Time to Stand and Stare

(The Nationalist, 16 July 2004)

 

A Welsh poet, William Henry Davies, who lived from 1871 to 1940 and spent much of his life in the USA, wrote a poem called Leisure. In it he asked,

‘What is this life if, full of care,
we have no time to stand and stare?’

Our world of efficiency and productivity has no time to stand and stare, to look over a bridge and watch the water flowing past, to talk and listen quietly simply for the enjoyment of human companionship. That word companionship comes from two Latin words which mean eating bread together. It implies hospitality, sharing, the enjoyment of a shared meal.

We are harried and hassled by time, the clock is our master, the ghost that turns up at every feast. Shared meals? No – fast food, something thrown from the freezer into the microwave and eaten alone while on the Internet. We have built a society where the demands of work, of flexibility in the job market (the word market is significant – we’re up for sale) and the daily drudgery of commuting drains people of the time or energy for leisure.

In such a situation it is altogether unsurprising that people experience stress, a sense of alienation, of rootlessness – where I’m now based is the 21st place I’ve lived in! Change seems the only constant. We are a people under pressure. In such circumstances we cannot expect to have the desire for silence, prayer or contemplation. They are pressured out of people; they don’t register on the bar code of a consumer society.

But relationships are more important than functions, people more than projects, being more than doing, contemplation more than activity, time with people more than time for people.

Contemplation is a human need. We need time to ‘be still and know that I am God’, we need to have time for ourselves, to be quiet, to be alone, to unwind, to receive as well as to give – for example, parents spending time with children, talking and listening, walking and sitting (without the TV), doing things together, being quiet and calm.

Next Sunday’s Mass readings come from a different time and culture, yet some of the key words in them are ran, hastened, hurry, running and distracted, worry, fret. That’s us alright. It’s not a new problem. An anonymous writer in nineteenth century rural Russia wrote, ‘The trouble is that we live far from ourselves and have but little wish to get any nearer to ourselves. Indeed we are running away all the time to avoid coming face to face with our real selves, and we barter the truth for trifles’. (From The Way of a Pilgrim, Triangle Press, London, 1995, p.89)