Time to Think

“I hate my mom's phone and I wish she never had one.”

Those are the bitter words of a seven year old girl whose teacher had asked her to name an item she wished had never been invented. Like many of her classmates, she chose the cell phone. It appears as though that girl is jealous because her mother appears so bound up in tweeting and texting and emailing that she has no time left for her, and last week her poignant reflection boomed around the internet, read no doubt by most people on their phones.

The problem is the pressure that so many of us place on time. It is too easy to view time as a commodity that needs to be exploited to the full. We can end up cramming every single second with activity so there is no space left in our lives at all. Pope Francis has invented a word for this tendency ever to increase the pace of life. He calls it rapidification. A faster pace of life means an ever greater consumption of the world's finite resources, and so Pope Francis suggests that the pressure we are putting on time has become a critical issue for the future of the planet.

It may be that an eighth century Saint can pour some wisdom into this very contemporary conundrum. Bede was a monk who lived in the North of England around 672/3 – 735. Bede had a fascination with time. He monitored the tides, he watched the movements of the moon and stars, but Bede had a very different understanding of the purpose of time. For him time was not a commodity to fill up but a means of marking out the spaces where he could meet with god. It was a way of ensuring that life was fitted around a daily pattern of prayer and an annual calendar of seasons and festivals that told the story of Jesus. The purpose of time was to encounter the timelessness of God and, in so doing, to discover human identity.

Maybe there is something in Bede's thinking that can help us all. Rather than seeing time as something we have to fill up and exploit to the maximum, perhaps we might begin  to see it as the space in which relationships can be fed and human purpose explored. Empty time is good time. Being with those who are close to us is time well spent. Why not lose the phone, slow down and ‘waste' some time with the people you love.*

Author Info: Andrew Moore

Chaplain Andrew is the Associate Chaplain here at the Campus. Before relocating to Arizona in 2014, Andrew lived and studied in the united Kingdom. Andrew was ordained in the Anglican Church and has worked in a variety of parishes.