Archived Sermons

Introductory Words
From the introduction to the book In Praise of Slowness by Carl Honoré come these words. “On a sun bleached afternoon in the summer of 1985, my teenage tour of Europe grinds to a halt in a square on the outskirts of Rome. The bus back into town is twenty minutes late and shows no sign of appearing. Yet the delay does not bother me. Instead of pacing up and down the sidewalk, or calling the bus company to lodge a complaint, I slip on my Walkman, lie down on a bench and listen to Simon and Garfunkel sing about the joys of slowing down and making the moment last. Every detail of the scene is engraved on my memory: two small boys kick a soccer ball around a medieval fountain; branches scrape against the top of a stone wall; an old widow carries her vegetables home in a net bag.

Fast-forward fifteen years, and everything has changed. The scene shifts to Rome’s busy Fiumicino Airport, and I am a foreign correspondent rushing to catch a flight home to London. Instead of “kickin’ down the cobblestones and feelin’ groovy”, I dash through the departure lounge, silently cursing anyone who crosses my path at a slower pace. Rather than listen to folk music on a cheap Walkman, I talk on a mobile phone to an editor thousands of miles away.

At the gate, I join the back end of a long lineup, where there is nothing to do except, well, nothing. Only I am no longer capable of doing nothing. To make the wait more productive, to make it seem less like waiting, I start skimming a newspaper. And that is when my eyes come upon the article that will inspire me eventually to write a book about slowing down.

The words that stop me in my tracks are: “The One-Minute Bedtime Story”. To help parents deal with time-consuming tots, various authors have condensed classic fairy tales into sixty-second sound bites.

My first reflex is to shout Eureka! At the time, I am locked in a nightly tug-of-war with my two-year-old son, who favors long stories read at a gentle, meandering pace. Every evening, though, I steer him towards the shortest books and read them quickly. We often quarrel. “You’re going too fast,” he cries. Or, as I make for the door, “I want another story!” Part of me feels horribly selfish when I accelerate the bedtime ritual, but another part simply cannot resist the itch to hurry on to the next thing on my agenda—supper, emails, reading, bills, more work, the news bulletin on television. Taking a long, languid stroll through the world of Dr. Seuss is not an option. It is too slow.

So, at first glance, the One-Minute Bedtime series sounds almost too good to be true. Rattle off six or seven stories, and still finish inside ten minutes—what could be better? Then, as I begin to wonder how quickly Amazon can ship me the full set, redemption comes in the shape of a counter-question: “Have I gone completely insane?” As the departure lineup snakes towards the final ticket check, I put away the newspaper and begin to think. My whole life has turned into an exercise in hurry, in packing more and more into every hour. I am Scrooge with a stopwatch, obsessed with saving every last scrap of time, a minute here, a few seconds there. And I am not alone. Everyone around me— colleagues, friends, family—is caught in the same vortex.

In 1982 Larry Dossey, an American physician, coined the term “time-sickness” to describe the obsessive belief that “time is getting away, that there isn’t enough of it, and that you must pedal faster and faster to keep up.” These days, the whole world is time-sick. We all belong to the same cult of speed.

Music: The 59th Street Bridge Song

Sermon
Sometimes it feels like I respond to the question, “How are you doing?” by reporting on my progress in completing my “to do” list. You know the “to do” list—that list of things most of us carry in our heads, or on scraps of paper or our new palm pilots—the list detailing what we need to get done—that list which outlines our life day after day.

I answer the question with “I am not doing well” if I have a long list of things and little time. I say I am not doing well because I feel anxious and dissatisfied in my life. I feel like a failure because I am not getting things done. On the other hand I feel great if I have been able to check everything off my list and still have some time left. Now that is a mighty good feeling—a feeling that lasts for an hour or so until the list begins to repopulate. Sometimes it might last until the start of the next day when I face another list, but this time the list is even longer because the day before I proved how efficient I can be. And so the race goes on—and the pace accelerates.

And I am not alone in this. Here are some statistics from people who study such things:

• From 1973 to 2000 “the average U.S. worker added 199 hour to her annual work schedule. In fact, we're working more than medieval peasants did, and more than the citizens of any other industrial country. [Sociologist Janet Schor]
• Mandatory overtime is at near record levels, in spite of slow economic times.
• On average, we work nearly nine full weeks (350 hours) longer per year than our peers in Western Europe do.
• In 2002 Americans gave back 175 million days of paid vacation to employers—time they had coming.
• The average American now gets ninety minutes less sleep per night than she did a century ago. (page 7 In Praise of Slowness)
• Working Americans average a little over two weeks of vacation per year, while Europeans average five to six weeks. Many of us (including 37% of women earning less than $40,000 per year) get no paid vacation at all.

But our problems with time are bigger than just work. It has to do with the frenzied pace we have created for ourselves and our families as we try to cram more and more into our lives.

From the September/October UU World magazine comes this excerpt from an article entitled “Let’s Take Back Our Time” by William Doherty.

“The Peterschmidts were on the modern American fast track until Margaret, the mother, came down with pneumonia and was told by her doctor that she had to cut back for a month or two. Impossible, she concluded. With her part-time job, her kids’ intense extracurricular schedules, and her husband’s management work schedule, there was no time to be sick. Her doctor, though, insisted, and Margaret was forced to take stock of her life.

During this period of soul-searching, Margaret attended a public forum that I facilitated on the problem of over-scheduled kids and under-connected families. [She began to see these dynamics in her life and some of the ways they had crept into her life. She remembered] . . the calls from neighbors warning her that she had to sign her son up quickly if he was not to lose out forever on a chance to play varsity hockey eight years later; [she recalled] the pervasive pressure to spend more to keep up the consumer lifestyle; and the importance of having the kinds of jobs that feed that consumer lifestyle. [She realized that]“Keeping busy” had become a measure of their lives.

Margaret and her husband Jeff soon decided to take the plunge into a radical contemporary lifestyle: one of balance, where the family ate dinner together, hung out together, got enough sleep, and filled in the extra spaces in their lives with sports, music, and hobbies. Jeff turned down a promotion that would require more travel and decided to go to work earlier in the day in order to be home for dinner. Margaret and Jeff decided to enroll their kids only in activities that allowed for dinner hours and did not take up most weekends.

Welcome to the strange new world where being home for dinner is a radical act. For three decades a new spiritual and social justice issue has been arising in our culture and our congregations, but we’ve been too busy to notice it. It’s the problem of time: over-work, over— scheduling, and a chronic sense of hurry We have become the most productive and the most time-starved people on earth.”

Now some may ask, “Why is this a concern?” Being more productive is good—right? It helps keep this nation on top. It allows us to keep our life style. And some would wonder why this is a topic of a Sunday morning service—how is this a religious issue?

Well, it is. It is a religious issue and it needs to be talked about during our worship and it needs to be written about in such publications as the UU World. As I see it religion is essentially about creating greater holiness in our lives and in the world. Such holiness is an outgrowth of right relationship – it grows from our lives when we live in right relationship with the fundamental forces that move the universe. Some call these forces God or Goddess, others see them as a set of impersonal universal laws. But it doesn't matter how you imagine the divine, because amazingly enough all the various concepts lead to similar understandings of right relationship. Across the faith spectrum, across cultures and time, right relationship boils down to love — love your neighbor, love yourself, love the earth, love the awesomness of existence itself.

What religious people are called to do is focus on developing greater love in their lives. Increasing the odds of love is the religious endeavor — it is the religious act. Religious people strive to remove the obstacles that get in the way of love —things like greed, self-centeredness, apathy — all attitudes that arise out of fear.

The forces that give rise to the frenzy in the lives of so many of us come from our fear. This frenzy gets in the way of our growing in love — it has us focusing on a game driven by fear — a game we can never win. It is a game of competition — of working hard to keep up with the Jones’s and the Jones’s kids. It is a game of materialism working to acquire more things that we are told will bring us a sense of well-being. It is a game of upsmanship where we feed our ego needs by gauging ourselves against others. It is a game of trying to cheat death—where we believe that death will not come to someone so alive with responsibility.

So we focus on the games created by fear rather than the activities that encourage love. Activities that require us to slow down, that require us to reflect on our lives, that require us to face the realities of life (like death) and trust the powers that are beyond our control.

This is why slowing down our lives is a religious issue. Again in the UU World William Doherty wrote: “Every spiritual tradition emphasizes the importance of silence and repose; most have some form of Sabbath and seasons of reflection. Our culture of busyness is antithetical to the spiritual life. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton expressed it well in Confessions of Guilty Bystander: [He wrote in reference to those we would say are some of the most compassionate people in the world—those who are immersed in the fight for social justice]. Merton wrote:

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence, and that is activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of this innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone and everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh is often quoted expressing similar sentiments:

If we are too busy, if we are carried away every day by our projects, our uncertainty, our craving, how can we have the time to stop and look deeply into the situation—our own situation, the situation of our beloved ones, the situation of our family and of our community, and the situation of our nation and of the other nations?

“We Unitarian Universalists are in the belly of this beast. We are a largely middle- to upper-middle-class denomination, and our social class group leads the way in the social pathologies of overwork and overscheduling. We work hard and achieve much in our personal lives. We want the best of the best for our children. In our congregations, we lionize those who give the most time to the church, who serve on multiple committees, who spend their evenings and weekends in the service of the community.”

We Unitarian Universalists are sitting ducks for the culture of workaholism, competitive parenting, and frantic living. We are its agents, not just its victims.

But we have a rich Unitarian Universalist tradition of challenging the blind spots in ourselves and the larger society We have the spiritual and community resources to tackle this new problem. The beginning of social change is to name a problem that has had no name, and to say that it doesn’t have to be this way.”

Carl Honoré wanted to clarify what our task is. He wrote: “Before we go any further, though, let’s make one thing clear: this book is not a declaration of war against speed. Speed has helped to remake our world in ways that are wonderful and liberating. Who wants to live without the Internet or jet travel? The problem is that our love of speed, our obsession with doing more and more in less and less time, has gone too far; it has turned into an addiction, a kind of idolatry. Even when speed starts to backfire, we invoke the go-faster gospel. Falling behind at work? Get a quicker Internet connection. No time for that novel you got at Christmas? Learn to speed-read. Diet not working? Try liposuction. Too busy to cook? Buy a microwave. And yet some things cannot, should not, be sped up. They take time; they need slowness. When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, when you forget how to slow down, there is a price to pay.”

The terms “Fast and Slow do more than just describe a rate of change. They are shorthand for ways of being, or philosophies of life. Fast is busy controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections—with people, culture, work, food, everything. The paradox is that Slow does not always mean slow. Performing a task in a Slow manner often yields faster results. That is why the Slow philosophy can be summed up in a single word: balance. Be fast when it makes sense to be fast, and be slow when slowness is called for. Seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto—the right speed.

One aspect of creating the right speed, creating a holy pace, in our lives is to be clear about our priorities. We have heard the advice many times: figure out what is really important in your life, what brings you lasting joy and satisfaction, what is loved-based and not fear-based—figure these out and then tend to them. Make sure you take the time to do these things well. Eliminate some of the things that don’t nurture the human soul, human holiness—that distract you—that consume your time. I know this isn’t be easy—we are easily distracted. And I suspect some of this is because we want to avoid the call to holiness. We want to avoid because matters of the soul are sometimes complex and messy and frightening. All the same, they are our salvation.

Carl Honoré ends his book with these words:

“When I set out to write this book, the real litmus test for my own deceleration was whether I could take the hurry out of bedtime stories. The news is good. I can now read several books at a sitting without once worrying about the time or feeling the urge to skip a page. And I read slowly, savouring every word, heightening the drama or humor with assumed voices and facial expressions. My son, who is now four, loves it, and story time has become a meeting of minds rather than a war of words. The old “I want more stories!”/”No, that’s enough!” sparring is gone.

One evening not long ago, something remarkable happened. I lay down on my son’s bed to read him a long fairy tale about a giant. He had lots of questions, and we stopped to answer them all. Then I read an even longer story—this one about a dragon and a farmer’s son. As I closed the book on the final page, it suddenly dawned on me that even though I had no idea how long I’d been reading—fifteen minutes, half an hour, maybe more—I was happy to continue. My flirtation with the One-Minute Bedtime Story was now a distant memory. I asked my son if he wanted me to read more. He rubbed his eyes. “Daddy, I think that’s enough stories for tonight,” he said. “I actually feel quite tired.” He kissed me on the cheek and slid under his covers. I dimmed the bedside lamp before leaving the room. Smiling, I walked slowly down the stairs. As Ghandi said “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”


©2004 Rev. Daniel S. Brosier