Too often, we believe, as the old song has it, "That was yesterday, and yesterday's gone." But I'd like to suggest that yesterday's not gone. Dead people still rule our lives. Almost all of the ideas and institutions we inhabit today are the creations of dead people. The words I'm speaking were invented by dead people. We are the incarnation of the past, and therefore we are responsible to it.

Wendell Berry's poem "At a Country Funeral" is a lovely reminder of the potency of the past in our lives. A farmer has died, and Berry describes the funeral:

Now the old dead wait in the open coffin

for the blood kin to gather, come home

for one last time, to hear old men

whose tongues bear an essential topography

speak memories doomed to die.

But our memory of ourselves, hard earned,

is one of the land's seeds, as a seed

is the memory of the life of its kind in its place,

to pass on into life the knowledge

of what has died. What we owe the future

is not a new start, for we can only begin

with what has happened. We owe the future

the past, the long knowledge

that is the potency of time to come.

That makes a man's grave a rich furrow.

Future Time

We don't think much about the future as something that we create today, both by our activity and our inactivity. We don't usually think that we are literally making history with every one of our everyday actions. And as a result, the future that we are creating is not one that many of us would want to live in. But we are tomorrow's dead people. We are the future in its present incarnation. We're the last best hope of future generations. What we do today creates and reinforces the institutions of tomorrow. When we come to St. Joan of Arc on Sunday, we strengthen a community with a particular vision of the future. When we go golfing instead, we contribute to an alternative future. When we go to a peace rally, we create a future that has more possibilities for peace. And we create a future that has a powerful peace rally as part of its usable past. But when we watch mindless TV instead, we create a future with more commercials and commercialism, reinforcing images of people and society that often contradict our deepest values. When the alarm wakes us up in the morning, it calls us not just to the work of the day, but to the work of the days to come as well.

Nature's Time

In nature's time, minutes and seconds don't mean much. As a measure of biological time, therefore, we might take the amount of time it takes to make an inch of topsoil, roughly five hundred years. And we might consider that when we live in a way that depletes soil faster than that, we are not "on time," no matter how fast or productive we might be.

God's Time

In earlier Christian cultures, people told God's time with the Angelus bells, which provided a religious frame for the day by calling people to prayer every evening. [The word "clock," in fact, comes from the French word "cloche," meaning "bell."] Americans still ritualize the idea of God's time with a day known as the Sabbath. The Sabbath used to be a sacred time, a time when Christians considered how to "redeem the time"--how to make ordinary time extraordinary, luminous with possibilities for good. With the Sabbath, people made time to listen to the sacred, and to apply the wisdom of holiness to their everyday lives. Although many religious Americans still attend church services on Sunday--and here we are--we often lack that earlier sense of sacred time, with its promise of changing the world.

If we ever set our clocks to God's time, if we ever woke up to God's extravagant gift of time, we might need to spend our days differently. An awareness of God's time, for example, might cause us to challenge human notions of progress, as Martin Luther King did. In his magnificent epistle, the "Letter from Birmingham Jail," he argued against "the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually," he insisted, in a passage that seems especially relevant this week, "time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of [people] willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation."

Conclusion

Secondly, we might try to redeem the time. When the alarm goes off in the morning, what time is it? According to Martin Luther King, it's time to be co-workers with God. So we need to think about how we spend our time, and to consider whether the time of our lives reflects the times--past and present, natural and sacred--that make life meaningful for us. When the alarm goes off in the morning, we might try to come up with a good answer to Mary Oliver's provocative question: "What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"

To redeem the time, we might practice a new form of time management. Instead of cramming as many activities as possible into our days, we might try to schedule some redemptive activities. And these redemptive activities don't need to be big. Recently one of my former students wrote me a beautiful letter about his struggle to find the good work that is the mark of vocation. In it, he observed that "We are made in our small moments. In fact, `now' is all we have, so we should do our best to be good during the smaller moments. It is a form of practice for the rest." Too, often we identify with our major moments, and forget that we can redeem the time with actions as small as a kiss or a caress, as seemingly insignificant as a conversation. Sometimes, just by listening, we create "free spaces" where good people can find support for good thinking and good work. At St. Olaf, I meet regularly with one of my friends because we have become what Julie Madden calls "hoping mechanisms" for each other. In our conversations, we help each other focus on having a good time--which is to say, a time in which we are good.

In addition to telling time and redeeming time, we might also try to reform the time. We live in a culture that trivializes time, a culture that defines "prime time" by its peculiar tele-vision of the world. We live in a culture that systematically creates a "time bind" for people by trapping them in "long-hour jobs" that often leave just minutes for the real work of creation. We live in a culture that consumes our time with demeaning work and consumption, assuring us that a few minutes of "quality time" is an adequate compensation for long hours of "quantity time." In this social construction of time, the clock often works against our fully human being. And yet we have no politics of time. The Republicans tell us that Iraq is the issue, and the Democrats tell us that "It's the economy, stupid,"--and we, playing the part of Stupid, stupidly believe them. But it's not just the war or the economy--it's the larger economy of time. It's the moral ecology of everyday life. And it's our institutions. Catholic Worker Peter Maurin once said that institutions should be designed to make it easier for people to be good. We have some institutions like that--and St. Joan's in one of them. But we don't yet have enough of them. So it's probably time to make time to get them.

Will we ever really learn to tell time? Can we make time to redeem the time? The answer, of course, is that only time will tell.