|
Have you too been shocked by how fast the time seems to go by? “Goodness me, February is nearly over, and it doesn’t seem any time since Christmas!”
There is no doubt modern life is much faster-paced than even a few years ago. The latest technology means we can get information even faster, and so the pace of work and life speeds up to match; we can get lots of emails sent in the time it would take to write one letter. The reply to the letter could take days; we are often irritated if our emails aren’t answered the same day! So partly we are responsible for the pressure we put on ourselves: the volume of things that can get done increases, so do our expectations, and as a result the time appears to fly by; OK if things are going well, when a swift-paced life is interesting and exciting, but when we start to fall behind, we’re forever catching up, and life becomes harder and more laborious.
How does this affect our attitudes, beliefs and outlook on life? I have been reading a book during my training recently; it’s called: “What prevents Christian adults from learning?” by John Hull, which reflects on this matter. Hull’s thinking is that modern life expects us to do so much that in order to cope we begin to put the various activities of our lives into lots of different boxes, a bit like organising our papers from a solid pile into different drawers of the filing cabinet. The areas of our life, a bit like our papers, are then kept separate from each other; they have to be, or disorganisation occurs; how else can busy people keep on top of things?
Hull also points out that modern life is characterised and driven by the ever-increasing growth and needs of large organisations and their efficient, frequently depersonalised technologies. Anyone who has ever tried to speak to someone in a big corporation and spoken to either an automated service or been taken through a long menu of different options understands this. This fact is an inevitable consequence of the increasing complexity and sophistication of modern life. This, along with all the other pressure on us and our time, our worries about health, finance, work, the future, does have consequences.
But what effect does it have on our inner self? We can, more so in larger towns or cities perhaps than in our smaller communities, start feeling cut off from each other; isolation and loneliness are far bigger problems now in Western cultures than they were a generation or so ago. So, Hull argues, we create little havens for ourselves to keep such impersonal forces at bay: our house, home, the family, pub, club, interest group, church, social circle or local community, for example. These can become cosy zones where we feel a sense of control or immunity and freedom, rather than confront the threat of the unknown from bigger forces beyond which place all sorts of unwelcome demands on us.
Nothing inherently wrong with this, of course, but for Christian believers or those for whom Christianity still has some appeal or validity, this cultural setting in which we operate does tend to restrict our learning and development. The very term “God slot” used by TV programmers to describe the time for religious broadcasts becomes our experience; there’s so much to do that God or the things of God can get relegated to a time-defined “slot” or more realistically, despite many good intentions, get pushed to the sidelines and beyond.
So when we look at ourselves, how are we doing? Are we making some progress and growing in our understanding of God and what and who Christ is in our journey through life? Or has our spiritual life become a bit dull and stagnant? A bit like that comment of Mae West who is supposed to have said: “I used to be as pure as the driven snow, but then I drifted!” There are lots of reasons (excuses?) why this comes about, and maybe we can live happily in this condition.
Here’s a thought, whatever our own self-diagnosis may be. We often have to learn new tricks (modern technology in my case) so learning is always possible at all stages of life, not just for young people. So no reason why we can’t keep on learning and understanding about God. This has certainly been my privilege in my training, and helped prevent the spiritual life from becoming static, even if this has required a certain amount of effort! But as ever, most things worth having do need some input from us; I remember when I was younger and more sporty, our rowing crew never did terribly well when the training lapsed a bit, but when we did make an effort, our success rate was enough motivation in itself to train properly from then on.
So now Lent is with us, and with it comes the awareness of the tradition we should give up something we like, whether for our own good (eg cutting out chocolates, sweets or alcohol) or for that of others, giving money saved to a charity, for example. So the suggestion I’m offering is: let’s try giving up a bit of time in the weeks until Easter to get the spiritual muscles toned up a bit. Perhaps read a chapter or two each day from one of the Gospels, say St. John, or a psalm in a modern translation, and think about what’s going on, and what God might be wanting to say to us.
Giving up chocolate or beer may do the waistline and heart some good, but giving up a bit of time regularly to think about who and what God is and might have to say to us may well, in ways we can’t tell, begin to make our life richer and the swift passage of time less worrying.
David Frith, Reader in Training
|
