Story for All Ages
(the children go to
Religious Education at the end of the story and the adults sing "Spirit of Life" )
Today I will just make a simple statement and let you all think about it. At five minutes and six seconds after 4am on the 8th of July this year,
the time and date will be 04:05:06 07/08/09.
Hymn:
# 123 (STLT)
"Spirit of Life" by Carolyn McDade (adapted)
Spirit of Life, come unto us,
Sing in our hearts all the stirrings of compassion.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;
Move in our hands, giving life the shape of justice.
Roots hold us close; wings set us free;
Spirit of Life, come to us, come to me.
First Reading
A thought About Time
For our reading this morning I have put little slips of paper with thoughts on time, through the centuries into this basket, please take one, read it aloud and pass
the basket along.
On January 1, 1972, the definition of a second was designated as the atomic second -- 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the
cesium atom -- and Coordinated Universal Time was set by international agreement ... the time, abstract, universal, monotime.
But. There is no such thing. Despite its seemingly ubiquitous global dominance (anyplace where Western capitalism -- which
has forever linked money to time -- has made deep inroads), the ideology of Western time is just one of thousands upon
thousands of other, different ideologies that are literally more natural than our synthetic time, that of plastic plants pretending
to a perennial summer and year-round Astroturf trampling on real spring's grass seedlings. In countless other cultures past and
present, time can be embodied only in the natural world and in nature's processes, where it has true immediacy and radiance,
where it is a sensual perception, not a notation.
-- Jay Griffiths, "The Nature of Time" (Body & Soul, September/October 2002)
Never say that you have no time. On the whole it is those who are busiest who can make time for yet more, and those who have more leisure time who refuse to do something when asked. What we lack is not time, but heart.
- Henri Boulard, Egyptian Jesuit
In the now is all time, and to understand the now is to be free of time. Becoming is the continuation of time, of sorrow. Becoming does not contain being. Being is always in the present, and being is the highest form of transformation.
- J. Krishnamurti
Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of.
- Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanac
It has often been observed, that those who have the most time at their disposal profit by it the least.
- William Ellery Channing
The years are too short, the days are too long.
- Joseph Heller, Something Happened
We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.
- John F. Kennedy
Time does only co-exist with creatures, and is only conceived by the order and quantity of their changes.
- Gottfried Leibniz
If nothing happened, if nothing changed, time would stop. For time is nothing but change. It is change that we perceive as occurring all around us, not time. In fact, time doesn't exist. What exists are just "nows."
- Julian Barbour, British physicist
Whether, if soul did not exist, time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked; for if there cannot be some one to count there cannot be anything that can be counted.
- Aristotle
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
- Anne Dillard
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
- T.S. Eliot
Time rushes by and yet time is frozen. Funny how we get so exact about time at the end of life and at its beginning. She died at 6:08 or 3:46, we say, or the baby was born at 4:02. But in between we slosh through huge swatches of time—weeks, months, years, decades even.
- Helen Prejean
There is never enough time, unless you're serving it.
- Malcolm Forbe
Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.
- Theophrastus
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