Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,
2015 is here! The Earth has successfully made it around the Sun yet another time! On December 31 the world partook of New Year’s Eve celebrations which mark the most popular secular holiday on the planet. Many people sang “Auld Lang Syne,” or “days long gone by” at midnight to kick-off the New Year. Auld Lang Syne asks its hearers to contemplate the past and whether or not it is worth remembering (“Should old times be forgot?”). The practice of looking back on the eve of a new year dates back to the Roman Empire and the god Janus who is the Roman god for which the month of January is named. The word “Janus” literally means “door.” Janus had two faces, one face looked forward while the other looked back. The two-faces of Janus symbolize “time” or “memory and expectation (looking backwards and forwards simultaneously).” By invoking Janus, or Auld Lang Syne for that matter, people are asked to take account of the previous year and perhaps imagine what the future may hold. As midnight approaches on New Year’s Eve, while each person anticipates the coming new year while watching other celebrations around the world on TV and the internet, a sacred event occurs! There is a sacredness or holiness in taking account of where we have been as well as dreaming about where we are going. In this sense New Year’s Eve is ritually significant in that a great mass of people the world over are given time and space to assess their lives and hope for a better future collectively.
We are all so busy. It is a curiously rare occurrence when we are given the time and opportunity to think about where we have been and where we are going. It is also increasingly rare that we are given the opportunity to collectively reflect in so great a multitude as New Year’s Eve. We are all so busy and we do not have the time or space to even ask ourselves which parts, if any, of our life are worth remembering or forgetting. We are generally not given the opportunity to dream about what the future may hold on account of our lack of time. When time keeping began to be standardized the 2nd century B.C. Roman playwright Plautinus said, “The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours. And, confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my days so wretchedly into small pieces.” The days are getting smaller still since the 2nd century B.C. Plautinus dealt with time being broken down into quarters of an hour with the sundial. Today, however, we are charged by the second when it comes to cell phone use and even nanoseconds when we speak of data usage on mobile devices. We are busy and we don’t have the time nor the equipment readily available to accurately measure the speed at which our world now operates. As the world turns faster and faster we must try to keep up with it! And, even though we cannot keep up with the rate at which the world moves we are held accountable to the ever pressing impositions on our time from email, social media, text messages, chat, a 24 hour news cycle, and lengthening hours of work. We have no down time! We are busy so we say, “I must try to save time.” Sometimes after working so hard to keep up with time we take time off. We complete tasks in a timely fashion for the sake of having more time to meet other obligations bound by time. Sometimes in our efforts to save time we lose time. And other times we wrongly say something is timeless (everything falls victim to time.)! In the end time is at best a constant reminder of our need to keep it because for all of us time is in limited supply. Once we have lost time we can never get it back. Given our busyness it seems as though we are all running for fear of running out of time. In this day and age with our smart phones, watches, wearable tech, clocks, and notifications we simply don’t have time to keep time because it would take too much time to keep! For us, in this day and age, time keeps us.
So, we are officially given permission one time each year as a secular society to communally reflect upon our lives and futures on New Year’s Eve. We are given the time to keep time! This secular action of reflection has a name in Christianity, it is called prayer. And, the busier we get, perhaps the more apparent it should be that prayer is needed. Martin Luther said, “A Christian without prayer is like being alive without breathing.” Praying is breathing! Prayer is “stepping out” of our busyness. Taking the time to pray is a powerful rejection of the ticking clock, “punching in and punching out” at work, counting down the minutes until break time, and, in the end prayer is a rejection of finitude itself. When we pray we step outside of time and step into eternity with God. In prayer, eternity collides with the past and the present wrapping them all into something that moves beyond “being in the moment” or “being mindful.” In prayer, the entire landscape of your life, past, present, and future, are fair game for reflection. Christianity is not so much about being in the moment as it is about being formed by God’s past and God’s future. The “moment,” that slippery little thing temporally called “now,” truly exists when both of those poles of our/God’s being are taken into account. That we cannot exist if God had not made us is a point of departure from an ahistorical now. We cannot hope and have no future if God had not promised eternity to us. So “now” or the “moment” is formed by delving deeply into God’s past, which is our past, and God’s future, which is our eternity. For Christians, this is the resurrected life lived today! And as I paraphrase what Luther said, “Praying is breathing.”
If praying is breathing, can we rightly say that we are alive when we bounce from task to task unreflectively and unaware of our communion with God, neighbor, and all creation? When you really take into account the limitedness of our life span it seems counterintuitive to take the time to pray. Why waste the time? But, in the end, is it not sacred and holy to “waste” time praying? Given the phrase “time is money” coupled with how overbooked each of our schedules are, is it not appropriate then to pray and reflect on those events and relationships which we have filled our schedules up with? Is prayer not an opportunity to slowly and patiently review those things that we have done and perhaps see God’s presence in our lives? And, having perceived God in the past, perhaps we will be better attuned to see, hear, and touch God in the present? Future?
Soren Kierkegaard said, “The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.” Prayer is the beginning of everything. For example, peace begins with a prayer. The first step towards a more peaceful world is to pray for it. In so doing we are admitting to our desire for peace. Praying for peace is the beginning of peace in that the subject of the prayer, peace, is the object of our desire and a desire for peace is congruent with God’s will for all humanity. So peace, congruent with God’s will, is made possible firstly by a person who desires it. So prayer is the beginning of peace. The ability to forgive begins with prayer. Much the same as peace, the first step in forgiving someone is the desire to forgive. So, in the absence of the desire to forgive, praying for the desire to forgive is the first seed of restoration that has been planted in the soil of the heart. From the seed of desire grows the possibility of forgiveness. Prayer then is the beginning of forgiveness.
Paul says in Philippians 4:6, “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your request be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4:17, “Pray without ceasing.” In this New Year, 2015, let us begin with prayer, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Let us pray unceasingly for a better and more forgiving world. Let us pray for peace. Let us pray for freedom from time and a life lived in eternity with God. Let us pray for the ability to listen to our families, friends, loved ones, and even our enemies. Let us pray for an end to homelessness and hunger. Let us pray, let us pray, let us pray… Lord, in your mercy. Hear our prayer. Amen.
Grace and peace,
Pastor Carmine Pernini
