Time is Too Precious to Waste”
November 2, 2008
Opening Reading: The Summer Day, Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Sermon: “Time is Too Precious to Waste”
This is the sermon title my friend and colleague in ministry, Dick Drinon, planned for October 12 at his church in Hopedale, MA. He didn’t deliver the sermon — he died of heart failure that morning. The sermon title was published in his newsletter. About the sermon he wrote:
“Do you have enough time to do what you want to do? In this time of crisis what is the best way to use the time that you do have? This is it! We only live once. Join us this Sunday as we apply our faith principles to the basic human needs during times of stress.”
Dick’s sermon title reminded me of the sign under the clock in my eighth grade science class: “Doth thou love life? Then don’t waste time for that’s the stuff life is made of.” Ben Franklin
During the last forty-one years, Dick and I shared lots of time together — quality time. We wove our lives into an intricate pattern, officiating at one another’s weddings, delivering ordination and installation sermons for one another – he officiated at my mother’s funeral and dedicated my granddaughter in this sanctuary and simply being together, laughing a lot, eating a lot – especially lobsters in Maine. Quality time!
Dick stayed at my little cabin at Old Orchard Beach, Maine, every summer. This past summer he was the last one to use it, staying for a week in late August, and he left a note: “Many thanks. Love and healing thoughts, Dick.” He drew a smiley face. Dick smiled a lot; laughed a lot.
Two weeks ago I officiated at his memorial service. I chose a few of his favorite readings, asking members of his local clergy group to do them:
He loved St. Francis; he always wore his St. Francis medal. So the local Catholic priest, Father Konicki, read the famous St. Francis prayer:
Lord make me an instrument of your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light; and
where there is sadness, joy.
Divine Master grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Tim House, ministerial intern and a member of Dick’s congregation in Hopedale read Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night…and the minister of the United Church of Christ, Chris Dodge, read the famous passage from the 25th chapter of Matthew: ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me. And they asked, when did we see you hungry…or naked…or sick or in prison? And he answered, As you have done it to one of the least of these you’ve done it to me.’
It was from Dick that I learned the benediction I usually use, though he used a different version, which he had framed and kept on his desk:
“I expect to pass through this life but once, therefore, if there’s any good thing I can do or any kindness that I can show to any person let me do it now, let me not defer or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.”
Dick and I shared a love of the New England transcendentalists. One of them, Henry David Thoreau, wrote in his famous book, Walden:
“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? …Time is but the stream I go fishing in. Sometimes in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon. I realize what the Orientals mean by contemplation…I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. It seemed to me that I had several more lives to live. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I learned this, at least, by my experiment, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. In proportion as he simplifies his life the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor will poverty be poverty, nor weakness weakness.”
What appears to be time wasted may later prove to be time well spent. Thoreau talks about sitting in the doorway of his little cabin from sunrise to noon; he doesn’t talk about what he saw, or felt during those morning hours, but simply says that he was there, paying attention to what was going on around him and in him – he called it ‘contemplation.’
Was it time wasted? Or was it time well spent?
There’s a passage from a poem by Carl Sandburg about a father seeing his son nearing manhood and he asks, ‘what should he tell that son?’
“Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted. Tell him to be a fool every so often and to have no shame over having been a fool, yet learning something out of every folly, hoping to repeat none of the cheep follies, thus arriving at intimate understanding of a world numbering many fools.” From The People Yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.
The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
“I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.
We have time, but it is limited. How shall we spend it? We may be more concerned about ‘making good time’ on the highway rather than ‘making time good.’
In his sermon description Dick referred to ‘this time of crisis,’ meaning the economic downturn. I suspect he would have reminded us that a successful life isn’t measured by material wealth, but he would not have denied economic necessity.
That’s why I read those well-worn lines attributed to Emerson about a successful life. Let me remind you, keeping in mind the ‘time of crisis’ we’re in:
“To laugh often and love much. To win and hold the respect of intelligent persons, and the affection of little children. To earn the praise of honest critics and to endure, without flinching, the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty always, whether in earth’s creations or men and women’s handiwork.
“To have sought for and found the best in others and to have given it oneself. To leave the world better than one found it, whether by nurturing a child or a garden patch, writing a cheery letter, or working to redeem some social condition.
“To have played with enthusiasm, laughed with exuberance, and sung with exultation. To go down to dust and dreams knowing that the world is a little bit better, and that even a single life breathes easier because we have lived well, that is to have succeeded!”
My dear friend and colleague lived a very successful life. He wasn’t rich, that’s for sure. He wasn’t famous – not even well-known among UU colleagues. But he touched many lives in a deep and lasting way; it was a gentle touch.
At his memorial service we invited people to come up to light a candle for Dick and a line formed, each telling how Dick touched their lives, including several young people from the congregation he served.
A nine year old said, “Last Sunday I was selling popcorn to raise money for our cubscout troupe and Dick bought some, but now I have a problem – what do I do with Dick’s popcorn?”
I, of course, said, “Give it to me!”
Another seventeen year old said, “I was always a trouble maker in Sunday school – I had a bad reputation. One Sunday after church my mother brought me in to Rev. Dick’s office and left me there to talk with him. He didn’t yell at me or anything like that. He listened to me and I got the feeling that he liked me, and I got the feeling that he respected me, and from that day on whenever I saw him and we said hello I knew that he respected me…he accepted me and I’ll never forget that, and I’ll never forget him.” “
This young man’s confession about being what he referred to as ‘a trouble maker,’ and his affirmation of feeling respected is one of the lessons about how we spend our time. It’s about the time Dick spent listening, which resulted in this young man’s feeling of being respected; it’s about the ongoing influence Dick is having on him.
St. Francis’s prayer ends: “It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
Temporal life is about the hours in a day, and the days in a year. Eternal life is about the ongoing influence that we have on the lives we’ve touched in a way that results in a feeling of respect – self-respect; and a sense of appreciation, the kind of appreciation this young man expressed.
There it is in a nutshell. It’s about the important encounters in our lives, like his encounter with Dick that day when he expected to be lectured and talked down to…but instead he was listened to and left feeling not only a sense of relief, but he felt respected.
Trouble makers lack self-respect and their lack of self-respect is perpetuated by making more trouble until someone like Dick comes along and has compassion, in spite of the bad behavior, realizing that there must be some kind of ‘war going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.’
The famous therapist, Carl Jung “Where love rules there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.” Jung
The will to power comes from a sense of insecurity; it’s what makes us feel the need to have control over others, and, as someone said, it ‘drowns love in a flood of dominance.’
Mature love, unencumbered by the need to have control over the other, simply wants to connect. It’s what makes us pay attention to another person and it often results in an increase in self-respect, as the young man at Dick’s memorial service said so clearly.
We have enough time to listen, even if we feel like we’re in a hurry. Aristotle said, “The wise man is never in a hurry.”
Easy for him to say – he lived in a world without the automobile that could go from zero to sixty in a few seconds; he lived in a world without computers that may take as long as two minutes to boot up, creating a sense of impatience in the user that motivates the computer makers to find ways to make the computer boot up in a minute or less.
A New York Times article this week said, “It is the black hole of the digital age — the three minutes it can take for your computer to boot up, when there is nothing to do but wait, and wait, and wait some more before you can log on and begin multitasking at hyper-speed.”
Aristotle didn’t have that problem; he wasn’t swamped with emails; didn’t have to catch the six o’clock Metro-North train to Grand Central and open his lap top to catch up with email correspondence. He wasn’t inflicted with an exaggerated sense of urgency, afraid that if he slowed down he’d fall behind the other guys in the firm.
Dick reminds us that time is precious, it’s too precious to waste hurrying from one thing to another; too precious to fill with fear and anxiety so that we wind up ‘deferring and neglecting’ opportunities that come along unexpectedly.
Remember what the fox tells the Little Prince who is trying to understand his relationship to his rose—the rose he discovered and took care of. He said, “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
Time is too precious to waste hurrying to get everything in; and you never know for sure what time has been wasted – it’s often the time we think we’ve wasted that proves to be the most rewarding of all.
We’ll conclude with the closing passage from Mary Oliver’s Summer Day:
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Closing Words: Henry Van Dyke
Time is too slow for those who wait
too swift for those who fear
too long for those who grieve,
too short for those who rejoice,
but for those who love, time is eternity.
Hours fly, flowers die,
new days, new ways pass by,
Love stays.