Every now and again, I read a book that blows me out of the water. Not an interesting book. Not a book that has some good things to say. But the kind of book that when you put it down, you are forced to live in a new way because you’ve seen too much. You know too much, and now you can never go back because it’s ruined you or maybe saved you.
Or maybe both.
That’s what happened when I read Carl Honore’s In Praise of Slowness (slowplanet.com). Honore has joined voices with many others who are calling into question our culture’s obsession with speed. He is advocating a different way to live. Slowly.
There is a chapter in which Honore recounts the first European town to set up a clock in the town square and how that clock re-ordered the life of the community, and eventually the world. There is no corner or crevice of life untouched by the obsession with speed: food, work, sex, parenting, and the list goes on.
His assessment of our culture’s obsession with time got me thinking about clocks. Namely, the fact that they’re everywhere. If I want to know what time it is, I have only to look at my wrist or my cell phone. There’s a clock featured prominently on the wall at home. There’s a clock on my computer screen, on the oven, on the coffee maker, on the television, and in any public place you never have to look far to find one. The proliferation of clocks in our world seems to me symptomatic of something much more than an obsession with time. It makes me think of idolatry.
Idols were images of gods, often placed in places of worship and people’s homes. Idol making was big business. I’m still looking into it, but I’m convinced that people carried around smaller images on their person, and that all of these idols were meant to be visual reminders of a person’s responsibility to live in obedience to that god. Every ticking clock around me screams, “You have somewhere to be. Time is running out. Get a move on.”
If you think you’re exempt from this form of idolatry, pay attention to these kinds of statements: “If I can just get through Thursday, then things will slow down.” This turns into “If I can just get through May, then things are going to slow down,” which then morphs into “If I can just get my masters degree finished, by 2013 I’ll have some time for my family, for myself and my sanity.” Eventually, you begin to feel that you aren’t living your life but that your life is living you, that you are simply a passive observer as time moves on-a hamster on a wheel, just waiting for the day when you have some time. I’ve actually heard people say things like, “I’ve been living for my kids for 30 years. I just want 10 years of my life that can be mine, belong to me.” And now the house that was supposed to pay for retirement won’t sell. At some point you have to wonder, will I have wasted all this time chasing after a future that has been present all along?
Then there’s God, who is obsessed with Sabbath, who, in fact, built it into the rhythm of creation. Page after page of the Hebrew Scriptures you find God reminding the Israelites just how serious he is about keeping Sabbath. Then you get Jesus saying, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” In my mind, that was Jesus’ way of telling people that they were meant to live their lives and not the other way around.
Our obsession with the next thing takes us out of the present. There is an interesting Jewish take on Exodus 24. God calls Moses up on top of Mt. Sinai and says, “Come up to me on the mountain and stay here.” The Jews, who love the text more than anything and read it carefully and lovingly noted God’s interesting semantics. They believed that the God of the Universe didn’t waste any words (doesn’t waste any words), and that the addition of the phrase “and stay here” was either God stuttering or something entirely different. And since God doesn’t waste any words, they gathered that God was saying something profound. See, Moses’ hike up Mt. Sinai would have taken hours-a long, arduous trip. Maybe, the Jews surmised, God told Moses to “stay here” or “be here” because Moses would already have been thinking about going back down the mountain. The classic case of being here but not really being here.
Like when you’re out with someone trying to have a conversation and they’re looking at they’re watch or paying attention to everything else around you except what you’re actually saying. Or the person who answers their phone while you’re with them. They are physically sitting across from you, but they are somewhere else.
At any rate, the story of Israel, and I would argue the story of human history, is the story of idolatry: looking to created things for the peace that only comes from God. Anything can be an idol, but I think there are a few that are particular to our culture: time, stuff, nationalism, militarism, individualism.
And the Scriptures are clear, idols are lifeless and those who make them are like them. Lifeless.
One last story. There’s a Jewish tale about Abraham. The story goes that Abraham’s father was an idol maker and that Abraham helped him cut down the trees. One half was shaped into an idol. The other half was burned for fuel. One day, Abraham’s father had to run some errands and left Abraham in charge of his vast collection of idols. Abraham, so the story goes, took an axe and chopped down all of the idols except one. When his father returned, he asked Abraham, “What have you done?” Abraham replied, “This one idol must have taken the axe and chopped down all the others.” “C’mon Abraham,” his father replied. “We both know that’s not possible. They aren’t even alive.” To which Abraham replied, “So why then do you worship them?”
I think that’s the question for all of us. Why, then, do we worship them? Why do we let the clock call the shots? We were created to live our lives not the other way around.