BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
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  • BUUC Home
  • Events
  • About the BUUC
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    • BUUC Committees >
      • Executive Committee
      • Worship Committee
      • Membership Committee
      • The Women's Alliance
      • Flower Committee
  • Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Stewardship and Gift Policy
    • Saints We've Known
    • Charitable Giving and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act
  • Sermons 2022-23
    • A Waste of time
    • The Seventh Principle
    • Make Light of It
    • A Turn of the Screw
    • America: Part II
    • What Do You Expect?
    • Good Mourning
    • Beyone Repair?
    • No Signal
    • Absolutely, Maybe, Definitely Not
    • Do Guardian Angels Exist?
    • Right Here
  • Our Covenant
  • Minister's Welcome
  • Religious Exploration
  • Music & Choir
  • We Rise: Social Justice Resources
  • Newsletters
  • Church Calendar
  • Unitarian Universalism
  • Driving Directions
  • Photos of Us
  • Making the BUUC Accessible
  • LOVEUU
  • Community Resources
    • Mental Health Providers, Worcester MA
    • Southern Worcester County Parent Guide
  • Contact Us
    • Sermons 2021-22
  • Sermon Archives
    • Finding Joy in Uncertain Times
    • The Arithmetic of Joy
    • Of Muck and Martyrs
    • Doing Dishes
    • Idle Worship
    • The Fear of the Refugee
    • It's Not Just You
    • If We Choose
    • Lazy Busy
    • A Most Human Season
    • Running on Empty
    • Alone Together
    • Come Home
    • Winter Warmth
    • How Big Is Your Circle?
    • Thanksgiving Life
    • Kurt Vonnegut: Humanist Hero
    • In Costume
    • Again
    • Borderland
    • The Geometry of Life
    • Transformation and Growth
    • Come Build a Land
    • Our Brains, Our Minds and Our Hearts
    • Gifts
    • Repairers of the Breach
    • The Times They Are A-Changin'
    • Mission Possible
    • It Matters
    • Thanksgiving Reflection
    • Shoes That Fit
    • Winter
    • Ignorance, Answers, and Bliss
    • Questions, Questions
    • Living to the Point of Tears
    • Lost in the Shuffle: UU's Less Popular Principle
    • On the Turning Away
    • A Matter of Degree
    • A Collection of Near Death Experiences
    • I Know Her So Well, I Think. I Thought.
    • Faith-based Resilience
    • To Abet Creation
    • Who Cares?
    • A Matter of Life and Depth
    • Pass/Fail
    • Enough
    • O Holy Light
    • With New Eyes
    • Coming Alive
    • Beyond Words
    • Becoming
    • A Miracle Even Thomas Jefferson Could Embrace
    • Fear Not!
    • The Miracle of Change
    • Meeting Grace
    • R-E-S-P-E-C-T
    • Serving with Grace
    • The Pursuit of Happiness
    • When Heresy Met Sally
    • The Souls of All Living Creatures
    • What Are You Looking For?
    • Beloved
    • Let Me Count The Ways
    • Happiness
    • Chosen
    • Faith and Belief
    • Room To Grow
    • Blessed Fools
    • Don't Be a Superhero
    • Getting There from Here
    • Unfinished Business
    • Universalism's Origen
    • Yearn to Learn
    • Beauty Saves
    • Commentary on Freedom
    • Being Human: Religious Community in a Plastic Age
    • Questionable Certainties and Faithful Doubts
    • Commentaries on Murphy's Law
    • Children of a Lesser God
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Life Incarnate
    • So You Want to Be Happy
    • A Year's End Resolution
    • Where Stars Are Born
    • Thanking Eve
    • Anger, Our Teacher
    • Everlasting Punishment
    • Comprehending Moral Imperatives in a Me-centered World
    • Promises Kept
    • Dancing With The Stars: Science and Religion
    • Two Steps and Missteps: Church Membership for Human Beings
    • Light of the World
    • Dear God
    • Imago Hominis
    • CESA: Reflections on Drug Addiction
    • Falling in Love Again
    • How Does Your Garden Grow
    • Repent! No Guilt Trip Required
    • Go Out into the World
    • Thanks-living
    • Life and Not Life
    • Guilty As Charged
    • Dare To Hope
    • Don't Forget To Chew
    • Break the Silence - Stop the Violence
    • Living Among Strangers
    • What Is Religion Anyway?
    • East of Eden
    • Praying Attention
    • Wholly Human
    • The Healing Power of Forgiveness
    • All I Want for Christmas
    • Let It Be...Let It Go
    • Why Not?
    • People Like You
    • Vulnerable Trust
    • Thin Places
    • Now What?
    • Courageously Humble
    • The Last Butterfly
    • The Good, The Bad, and The Whole
    • Sacred Souvenirs
    • Made Whole
    • This Wild and Precious Life
    • Fragile Nets of Meaning
    • Where Our Future Can Begin
    • Taking Stock: Managing Our Spiritual Inventory
    • To Convert Life into Truth
    • Are We There Yet?
    • Family Matters
    • Ordinary Saints
    • All I Wanted Was Everything
    • Giving Thanks
    • To Be or Not To Be
    • Entering the Christmas Story
    • A Great Light
    • What's Real?
    • Troubling the Water
    • The Amazing Mr. Wedgewood
    • Lend Me Your Ears
    • Work That Is Real
    • Happy Melba Toast Day
    • The Great Pacific Garbage Dump
    • Plastics, Benjamin!
    • Surprise Beginnings
    • A Place at the Table
    • Norbert Capek’s Flower Communion: A Call To Honor Life
    • Voices of God
    • Hold On To What Is Good
    • The Little Stone Church That Rocks
    • What Would Jean-Luc Do?: A Tribute to Humanist Hero Gene Roddenberry
    • From Who am I? to Whose are We?
    • Turning
    • Spirituality
    • R & R
    • Spritual F-Words
    • Does Anyone Really Like Herding Cats?
    • Prepare to Be Amazed
    • The Greatest Gift
    • The Impossible Will Take A Little While
    • Taking Sides: Journey to the Center of the Universe
    • Help Wanted, Apply Within
    • Two Truths & Plastics and Water Don't Mix
    • The Third Conversation
    • Good People >
      • UU You >
        • Twitter and Covid and Wall Street, Oh, my!
        • I Do Believe in Spooks >
          • Holy Homophones >
            • What's in a Name?
            • So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye!
            • Open-Mindedness, As Assigned
            • Going on a Journey
            • Cheap Love
            • Nonproductive Delight
            • The Persistence of Memory
            • Thoughts about the Historical Jesus
            • Lindens and Tiarella and Bearberry, Oh My!
            • Season's Greetings
            • I Still Have A Dream
            • Peace Corps - A Lesson in Caring
            • Spiritual Engineering
            • Thanks for the Memories
            • Our Stories, Ourselves
            • Anxious Gardeners
            • The Best Sermon Ever!
            • UUnited
            • We Are Courageous
            • A Right Way to Be Wrong
            • Sacred Ideals
            • This Wild and Precious Life Revisited
            • 20/20
            • Home
            • What About Now?
        • Fragile
        • Time Ravel
        • Now Is Not the Time for Hope
        • The G Word (It's Probably Not what You Think)
    • No Thanks, I'll Walk
    • Be the Change
    • I Don't Know
    • What Lies Within
    • Guest Perspective
    • Growing Panes
    • De Colores
    • Roots and Wings
BROOKFIELD UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH
A Waste of Time
Barbara Hale
March 12, 2023
 
I lost an hour last night and I am not happy about it.  Every year when Daylight Savings Time rolls around, I get discombobulated and simply have a hard time adjusting.  It can be days until I am back to my normal tired and grumpy self.

Yes, I am a bah humbug about Daylight Savings Time.  And unfortunately, I only got my clocks changed to the falling back time a little over a month ago so now I have to do it again.  Bummer! 

When my husband Greg was around, he dutifully changed the clocks as soon as his feet hit the floor spring and fall.  But me…I just constantly do the math in my head.  Sometimes I am successful and often I’m not because I must remember am I springing forward or am I falling back.  Why don’t I just change the clocks like Greg did, you might ask.  Well, I don’t know why.  I just don’t.  It may be because I don’t think we should be changing the darn clocks twice a year and I can be stubborn. And maybe I’m just waiting for Greg to change them.

I will gladly admit that I am bad about clocks.  But I do think about time a lot. At least in the metaphorical and nostalgic sense. And I think about the days passing and how little I’ve managed to accomplish with them.

But mostly, I think about sitting on my bike as a kid counting cars going past our houses with my good friend Randy who lived up the street from us.  He got a point for every Chevy, and I got a point for every Ford. We lived out in the country, so our counts were low.  Still, we sat for hours on our bikes just wasting time and counting in the heat and humidity of the Ohio summer.  When it got too much for us, we would mosey down to his basement to watch old Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes movies.  Nothing accomplished.

I think about graduating from high school and my college days partying more than studying.  I think about when Greg and I got married and about having two kids and eventually 8 cats and 3 dogs.  I think about the first time we walked into this church when I was still in my thirties…just barely.  And now I am an elder here.  I think about times when I just sat and stared off into space trying to clear my head.  Time.  It has all gone so fast.

I sure don’t want to go back, especially to the hot Ohio summers.  But I do miss the people I’ve lost. Over the years I’ve lost my parents and my dear sister Cindy, my husband Greg, aunts, uncles and cousins, friends, 6 cats and 3 dogs.  Would I love to spend more time with each and every one of them?  Of course.  But that’s not the way time works in our universe.  It just keeps going forward except for in the fall when we get that one measly hour back.  Regardless, we must keep in step with time because we have no choice.

But when I think about what I miss the most about times passing, it’s not anything of a constructive nature or even regret for the things I have failed to accomplish.  What I miss are my father’s goofy jokes and his kindness to strangers.  I miss sitting and eating radishes with Cindy and solving all the world’s problems.  I miss the long road trips that Greg and I took and the days when we just got into the car and wandered.  Once on a beautiful, warm, early spring day, we wandered around in Connecticut and then Rhode Island for hours looking for an open ice cream stand.  Clearly, we were too early, and we ended up back here in Massachusetts late in the afternoon, but we found ice cream.  I miss talking with my mother and my aunt Irene about the Cincinnati Reds and my mother and Irene admiring Joey Votto’s assets.  I miss Ruth King saying cheerfully that it’s good to be seen.  However, not one of the things I miss has anything to do with work or anything serious.  What I miss is wasting time with the people I love the most.

In my humble opinion, we don’t allow ourselves enough to waste time.  We live overscheduled lives.  We’re constantly plugged in.  We admire multi-tasking even if that’s not the most efficient way to get stuff done.  It’s just the way it is in 2023.  We live in a plugged-in universe.  Facebook Tic Toc, Instagram, Twitter…Brother!  I’m not going to diminish the necessity of work because it is necessary, but it is a very good thing to unplug now and then.

A few years ago, I happened to pick up a little book by Alan Lightman called Einstein’s Dreams.  The writer of this book, Alan Lightman, is an interesting character.  He has written essays, novels, and poetry but in addition to that, he’s a physicist.   He has served on the faculties of Harvard University  and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is currently a Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT.  As such, he’s one of a very small number of MIT professors to straddle the worlds between science and the humanities.   In 2017, the Humanist chaplaincy at Harvard, which is known as the Humanist Hub, presented Lightman with their first-ever Humanism in Literature Award.  Lightman is also the founder of Harpswell,  a nonprofit organization whose mission is to advance a new generation of women leaders in Southeast Asia.  Alan Lightman is no slacker.

But back to his book, Einstein’s Dreams.  It’s a short study of time and Albert Einstein’s voyage toward his formulation of the special theory of relativity.  Do I understand it?  Not in the least, but the book is a beautiful look at different aspects of time.  If anyone in the whole universe could understand time, it had to be Einstein.  What he determined, from my understanding, which as I said is very limited, is that time is relative.  In other words, the rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference. 

To me as a non-physicist, that means that when you’re enjoying yourself, time passes quickly and when you’re doing something you really don’t want to do, time drags.  Now, at my age, I don’t mind time dragging so much, but I have to say that looking back, I certainly appreciate the fleeting moments much more than the excruciating ones even though I may have benefited from the excruciating ones medically or educationally. 

Those of us who have waited for a loved one to die know this feeling of time creeping much more than we want to.  Each night while I waited for the call to tell me that my sister didn’t make it, I thought about our times together.  Our good times.  She was a fantastic cook and the many happy meals with her were such a comfort and joy.  She and her first husband Mark had these fantastic parties that I can still conjure up in my head.  So much fun.  Music and scotch and maybe a little weed.  But nothing productive came of those times.  We were just wasting time with each other.  Just being together. 

In another of his books In Praise of Wasting Time, Alan Lightman talks about the origins of our feelings about wasting time.  He says: 
“There may even be a religious component in our communion with time.  Consider the United States and England.  According to the deep Puritan ethic imported from England in the founding of America and still present today, it is actually a sin to waste time.
“We can, perhaps, trace the roots of this ethic to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, written in 1646 and 1647 by the Westminster Assembly, a group of English and Scottish theologians.  Most Puritans who colonized America in the seventeenth century subscribed to the Catechism.  Question 61 reads: ‘What is forbidden in the fourth commandment?’ The answer: ‘The fourth commandment forbiddeth the omission, or careless performance, of the duties required, and the profaning the day by idleness, or doing that which is in itself sinful, or by unnecessary thoughts, words, or works, about our worldly employments or recreations.’ Note that ‘idleness’ is considered a profanity….”
He continues: “I would argue that even today, four centuries later, we can find deep in the American consciousness the Puritan work ethic that wasting time is immoral, that wasting time is a sin against God.”

I sure don’t agree with the Puritans on this subject.  Lightman says, “In some ways, this moment, this single moment is just as vital as the billions of years of the cosmos.  Every moment is a gift if only we can grab onto it. Wherever this strange universe we find ourselves in, we’re part of it.  We’re connected.  That’s meaning for me.” 
I agree.  Spending a moment doing nothing in particular with loved ones can be heavenly.  Sitting alone and considering…what?  Well, it doesn’t even matter what, but maybe in one of your quiet moments you can improve on Schechter’s formula for the number of galaxies with different luminosities.  Who knows? 

In any case, the quiet pursuit of our inner thoughts should never be discounted.  Lightman says, “Mental downtime is having the space and freedom to wander about the vast hallways of memory and contemplate who we are.  Downtime is when we can ponder our past and imagine our future.  Downtime is when we can repair ourselves… And you don’t need to go to a meditation center in rural Wisconsin to unplug.  All you need is time away from the rush and heave of the world.  Quiet time.  Alone time.  Without downtime, we might not physically die, but we will die psychologically, emotionally, spiritually.  In downtime, we are making sense of our lives.  We are combing through the thousands of hours and days of our lives to find those experiences and thoughts that have personal meaning to us, that speak to us, sometimes in that quiet whispering voice.”
​
Don’t write off the value of wasting time.  That’s what you will remember happily as you age and see your days shortening.  In that way, I feel that wasting time is a spiritual pursuit.  The act of sitting and staring can spur creativity that you never knew you had.  Spending precious time with someone you will miss someday is the best time you can ever spend. 
 
So let us take our time and wander down the street.
And stop under the branches of a tree
To admire the bottoms of the leaves
That we never bother to look at and so don’t see.
Let us take our time and open a book we’ve always wanted to read.
But somehow have never managed to crack its spine
To travel to worlds we’ll never know unless we take the time.
Let us take our time and cherish that elusive afternoon nap.
And wake up refreshed when we leave the quiet of it behind.
Let us take our time and drive out into the country,
Away from the “rush and heave” of the world.
And stop to moo at the cows,
Who never seem to hurry even though their lives are so short.
Let us take our time and look at one another.
And admire the small wonders all humans hold within.
Let us take our time to find a bench.
And stop and stare.
And feel the breeze
And smell the earth
And live in peace at least for a few minutes.
Let us take our time and cherish this short life.
With its ups and downs
Its ins and outs
Its frustrations and contentment
Its temptations and its fulfillments.
Let us take our time and feel grateful for the person sitting next to us,
For the friends we have and those we have lost.
For the family we love and those we only tolerate.
For the petting of a dog or a cat,
The laughter of a child,
The flash of a favorite color,
The snippet of a favorite song.
Let us take our time and feel the warmth of happy days gone by.
The touch of a hand,
The sharing of some wine,
The spark at the start of a friendship,
All the things life has handed us both good and bad.
For time always has her way and soon it will all be over.
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