Some things can’t be rushed.
Communion even at our small church is a cumbersome affair at best: congregants fumble their way out of pews and into the aisle, diligently stand in line to wait. People need time to receive the elements as well as the words, to chew and swallow, to walk back to their seats. And even then, there is time. Those who have received sit and reflect, while others continue forward.
I have been thinking, lately, of sacrament, and time.
Sacrament requires time. Reflection. A pause. To mechanically and hurriedly push people through the motions of, say, baptism, would be unthinkable. Water and bread and wine have material heft: we feel them, touch them, taste them. So too must we spend time on these acts, and on considering what they mean and are.
Sacraments require time because only time begets attention.
Sit in a doctor’s office without your phone and it’s astonishing what you notice. The pattern on the carpet. The paintings on the walls. The color of the shirt of the little boy squirming out of his mother’s arms. Phone in hand, you see none of it, register none of it. We see because we attend; we attend because we have the time to look.
Of late, I’ve received the gift of extra time.
Something I was planning on didn’t happen. It would have taken a lot of my hours—maybe too many of my hours. I was expecting the next few months to be rushed and frantic, me cramming in everything as I’ve had to cram in everything for the past three years. And then, not. The thing I planned for dissolved into nothing more than a dream. It was supposed to be a disappointment.
I’m not sure that it is.
Because now I have all this time and it’s frankly disorienting. A schedule that I had meticulously meted out has gone up in flame and now only blank calendar days remain. Certainly I have some things to do relevant to both work and home, but far less than I expected. And now, these hours with which I must do…something.
And that’s the temptation, isn’t it? Ah, here’s a half hour, an hour: let’s do something. Write an article or read one. Pick up the socks from the floor. Start dinner early. Send some emails. Scroll. The task-oriented among us, of which I am one, abhor a vacuum. We like to make and do and plan and organize and execute. In the absence of such things we seek a distraction.
But sometimes the best thing to do with extra time is to settle into it and attend.
Wait for God to do something. This will not look remarkable. It will not look like a sudden dissertation, hand-delivered to your mind, on 2 Timothy. It will rarely sound like the voice of God giving you a distinct command to go do that thing. It will be a small and imperceptible thing, the tug at your attention.
It might be feeling compelled to smush your face into your cat’s fur, and hear the rumbling vibrato of his purrs, and think of how remarkable and fragile and warm and alive these creatures are, and meditate on the God who made them and what it means that He did.
It might be the slant of sunlight onto a wood floor that reminds you of everything you ever read about light defeating darkness.
It might be the laughter of neighborhood children through your window, or what your mind lands on when, once away from phone and media, it stills and settles like snow in a snowglobe. It might be the goofy joke your husband made that has you chuckling two hours after he left—and the realization that there won’t always be days like these, that a silly moment is itself a gift.
Time allows us to encounter sacramental reality. To perceive it.
I like to think that writers have a particular advantage at this practice: we are deft at perceiving and attending. But even then, we often lack time. Even then, the day to day pace murders any opportunity we have to perceive anything. I’ve been given the gift of time, but absent that gift we must carve it out for ourselves. We must commit to it and practice it. We must wait patiently, and see what we will see.
And what will we see?
Only God knows. And that is the delight of it all.
Samaritan's Song 