“Take more time to say less” was excellent advice that I received this weekend while running a rehearsal of the upcoming Saturday Seminary Series on Scarcity & Abundance. It’s funny because this is the first piece of advice I used to give new Lectors in The Episcopal Church when I worked as a verger: “Slow. Down. If you feel like you are speaking too slowly, take it back another notch. Like you’re wading through molasses? Take a breath and slow down again.”
I *do* try to say all of the things all of the time, and to tell all of the stories, make all the points, frame all the visions. At least this sort of verbal babbling used to be my modus operandi. It really it felt like an autonomic response, one over which I had no control. I used to think that I only had so much time, that I could only hold your attention for the brief moment and I had to pour in all of it or hear all of it or do all of it. Whatever it might have been.
Youth ministry helped slow me down somewhat. You really can’t do more than guide the timing of adolescent growth, make sure the tools they’ll need are there when they need them. You can’t dictate it.
And of course climate work requires slowing down in all the things, even while the clock IS ticking, ticking. The climate crisis is real, the urgency is real, and nothing is more dangerous for the changes we need than panic or frenzied and angry urgency. As the inspiring Amy Lewis, Vice-President of Policy & Communications at the Wild Foundation, has reminded me, “We don’t have have time not to go slow.” Trees take years to grow. Ideas take years to bloom. Relationships take years to solidify. Rivers take years to cleanse and soil takes years to regenerate. But all of it is possible. And we can start now.
So for these Thursday posts, I’m working on slowing myself down. Being aware of time (it is at the moment Monday evening) but not letting it freak me out. Being aware of what I want to put out there, to say to any of you who read this, but not letting that make me rush it. Unfold, not explode.
The environmental time conundrum -that is being both out of time and in great need to take time- is an intersection of climate justice work and the theologies of Scarcity & Abundance. Also crashing into this intersection is eschatology, one of my favorite theological areas of study. Eschatology is the theology of the end of the world and the remaking of all things. It itself is obviously bound up in theodicy (the exploration of evil and god), soteriology (the theology of salvation), and exegesis (the methods by which one frames and interprets scripture). That is way too many theological terms, and I’m just going to leave them there, as I think it illustrates just what a pile-up the crash at this intersection is.
One of the most radical things Jesus says throughout the Gospels is that the Kingdom of God is at hand, possible in every moment. But we seek for justice precisely because our world is broken, and not whole, and the lives of many are hard. This is essentially the “already-not yet” of the eschatological question. And we are certainly faced with this every day.
6,000 species die out a day. The Greenland ice shelf significantly melted last year. Soil erosion may have been a factor in the condo disaster in Miami this summer. We are reaching tipping points that cannot be reversed, and time to end our toxic practices is running out.
Regenerative agriculture has been spreading throughout the planets movement of integration and renewal. Indigenous practices have been rising in use as their well proven efficacy is finally being seen. The Paris Climate Accord made strides in global collaboration that had seemed impossible just years prior. These beginnings will unfold over decades and that is necessary for them to truly take root.
And we live in both of these worlds. Both are true. We have work to do that will unfold over centuries. We have work to do that must happen now.
A Mister Roger’s song comes to mind called “I Like to Take My Time” in which he reminds kids that hurrying causes mistakes, that taking the time to do something right matters. The only video of it that I’ve found lives in my memory, but here is the audio.
I think we’ve all experienced the fluidity of time, the moments that stretch forever and the afternoons that go by in flash. The days that linger and the years that fly.
I would ask us to hold onto that deep body knowledge, even if it makes no sense to our logical minds right now. The future will be like this as well, with time stretching over growing seasons and critical events condensed like lapse photography.
For we straddle the already-not yet, the liminal thresholds of great tumult and change. Instead of a 7 car pile-up or wrecked mangled forms from our intersectional crash, may we find the new fulcrum points to strengthen at these crossroads, the scaffolding to build from what is being torn down.
What I’ve learned of late is that hurry, panic, urgency -these are the scarcity responses to the dynamism of time- and that I must stop. Breathe. Breathe again. I must take more time to say less, to build more. For we have all we need.