Running Down the Clock
[powerpress]http://www.fuub.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Running-Down-the-Clock.m4a[/powerpress]
I once had the good fortune of sitting down on the subway next to a guy who was playing a driving game on his iPhone. He had the sound turned way up so everyone in the subway car could hear every time his tires screeched and his car flipped over and went crashing into the side rail. This happened about every 30 seconds, at which point he would curse loudly, throw up his hands in frustration, and then hunker down and restart the game. He seemed oblivious to the fact that he was both annoying and entertaining everyone in the subway car.
At one point, after one of his outbursts, I laughed and we made eye contact and he laughed too, thinking that I was laughing with him rather than at him. He offered me his phone saying, “You want to try?” I said, “Sure.” He showed me how it works, how you tip the phone from right to left to make the car change lanes, tap the screen to make it go faster. I realized quickly that it’s the kind of game that rewards people who play it a lot. And it’s really stressful. My car ended up in multi-car pileups over and over and within seconds, I became that guy, hunched over the phone, making a scene in the subway.
I had been laughing but it is so easy for a game to feel real. We get sucked in all the time. Not just literal computer games but all the games of our world, all the striving we do, all the spinning our wheels for things that, at the end of the day, mean little or nothing. We get so invested in trivialities and yet ultimately we’re just running down the clock on our own lives.
My subway ride that day was a return home from Barnes & Noble after buying The Communist Manifesto. There are so many delicious ironies here, including the fact that I was sitting there playing with a phone probably produced by exactly the kind of meaningless factory labor that Karl Marx so reviled. It’s also ironic that The Communist Manifesto is on the shelf at Barnes & Noble at all. This text about the revolution of the working class is now helping to line the pockets of a multinational corporation. And even though Karl Marx’s economics have been debunked by most economists and, some would say, by history itself, we’re still reading his books – not only academics but apparently the public at large. I think it’s because, like Scripture, we recognize ourselves in the poetry of the text.
One thing Marx definitely got right is the insight that I’ve talked about before — that time is the ultimate form of human wealth on this earth. Without time, all other forms of wealth are meaningless. To his way of thinking it’s the labor time embedded in a commodity that gives it its value. Regardless of whether this is literally true or not, it is clear that our human life hours on this planet are all we really have and all we really have to give. Even the money we have is just a congealed form of the time it took to earn it. It is this insight about time that makes the stakes so high in how we spend it.
We typically spend our time in a flurry of activity. As good Capitalists, when we’re not producing, we’re usually consuming. And when we’re not consuming, we’re usually producing. And sometimes we do both at once. It’s bad for business if two people are happy just sitting on a bench talking without a Starbucks coffee in one hand and a smartphone in the other. It’s bad for business if people feel like we have enough or are enough. So we spend our lives running ourselves and our children ragged, striving to scratch that itch that the backscratcher can’t reach, maybe trying to cure an incurable dissatisfaction with who we are. More, more, more. Stopping is not an option. And if we do happen upon any free time when we don’t have to be racing from point A to point B, apparently we spend it on our iPhones pretending to race from point A to point B.
How strange is that. How strange that we play these games. That in our free time, we replace our real busyness with faux or vicarious busyness. We play driving games or watch competitive sports or violent TV shows like the news. Or we make an obsessive science of choosing what clothes to buy. Or we spy on our ex on Facebook. We shop for things we don’t need, work out endlessly on a Stairmaster, watch a YouTube video of someone’s cat falling off a television set and then forward it to all our virtual friends. Running down the clock.
All these things seem to do is to kill time. And it’s strange that we’re so eager to kill time when we always feel like we have so little of it. Weird that we’re willing to run down the clock when we’re so concerned about our mortality. Especially because, of course, we don’t actually kill time – time kills us. It marches on inexorably regardless of what we do; indifferent to how we spend our lives. We become, in Marx’s words, “at best, time’s carcass.” Maybe we’re in denial about this.
Maybe we’re in denial because we’re addicted to these games we play. We get strung along, looking for the next fix. It feels good to get those new shoes, it feels good when your team wins the Superbowl, it feels good when 15, 20, 30 people “like” your Facebook post. And these ephemeral things sometimes substitute for real meaning in our lives. Think about how we were told after September 11th that the most meaningful, most American response we could offer was to go out and shop. That’s denial.
I believe our best work as a religious community happens when we break through this denial. When we can look at our lives from 40,000 feet, the God’s-eye view, the sober view from the future end of our days and ask ourselves how will we really want to have spent them. Our best work as a religious community happens when we can separate out what’s a game from what’s real and get inspired to demand the real and accept no imitations. To paraphrase Marx, it is our task to pluck the imaginary flowers from the chain, not so that we have to bear the chain without comfort, but so that we can cast off the chain and pluck the living flower. At our best, this is what we do here.
Of course Marx didn’t think religion could accomplish this. He put religion in the same category as he would have put the empty busyness of an iPhone driving game – opiates that anaesthetize us and feed our denial; vapid pleasures that compensate us for the tragic meaninglessness and alienation of our lives. Is Marx right? Is religion a drug that anaesthetizes us and keeps us dreaming of the afterlife so we don’t rock the boat in this life? I’d like to think that, while some religions certainly function that way, real religion has the opposite effect. I’d like to think that Unitarian Universalism and other traditions at their best sensitize us, rather than desensitize us. They radicalize us. They paint a vision of how life could be that’s different from how it is. They impel us to take risks. They call us back to wisdom in how we spend our time.
Think of the Ecclesiastes reading we shared earlier – it suggests the raw essential things that we really have time for: “a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up; a time to weep and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.” The list goes on, but nowhere, may I point out, does it say, “a time to play a game on your iPhone and a time to post a selfie; a time to take it down because it looks stupid and a time to post another one.” It doesn’t say that.
My prayer for you who have joined this congregation this morning – John, Adam, Kristen, Desiree, Ashley, Mi, Emily, Ethan, Lisa, Mitchel, Jami, Liz, Lodz, and Katie – my prayer for you is that you can allow this community and this religion to kick your butt to cast off whatever chains might be holding you back, stop playing whatever games you might be playing, and live your real life in the time you have left on this earth. This doesn’t mean that you can’t relax and have fun – but have fun in ways that genuinely connect you – to others, to God, or to yourself. Have fun in ways that you will be glad you did at the end of your life.
This is your one life; as far as we know, your one and only life. This is the moment, not tomorrow or the next day, this is the moment to take care of business. And what that means is something different for each one of us. This is the moment to deal with what you need to deal with in your family, with your friends, your partner. This is the moment to start a prayer or meditation practice. This is the moment to end a relationship that’s not feeding you or quit a job that’s leaving you cold. This is the moment to visit your friend in Alaska or Hong Kong. This is the moment to start painting, writing, playing the sitar. Whatever it is for you, this is the moment to take a risk. Author Cynthia Heimel says, “When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So what the hell, leap.”
So all of this is not a call for us all to carry around copies of The Communist Manifesto (although I have one if you want it) or to delete the game apps on our iPhones (although that wouldn’t be a bad idea either). It is a call for us to notice the apps that our consumer society has downloaded into our consciousness without our full awareness and to take back the control of our most precious resource: our time. To use whatever practice makes sense and has meaning to step back, step out, and step away from the routines of our day or week and demand the real in our lives. To live less vicariously and more vividly. To escape the world less and affirm the world more. To respond to the ticking clock of our lives by plucking the living flower.
