Chalice Reflection & "All the Time in the World"

Chalice Reflection
of
Diana (“Pokey”) Kornet
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
November 1, 2009

All the Time in the World

We shall soon hear what Jan intends to convey with this topic – it can be interpreted so many different ways. When she left a message last Monday asking if I would do this, I thought, “How will I possibly have time to fit that in?” We are obsessed with time.

Sometimes we behave as if we have “all the time in the world” to do things, but we don’t. John and I have just returned from a visit with his uncle and aunt in Jackson, Mississippi, to help celebrate his 90th birthday. They moved down there 5 years ago to be near their daughter, who is John’s favorite cousin – we realized we hadn’t seen her in 27 years! My father was 90 on October 1st; our time with him is short. This past Wednesday I visited our 77-year-old aunt in Newton Wellesley Hospital; she has just learned that she has cancer in both lungs, her liver, and her bones. Time is precious. I cherish the 12 hours I spend each week with our granddaughter, Sydney, helping introduce her to life’s wonders...does she have all the time in the world? Our daughter-in-law, Becca, has a new appreciation for growing old!

But time is part of this world. Jan’s mother is now in the timeless spiritual dimension. So is our daughter, Diana, and Jennifer Baird, Shelley Donze, Jack Langmaid, Priscilla Tebbetts, Sumner Smith and so many other dear friends and family members of First Parish. But their energy, their essence, their souls are still here in the Universe, and they know what is going on in our lives. A gifted medium in upstate NY relayed to me that Diana saw our family riding in a truck, and saw “boogie boards.” We have never owned a truck; but 3 weeks before, we had been visiting on the big island of Hawaii. Another cousin of John’s had loaned us their second car, a truck with their boogie boards in back, to use for the week we were there. The same medium told Allison that Diana said, “Desiree says hi.” Desiree Yess was in Diana’s class, but played on the basketball team with Allison, before she died in a tragic car accident in eighth grade.

We may not understand how, but soul energy lives on. Quantum physicists have proven the principle of non-locality: particles once associated are linked forever – when something happens to one, the other reacts at the same time, no matter how far away it is. Time is non-existent in this instance. Experiments have proven that a person’s subconscious ‘knows’ what kind of image will be shown before it appears on a screen, indicated by a change in pulse rate and perspiration on the palms. Time is very “fuzzy” in that situation. Random Number Generator machines all over the world lost their randomness and began to correlate with each other an hour before the planes hit the buildings on 9/11 and continued for several hours afterward; similar phenomena were observed during the funeral ceremonies for Princess Diana. If one can imagine a large amount of focused consciousness affecting an RNG, one might expect that the RNGs would cease their randomness when the event occurred and continue a pattern for some time afterwards. But it appears that events which affect the emotions of millions of people are like a rock thrown into the pond of time, with ripples of effect emanating out in all directions from the ‘point’ of impact. Again, time appears very ambiguous, not linear at all.

Time is only in this world.

On this All Souls Day, I light the chalice in memory of those who have rejoined the Universe, where time is non-existent.

“All the Time in the World”

Two Reflections by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
November 1, 2009

A Reflection on Time

Time is relative we learned early on. So we stretched the meaning of this fact of physics and arrived late to class or late to meetings or late to weddings or late even to funerals or, imagine, late to church. Or we stretched the meaning and arrived unduly early when we’d forgotten to turn our clocks “back” or when Christmas morning just couldn’t come fast enough or even when our readiness to be born pre-empted a due date announced to our birth parents less than nine months earlier. Some of us are late comers; some of us are early arrivals. Some of us are late bloomers. Some of us are early bloomers. Most of us are grateful that at some point we did arrive and we do bloom.

Yet early and late are concerned not so much with time, but with pace and readiness and inclination to do or be whatever. Time itself is a marker. We’re taught to “tell time.” Then we learn about time zones and calendars. Then we discover that ours is not the only calendar, not the only system for “telling time,” hour by hour or epoch by epoch.

While time eludes our infant grasp, the illusion that we can measure it is imparted as an early fact of life as soon as we convince our parents and teachers that we can count. Whether or not we understand number doesn’t seem to matter. If we can count, we’re deemed prodigious enough to tell time, to measure it, and to be on time. While numbers were an early forte for me, being on time was not. I was perpetually late—though I suppose that’s impossible if it really is perpetual. Slowly, slowly—another temporal measure—I learned to honor my commitments by being “on time.”

It all gets further out of our grasp when we learn about space-time measures. Miles per hour I get, but light-years; light-years still play more in my imagination than my logic. I can stretch my imagination into “the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1 year”—that is, 5.88 trillion miles,” but my thought doesn’t go there. I need immediate examples, a mile a minute say; but as I cast my gaze upward on a starry night and imagine light-years, I’m into the realm of mystery, awe, and bafflement.

As I consider the span of a human life in the fullness of a star-filled cosmos, I wonder how much it really mattered that I was once or frequently late to class. In the spirit of poet May Sarton, it has taken “Time, many years and places” to become myself. I too have “run madly, as if Time were there, terribly old, crying a warning, ‘Hurry, you will be dead before—‘(What? Before you reach the morning?”

Yes, there is so much, so very much I want yet to do, to be, to feel, and to experience. So much, and it takes what we refer to casually as “time.” I wonder if it’s a misnomer to describe ourselves as moving through time. I wonder if instead time moves through us. We matter I believe, but with regard to time, to light-years, to any primordial beginning or any imaginable end, we’re blinks in a nano-second. This can be a great relief. It can slow us down. It invites us to notice and to be more than we do.

The pace of this season invites a slower pace, a slower breath as antidote to crisper air, movements in the symphony of how we can be that are more adagio than allegro. Whatever God might be—whatever, whoever, however, if ever, forever—the ultimately holy has all the time in the world. In the beginning that was beyond the beginning; in the last days that we will never know and can barely imagine, we are called out of our quickened pace. The turning of seasons, the turning of leaves, the turnings of lives—some from who knows where to birth, some from what we know as life to death—invoke reflection on the meaning of it all.

In those lyrical words of Theodore Roethke,

“the blood slows trance-lie in the altered vein.”

In the reverie of Mary Oliver,

“...now is nowhere
except underfoot…”

Our Now is time-space, this morning, this hour, this moment, this sanctuary in this really not so age-old Meeting House. We cast a glance through these light-welcoming windows and ponder time and eternity, measures beyond our measuring.

“…now is nowhere
except underfoot…

…..This

I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay—how everything lives,
shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.”

“It goes so quickly, so quickly,” she said at the age of 95, with five more years to live. In the century of living known to my Mother, the measure of her days became timeless just a few days ago, timeless.


A Reflection on Autumn

Summer I revel in—the warm ocean—well, relatively so, the balmy nights, the raucous green, the edible close-at-hand garden greens and reds and yellows and purples, the no-coats policy of Mother Nature who never seems to call us in when we forego work for the pleasures of sunlight and starlight. My dear friend, Kathleen calls me “summer girl.” I am.

Yet the season that is draws me in, whispers, “All is not over….come, come into the lesser light. Come into the shadows of firelight. Come into the shining of a harvest moon. Come into the shimmering of leaf-light.”

The summer ends, and it is time
To face another way,

writes Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer/poet.

Our theme
Reversed, we harvest the last row
To store against the cold, undo
The garden that will be undone.
We grieve under the weakened sun
To see all earth’s green foundations dried,
And fallen all the works of light.

There is a paradox here. We harvest; we let go. We revel in the grandest of colors; light is less. We dream our way through heavy leaves; we quicken our pace as we head back to school, back to work, back to church. Now is a season to lie back in the leaves, envisioning that inevitable moment that we will be fully one with nature, and a season, in the poetic élan of Fredrick Zydek—to “dance just for the colors.” Now is a season to turn contemplatively inward and a season to gaze beyond the boundaries of sacred windows. In the words of my friend, Marietta Moskin, words born in the autumn of 2001:

Leaves—brown and gold
Rising upwards
From the tree outside the lead-paned church window
Gently borne by an autumn breeze
Soaring away
Small, fluttering shapes
Sparkling in the sun
Enjoying their freedom to fly.

Silly rash leaves. Do they have no predilection of their fatal dance? Silly dancing leaves, rising upwards as if the gentle autumn breezes will be forever gentle, as if the ground is an eternity away from their jubilant veins, as if some revelry for which they are so vividly adorned will go on and on and on. Don’t they know? Don’t they know?

“The soul knows
all too well,” mused Zydek,
…”what the trees mean
each time a leaf lets go and makes
the wind its temporary home.”

So it is for us, buoyed with anticipation at the revelry that surely lies ahead as we’re lifted upward by autumn breezes—no matter how late in the season, and then suddenly and without warning, borne by a god-like gust into that other dimension of the bargain made with life at the outset.

Summer I love. Autumn I embrace with all possible grace. Autumn is with us. In that final refrain of the lyrics of Theodore Roethke, “our vernal wisdom moves from ripe to sere.” “From ripe to sere”—a movement that loosens the lessons of fragility—the fragility of our planet earth, the fragility of each of us as we move through the seasons of our living, the fragility of our capacity to sustain life and to know life as we imagine ourselves to know it.

Breathe in the season. Then let it go; let it go. With grace and gratitude, let it go.

Amen.



Sources:

Wendell Berry, “The summer ends…” from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, Counterpoint, Washington, DC, 1998.

Marietta Moskin, “Leaves,” Unpublished poem, 2001, used by permission of the author.

Mary Oliver, “Fall Song,” in American Primitive: Poems by Mary Oliver, Little, Brown and Company, Boston/NewYork/Toronto/London, 1978.

May Sarton, http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/maysarton.html

May Sarton, “Now I Become Myself,” from Collected Poems: 1930-1993, W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.

“Now Light Is Less,” Words: Theodore Roethke, in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 54.

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=light%20year