into the inside of his skull.
“I do!” he shouted with enthusiasm. “I think about time all the time!” He shared that he was always trying to figure out who came before whom in the timelines of life and how long history was. Was God before the beginning of the universe? Would time ever end?
Must admit that R. and I are kindred spirits. I don’t decorate my art folder with blank calendars, but mostly this is because I don’t have an art folder, not because I don’t like looking at calendars.
Indeed, I have spent an extraordinary amount of energy in recent years working on calendars like my sisters might work on puzzles. Is it possible to be present for two different work events the same day on opposite sides of the country? No, not if flying from West Coast to East Cost. But what if the East Coast event is actually first? Aha! Or what if you can just pop in via Zoom from a hotel room that promises to have good wifi?
Once upon a time during Covid, I promised to stop playing with calendars this way, but was surprised how quickly the addiction to productivity re-emerged. Per the quote I found recently on Facebook:
ME: [extremely burnt out] I need to take the day off to relax.
ALSO ME: I wonder if there is a way I could relax that would be more productive.
I do feel like the pandemic helped quell my incorrigible internal drive for a bit but it turns out not a whole lot. This present moment in life asks anew: Ann, do you think that maybe you might enjoy a different way of playing with calendars? What if this time it might not be about you moving around the pieces and seeing what could still fit together on the calendar, but rather allowing time to play around a bit with you? See where you fit like a puzzle piece into to the big scheme of things?
I think here of Abraham Heschel and his brilliant classic called The Sabbath. I wasn’t able to get into this too much in my earlier newsletter on Genesis but my favorite deep dive into the creation stories actually involves the 7th day of creation (from the first creation story). Heschel suggests that as human beings we have been entrusted with a particular role—the capacity to take Earth into our hands and transform it through work to help it become more what God has always dreamed it to be. And six days a week, we can do that. We can work. But on the seventh day—Sabbath—we are commanded not to pick up anything. Not to change anything. Not to work. And we do this to remember that in the end, the plan for history is not ours. We are participants in a mystery of time much larger than our own moment. God gives us Space to play with, Heschel highlights, but (and this is my favorite line of the book) ultimately, “Time belongs only to God.”
When I was working on Redeeming Power, I spent lots of time thinking about Sabbath when preparing the final chapter of the book. I interviewed a couple great leaders talking about their own embrace of the invitation of Sabbath in their own lives, especially Erin Barisano, Joann Terranova, and Trinka Hamel. I’m attaching highlights of their interviews here.
Now, I realize that life is asking me to personally live that final chapter in a more intentional way—not just in word, but in action… or lack thereof. The celebration of the Feast of Christ the King this past weekend and the knowledge that we are now in the very last week of the liturgical year has made the invitation even more timely. If this is the case for you, too, here are three books I have read or re-read in the last couple years that you might also really get a lot out of.
- How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now by James K.A. Smith (Brazos Press, 2022)
- Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) [There is a cliff notes version of this available as a podcast with Krista Tippett On Being that will very much satisfy you if you are not into getting another book.]
- And, of course, Sabbath by Abraham Heschel (many publications available)
As the Liturgical Year C comes to a close, may God continue to help us figure out not so much how to manage time, but how to manage ourselves, our own compulsions, our own desires inside the mystery of time.
PS – How good of so many of you to continue to ask how I am doing as I wrap up Week 2 of radiation / chemo. I am happy to report that I am doing really well, and most likely because of your prayers + good health care at the Emory Winship Cancer Center. Thus far, the anti-nausea medication is working just fine and my energy level remains good. It turns out that the chemo I am on has less a chance of making your hair fall out. At present, I am only losing hair on the left side of my head where I am receiving targeted radiation. I am not sure that having hair only fall out on one side of your head is going to end up all that much more desirable than both sides in the long haul. I might end up looking like a punk rock star flashing a style that somehow feels less appropriate on a woman of my generation. But we will deal with fashion problems when we get there.
At present probably my worst side effect (at least according to those I live with) is that my anti-leprosy medication can make me a bit irritated. A friend has pointed out that there a whole phenomenon called “Keppra Rage.” I don’t think mine has quite arisen to merit a whole Reddit conversation, but I do experience a possibly irrational degree of irritation when things do not move at the pace I think they should move at. Is this perhaps only another manifestation of a productivity addiction? Okay, yes, that is possible.
But, really, I am doing very well. Please continue to pray for me. I do believe it is making a difference.
Wishing all my friends across the U.S. a wonderful, wonderful Thanksgiving this coming Thursday! It's been a hard year, but we still have much to be grateful for.
(photo credit: Roman Kravtsov - Unsplash)