Beginning in the late summer and through the fall, all of the clocks in my world that were not electronic seemed to go haywire. They were all keeping different time. Even when we changed the batteries, some of them were going faster or slower than the rest. The clock hanging on the wall in the church kitchen for example, still can’t figure out what time it is. And with the clock on the desk in my office upstairs, the second hand sometimes takes the minute hand with it and you can see the two of them traveling together.

I often have to look at my cell phone to find out what time it is, which, if you think about it, is fairly bizarre. When before in the history of timekeeping has your phone or communication device been the thing you look at to accurately give you the time of the day?

This whole episode reminded me a little bit of something that happened several summers ago when I went to visit a friend who had just bought a cottage in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. I had never spent much time there before. We were sitting out on his porch the afternoon I arrived and I could hear the chimes in the church tower. At 4 pm, four double chimes sounded (ding ding, ding ding, ding ding, ding ding). Then at 5 pm there was just one double chime, ding ding, and that was all.

I turned to my friend and said, “There were four double chimes at 4, shouldn’t there be five double chimes at 5. I only heard 1.” It seemed perfectly logical to me. He laughed and informed me that the church tower in Wellfleet was the only place left in the country and perhaps in the world that still keeps maritime time, a way of marking time that was developed for mariners and seafarers. According to this system, everything is on a four hour cycle rather than the twelve hour cycle we are used to.

So the clock rings a double chime at 1, 2 double chimes at 2, 3 double chimes at 3, 4 double chimes at 4, and then it starts all over again till you get to 4 double chimes at 8. And then it starts all over again. So, if you hear one double chime coming from the clock tower, it might be 1, 5, or 9, am or pm. You’ve got 6 choices there. Are you confused yet? It disoriented me for days until I got used to it and was able to tell time from the chimes in that clock tower.

But, apparently for mariners and seafarers of old, men and some women who were so in touch with the cycles of the sun and moon; well they knew from the light in the sky what time of day it was when they heard the chime. So if we were going by maritime time here, we would have rung three double bells for the start of our service at 11am and confused everyone in the neighborhood.

We are so used to our clocks, our watches, and now our electronic devices to help us keep track of time that we have lost the ability to read the cycles of morning and night, the cycles of the day.

We’ve, of course, been somewhat spoiled by our way of keeping time. In our world the day has been divided into 24 hour cycles for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. But in the not too distant past the specific hour and minute were not so accurately denoted and each state or region had its own “time zone,” if you will, it’s own determination of when it was noon or midnight or anything in between.

People who were working in the fields or working in their own individual shops didn’t need to know that it is now 11:52, they just needed to know that it was late morning. I imagine there was a more timeless less regimented feel to things and besides all the churches and most public buildings had large clock towers and bell towers that rang the hour.

It wasn’t until the industrial revolution and especially the expansion of the railroads that there became a need to standardize time. In order to organize people who were working in factories, time had to become more regimented and there needed to be a definite start and ending time to the workday. The railroad was a new form of transportation that gave the opportunity for many people to travel at once, making several stops along the route. If you wanted to be on the train, you had to know exactly when it was going to come and the time kept at your station needed to be synchronized with the previous station, and then next one, and so on.

So, the system of time zones we use today was developed where large swaths of the country and the world share the exact same time and when it is 11 am here in the Eastern time zone, it is 10 am in the central time zone not, say, 9:22. This system of organizing time has made life easier in many ways. But this way of organizing time has also enslaved us to the clock, to be somewhere or do something down to the specific minute and second even.

A sense of timelessness is rarely something I feel, and I imagine it is the same for many of you. I have difficulty thinking of time as abundant, as something that I will never run out of. My days are often so full that I seem to be running out of time all of the time. There never seem to be enough hours in the day and I sometimes feel overwhelmed and lost.

“If you’re lost you can look—and you will find me, time after time.
If you fall, I will catch you—I will be waiting, time after time.”

We, human beings have restless spirits and we are always searching, longing, questing for something. We’re rarely satisfied for very long. That might be part of how we’re made and, I think, our enslavement to time, to the clock gives us little space to explore some of the deeper questions that we are asking.

What or who are we looking for when we feel lost?
When we’re lost, what are we hoping to find and who might be there to catch us when we fall, or fall behind?

“If you’re lost you can look—and you will find me, time after time.
If you fall, I will catch you—I will be waiting, time after time.”

The answers here are many and might be as varied as the number of people in this room or the current circumstances of our lives. Some might answer that love is the void in their lives that they are hoping to fill. Some might say it’s a sense of spiritual and psychological well-being. Others might describe the object of their quest as some kind of meaning and purpose in their lives.

Others might say that their quest is more universal and might name peace and an end to violence, or living in deeper harmony with the earth, or a greater sense of justice and equality among people as what they are most looking for in life. Someone else might say that they’re looking for God, or some all encompassing spiritual source that they can turn to for comfort in times of great struggle or for reassurance when feeling lost.

There is book about a philosophy of Unitarian Universalism titled, To Re-Enchant the World, by Richard Grigg. He reminds us that the way of telling time that we are used to is chronological time. We often find ourselves caught in a losing battle to somehow master chronological time in our all too busy world. But there is another way of knowing time that he names “multi-faceted sacred time.” His language is fairly dense so rather than quoting him, I am going to try to explain what he is talking about.

First, he wants us to remember that our non-creedal faith is uniquely poised to help us deal some of these questions, some of this longing and searching that we find ourselves in the midst of. In Unitarian Universalism, we value the questions, the search, the journey and help and encourage each other as we journey together. We’re the religious tradition that has the unending quest for truth and meaning as part of its theological foundation.

This, according to Grigg, offers us a framework to look at time differently, to move away from a more self-centered and self-focused need that we have to master the clock and the calendar. Within our current framework time becomes something that controls us, something that we have to respond to, something that is always nipping at our heels as we move through the day.

What if we had a deeper sense of timelessness? What if the time that counted most was the quality time that we spent with others, others who are on similar journeys and asking similar questions, others who acknowledge the importance of spiritual and human connection as central to the wholeness of life?

Our connection in community with our fellow travelers, our fellow questers helps us give birth to a deeper understanding of life and meaning, helps us find the answers to our questions, helps us feel less alone in our journey, help us engage together with multiple issues that are important to us.

Grigg also uses the phrase “redemptive re-narration.” Human beings love to tell and hear stories, especially stories about things that happened to us, that we encountered, perhaps stories that changed us, and stories of what we are searching for. If this telling and retelling of our stories is done in a loving and supportive community, it can be healing and life-giving for us. As we tell and re-tell our stories we imagine the story of the personal and collective future, a future that we are building for ourselves, our families, our community and our world.

We need each other to help answer our questions, to work out the stories that we tell and to create the story of the future. This offers us a more timeless framework that is interconnected, interwoven and interdependent.

This clock that I stand under this morning; if we wound it, it might be the most accurate timepiece in the building. Yet its value to us is more timeless. It’s a work of art and craftsmanship that we don’t often see these days. It’s a connection to our history and the history of Dorchester. If it could speak, it would tell some amazing stories about what it has seen in its 240 plus years hanging not only in this hall, but in the Dorchester Town Hall in Codman Square when Dorchester was its own city, and in the building that replaced the town hall that we now call the Great Hall. It represents far more than a timepiece.

Perhaps we don’t need a ten thousand year clock to help break the stranglehold that time has taken over our lives. Perhaps we don’t need a ten thousand year clock to give us a more timeless feeling and help us appreciate the time we have with each other.

Perhaps in this new year we can appreciate a time that has fewer definitive markers and feel time’s presence in every cell of the universe. Perhaps in this new year we can renew our connections with each other and those we love and remember that time is a resource that is infinite and abundant.

Amen
Blessed Be