"A Timely Homily On What I Never Seem to Have"
(Father's Day)

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 15^th of June, 2003

Mark Belletini, Minister, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
following a week of mostly rainy skies,
to worship, to see ourselves and the world
from a perspective of compassion,
wisdom, wit, and unconditional love.
And so we open ourselves to the flow of time
and beauty and music and word by saying

And at celebration's end, may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves,
true to each other, and true to those shared visions of what we can together become.

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

And now, with the striking of the bell,
it is all transformed.
Like wizardry.
Like magic.
Something like presto changeo and hocus pocus,
but without the rabbits
or infinitely deep black hats.
The transformation is almost upon us.
Time measured by the hands of clocks
is not changed into time measured by breath,
in and out, in and out.
Time measured by memories and worries,
is not changed into time crafted
by the next heartbeat and the next.
Time's shadow stretching on a sundial
now changes into time's unsurpassed brightness
shining on the present second.
It's almost here,
a magic trick no different
than the first second of creation..
I am pulling the curtain back.
I am turning the card.
Look, it's the one you guessed…

(silence)

From one ancient second,
13 billion years ago, all others seconds.
All stars and all people and all calendars
and all clocks and all seasons…
knowing we share a common origin,
we can embrace those we share this world with…those we love, those who have helped us, those who have challenged us, those we struggle to love, those we miss. May we embrace them all by naming them tenderly in the quiet of our hearts, or aloud in the sanctuary of this place.

(naming)

Time flows in all of creation,
the very stuff of hope and memory,
the powerful magic that separates yesterday from tomorrow with the present moment.
But I wonder, who hopes in us now?
And I wonder, who will remember us in
in a thousand years? In a hundred? In ten…?

First Reading [Next] [back to top] is an early poem by Wislawa Szymborska, Four A.M. written while I was still in grade school.

The hour between night and day.
The hour between toss and turn.
An hour for thirty-year-olds, not me.

The hour that's swept clean
for the crowing of roosters.
The hour when the earth takes back
it's warm embrace.
The hour of cool breezes
left over from extinguished stars.
The hour when we ask
"Will-we-too-vanish-without-a-trace?"
An empty hour. Hollow. Wasted.
Rock bottom of all the other hours.
No one feels fine at four a.m.
If ants feel fine at four a.m.,
we're happy for the ants.
But I say let five a.m. come
since we've got to go on living.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] is a more recent poem by a Poet Laureate of the United States, Billy Collins:

It was after dinner.
You were talking to me across the table
about something or other,
a greyhound you had seen that day
or a song you liked,
and I was looking past you
over your bare shoulder
at the three oranges lying
on the kitchen counter
next to the small electric bean grinder,
which was also orange,
and the orange and white cruets
for vinegar and oil.

All of which converged
into a random still life,
so fastened together by the clasp of color,
and so fixed behind the animated
foreground of your
talking and smiling,
gesturing and pouring wine,
and the camber of your shoulders
that I could feel it being painted within me,
brushed on the wall of my skull,
while the tone of your voice
lifted and fell in its flight,
and the three oranges
remained fixed on the counter
the way stars are said
to be fixed in the universe.

Then all the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from the millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes.
Even after I have forgotten what year it is,
my middle name,
and the meaning of money,
I will still carry in my pocket
the small coin of that moment
minted in the kingdom
that we pace through every day.

Sermon: "A Timely Homily On What I Never Seem to Have" (Father's Day) [Next][back to top]

In mid-June every year, when I was growing up we had a big family dinner, very fancy, come mid-June. At that supper we celebrated Father's Day, both for my two grandfathers and my own father. My grandmother Anna and I also got a cake for our birthday, which fell on the same day. It was like a miniature Christmas.

Now it's changed. No fancy dinner any more. My grandparents are all buried, and my father is four hours away. Things are simpler in the year 2003, Common Era. I'll call my dad later today, and we'll talk for a while. He's sent me his typical sweet birthday card, which always gets here about five days before my actual day. This year he wrote me this note inside the card.

"Hope to pay you a visit soon. Have a great day and don't count the years because they sure pass fast."

"Don't count the years."

Ah, but we do, here in the Western World. We count them with Birthdays. Birthdays are especially big here in the States, more than in any other country. But they are not big everywhere. Or even known. My grandmother Carmelina, an Italian peasant, told me that she didn't really know the day she was actually born. Her mother gave her the purported day of her conception to celebrate instead. And in many areas of the world, the counting of years from the day of one's birth is simply unknown. Billions of folks on this earth have absolutely no idea how old they are, and have no idea why this birthday idea is considered important elsewhere.

Same thing is true of the commonly expressed idea over here of a day consisting of "morning and evening." In parts of Central Asia, for example, the day is divided up into five distinctly named parts. And Jews the world over will tell you that "tomorrow" begins at sunset tonight, not at the far hour of midnight. Also, for Jews everywhere, New Year begins in the middle of September, not January. And a hundred million Muslims celebrate their own New Year day, thank you. But their version of the calendar is so fluid that their central holiday month, Ramadan, may be a summer holiday when you are a child, and a winter holiday when you are a grownup.

Obviously, time itself has no divisions. Time is just time. Only human beings busy themselves with calculating the beginnings and endings of things based on clocks and holidays and calendars and ideas, all of which are different around the world.

Of course, in this first decade of the twentieth century, I am not sure exactly what is being divided up into all these days, hours, minutes and seconds, into all of these new years and leap years and holy times and secular measurements.

After all, I usually don't even have any time to divide up into arbitrary bits. Do you?

"I don't have any time."

Have you ever said that?

I certainly have. Over and over again. And I often still say it… to friends who ask me to visit them, to family members who ask me to dinner, to denominational leaders who ask me to lead a committee, to acquaintances who ask me to do their wedding on a day I'm doing two others, to folks I just meet who assume that I can get together with them on Sundays for a nice 10 o'clock brunch.

"I don't have any time." It's a common phrase these days, along with its twins… "I'm busy. I'm drowning. I'm buried."

But, of course, I do have time. So do you. Twenty-four hours a day of time, every single day. You and I have 365 days a year of time. It's what we do with the time we have that's really the issue.

Ah, but if time itself has no divisions, and all such divisions are arbitrary, and if my father is right that it's best not to count the years because they go by so fast, then what is time anyway?

When St. Augustine was asked that very question, he thought about it for a moment, and then quite rightly said, "If you ask me what time is, I don't know. But if you don't ask me, then I'll know." I'm not usually fond of what St. Augustine has to say, but I have to give him a high five on this one.

But of course, riddles like St. Augustine's are not satisfying to everyone. So, according to what I understand from my physicist friends, time, if you really want to know, is part and parcel with the whole universe, which can be accurately called "the space-time continuum." Physicists put a dash between the words "space" and "time" to make them into one new word, and to show that without space, there is no time.

Thus, the universe as we know it has four dimensions, length, width, breadth and duration, that is, time. Time and space, therefore, are one, inseparable reality. But as soon as I start to talk about time in this way, I begin to wonder which riddle is better, the one offered by the physicists, or the one offered by St. Augustine. Suddenly, the saint snaps back like a stretched rubber band, released. "If you ask me what time is, I really don't know. But if you don't ask me, then I'll know."

It's not like I've tried not to know. I actually have gone to the best minds on earth to try and figure out the answer to this question. I once had the opportunity to hear Stephen Hawking, the great physicist, lecture on the subject of "time" at the University of California, in Berkeley. He gave his talk at Zellerbach Hall, which easily holds three thousand. He was also televised into three other halls, each seating thousands. And finally, his words were piped out to where I was sitting, one of five thousand packed onto the square in front of Zellerbach. Speakers the size of my car broadcast his amazing lecture with stunning clarity, the strange voice created by his computerized speaking mechanism resonating with great clarity over thousands of attentive heads.

At one point, a group of ragged men crossed over from Telegraph Ave, extremely high on something other than knowledge. They started to interrupt the lecture with wild shouts and curses. The entire crowd of five thousand, as if they were one single person, turned toward the noise-makers, put their fingers in unison to their lips, and made the sound Shhhhhhhhhhh----. This immediately terrified the small group of troublemakers, who ran away at once.

Now Dr. Hawking used perfectly clear English. He did not use a single word that any high school graduate wouldn't know. No grand multi-syllable words that have not yet found their way into the dictionary. Yet I found his talk on time hard to follow anyway. I could understand every word in the sentence, but as soon as he came to the end of the sentence, it was as if my inner foot hit the brake pedal in my brain, and I came to a complete stop.

But there was one sentence he used that I shall always remember word for word. "It's possible that one day, time will flow in such a direction that we shall remember the future."

"Remember the future." What a wonderful phrase!

I know that as I grow older every year on my birthday, it's actually something I wish I could do. I wish I could "remember" what my godson Ben will be doing in twenty years. I wish I could remember what my friends' children will be doing in 2063.

I wish I could know what will happen once I am gone, by "remembering" it. But good Dr. Hawking really wasn't exactly talking about such a thing, as far as I can figure out. So in my present lifetime, there's no way I can "remember" tomorrow. I can only remember yesterday as usual.

I do remember having a hard time sleeping one day this week. I had so many things I promised to do, so many letters I had to get out, so many chores I had to complete before I fell asleep one night. I lay there awake, my eyes open like the full moon. It was a l-o-n-g night, it was.

Of course, it wasn't really long. It was an 8 hour night as usual. The hours and even the minutes were the same length they were on the nights I slept soundly, the same length they have been ever since the ancient Babylonians decided to cut free flowing time into these little segments called minutes, with 60 in an hour.

But it felt like a long night. And, at 4 AM, it was exactly as Szymborska says it is in her poem. It's the very hour between night and day, the hour between toss and turn. Thirty year olds can stay up that late, she reminds us. But she and I can't stay up that late any more and not be done-in the next day.

4 AM, she says, is an empty hour. Hollow. No one feels fine at four a.m. If ants feel fine at four a.m., we're happy for the ants.

But certainly not for ourselves.

And yet the 4 AM hour is exactly the same length as the 7 PM hour earlier that day when I was having a joyous dinner with friends. That hour passed by in a second. The 4 o'clock A.M. hour passed by in a week.

The ancient Greeks knew what St. Augustine knew…namely, that it's impossible to accurately define time because the experience of time is so often personal and subjective. They knew that sometimes human beings experience time as painfully slow, like Szymborska and me in our respective beds. They knew that sometimes human beings experience time as fast, like my father looking over his life from the vantage of 81. But the Greeks also knew that the subjective time which stretches into slow and concentrates into fast, is quite different from the cool shadow of objective time which moves across the sundial at exactly the same speed each and every day. Sundial time they called "Chronos," from which we get our English word "chronometer." But experienced time they called "kairos"… the right time," it's some times translated, or "the fullness of time." And of the two kinds of time, chronos and kairos, our spiritual ancestors revered the second, kairos the fullness of time.

And it's Billy Collins' poem which, for me, really seals the deal for me about this idea of "the fullness of time." I think he really conveys to me the power of a moment that is not counted, divided, or x'ed off on a calendar, but simply experienced. He describes a perfectly ordinary moment after supper, where he catches sight of his wife's bare shoulder, and three oranges on the counter behind her, and all of a sudden

"all the moments of the past
began to line up behind that moment
and all the moments to come
assembled in front of it in a long row,
giving me reason to believe
that this was a moment I had rescued
from the millions that rush out of sight
into a darkness behind the eyes."

No more years and months, birthdays and holidays, anniversaries or clocks, just the moment, the eternal now, the one thing that is not a thing, which can never be divided, split or pieced. The now, the present moment, kairos, which is neither past nor future. And no blade is sharp enough to separate the past from the future except the present moment, the present second. And that moment…that flash of a second, complete with oranges, love, and ordinary life, becomes his prayer for the day, his connection with reality, his appreciation for being alive, his thanksgiving. It is his blessing on the length, width, breadth and duration we call space-time, the whole future and past of the universe, all wrapped up into the present. The present which he perceives (maybe for the first time, I don't know), as a present, a gift, a wonder, a perfect rose blossoming in his hand.

Such time, such a moment, cannot be calendared or clocked, or in the poet's words, paced. It can only be experienced in the twinkling of an eye.

Life is blessed by such moments, when the ordinary reveals itself as extraordinary, when the banal blossoms as the sacred. Those are the moments which slow down the life that speeds on by so quickly, and quickens the life which languishes sleepless in bed. Such a moment can't be commanded or created of course…it can only be received, in the manner one receives birthday presents. But I think anyone can be open to such moments, as long as they know the truth hiding behind our clocks and calendars and counting… the truth that every day is our birthday, every day is a birthday gift, and every breath is both our first and our last. The world can indeed be seen in every grain of sand, infinity lies in the palm of your hand, and eternity is here, right now, not tomorrow. Blest is this moment, and all with whom I share it on "most this amazing day."

Father's Day Prayer [back to top]

O Song of Love
which we did not begin,
and which we shall not conclude,
where are our fathers?

Wherever wholeness and brokenness meet.
Wherever human beings admit
to actually being human.
Whenever we act or think with patterns
we don't remember learning
at our mother's knee.
Whenever we are afraid and do it anyway.
Wherever and whenever
we find ourselves amazed
to be alive at all.
Song, neither begun nor ending,
here we are.

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Last update: 07/6/2003