Doug's Dealings

Skylar Bella arrived this morning at 10:16 and is she cute!  Everyone is doing fine.  What a blessing – again.

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I struggle with “time.”  I stress over the lack of time.  I too often get upset when people take away my time for unnecessary reasons.  Anyway, I came across these words from Thomas Merton recently that gave me a new perspective with which to evaluate my attitude.

“The Liturgy accepts our common, everyday experience of time: sunrise, noonday, sunset; spring, summer, autumn, winter.  There is no reason for the Church in her prayer to do anything else “with time,” for the obvious reason that the Church has no quarrel with time.  The Church is not fighting against time.  The Christian does not, or at any rate need not, consider time an enemy.  Time is not doing the Christian any harm, time is not standing between Christians and anything he desires.  Time is not robbing the Christian of anything he treasures.

“Fundamentally the Christian is at peace with time because he is at peace with God. He need no longer be fearful and distrustful of time, because he understands that time is not being used by a hostile “fate” to determine his life in some sense which he himself can never know, and for which he cannot adequately be prepared.  Time has now come to terms with man’s freedom.  When man is not free from sin, then time is his enemy because every moment is a threat of destruction; every moment may be the one in which the unreality which man has chosen, by sinning, is brought face to face with cataclysmic reproof and is shown to be the fruit of servility, the abnegation of freedom, the surrender to determination by forces lower than man.”

- Thomas Merton, Seasons of Celebration, 45-46

So, for what it’s worth … one of the things I hear in that is: time is not my enemy because God is timeless.

This comes from a devotional book I have been using Lent and Easter:Wisdom from G. K. Chesterton, Day 13:

I invented a rudimentary and makeshift mystical theory of my own.  It was substantially this; that even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting.  Anything was magnificent as compared with nothing.  Even if the very daylight were a dream, it was a day-dream; it was not a nightmare.  The mere fact that one could wave one’s arms and legs about…showed that it had not the mere paralysis of a nightmare.  Or if it was a nightmare, it was an enjoyable nightmare….[N]o man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything.  At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence.  The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.

We are blessed. Amen.

After a full Christmas Eve - 3 services with almost 1100 total in attendance - we began a quiet Christmas.  We spent most of Christmas Day with our daughter and her husband and our two grandchildren.  Our time began with the announcement via video that our daughter's new child to be born at the end of April would be a girl.  (They actually found out several days ago but have been keeping it secret until the Christmas announcement- which they did very well.)  We were all hoping for a girl so that was welcome news.  The grandsons made a haul on gifts and we had fun playing with them throughout the day, ending with a great turkey dinner and a few rounds of "Apple to Apple."

We also spend time on the phone with our son in Tucson.  He is with his fiance and her folks for Christmas and are busy putting wedding plans together.  We are blessed.

By the way, the picture is of me holding a "Rolling Stones" magazine from September of 1979, sent by our son.  James Taylor is on the cover.  He's the "main man" - my favorite singer and musician.