Stumbling out half asleep from the tent for a midnight dash to the loo the starlit sky simply stopped me in my tracks. It is as if we are on a different planet with entirely different constellations the range of stars are so numerous and bright compared to the light polluted night sky of Milton Keynes. Psalm 8 sums the feeling so well standing in a starlit field with the waves crashing on the beach in front:
“When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?” Psalm 8:3-4
It had been a rather special day as we had gone on a Wildlife Safari Boat, particularly with Sam and Tom in mind. Sam is an adrenaline junkie loving rollercoasters and so the nearest thing to a rollercoaster on a remote island is bouncing across the waves on a speed boat. Tom, on the other hand, loves wildlife and is drawn to all animals and birds. So a speed boat wildlife trip ticked all the boxes. We saw dolphins! Not just one or two but up to around 30. These beautiful creatures dipped and dived around the boat, playing in the surf, teasing the boat driver to chase them. A mother and calf swam alongside the boat jumping together out of the waves in perfect harmony. We didn’t take photos and instead just lapped up this precious moment.
I have begun a new book, perfect for my time on St Agnes (and in fact one to really listen to throughout my sabbatical and beyond). It is called “The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to stay emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world” by John Mark Comer. He begins describing the moment he realised he was no longer functioning or living in any real or meaningful way. John (another John!!) was a pastor of a ‘mega church’ in the states, hugely successful speaker and leader with a congregation of 1,000s. That bit is not something I think many of us can identify with!! But his description of cramming his life to the point of breaking is something that resonates with many of us.
Early on he talks about the way that “Hurry and love are incompatible” and the way that when we have stretched ourselves to the limit and beyond it is always those who are closest to us, those we profess to love, who will get the snappy, grumpy, difficult us. But it is more than that, the very nature of love demands time, demands patience, demands that we slow down.
Our son Tom is by nature slow, everything happens at (to me) a very ponderous pace. I struggle not to constantly want to speed him up, to tell him to do things more quickly as if the speed he took life at was somehow something that was ‘wrong’ and needed to alter. We have made speed a virtue, we moan about the ‘slow service’ in a restaurant or a shop rather than simply accepting that we all have different speeds and that ‘fast’ is not always ‘good’.
John quotes from a book I read over 30 years ago (and may have to re-read). It is by a Japanese theologian called Kosuke Koyama and called “Three Mile and Hour God”.
“God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is “slow” yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love.” Koyama
John suggests that our need for speed, the way that we are all chronically hurrying is in fact more than an irritant it is like a pathogen destroying us emotionally and spiritually: “What if busyness isn’t healthy? What if it’s an airborne contagion, wreaking havoc on our collective souls”
John’s reflections on the history of our approach to time is interesting. I suspect there is a slightly romantic view of the past (particularly life pre–Industrial Revolution) but his blistering attack on the impact of technology on our mental health and relationship with time is a sobering read as is the impact on the loss of all notion of ‘sabbath’ in our lives.
2007 and the release of the iPhone is the year he marks as the “official start date of the digital age”. He charts from there the evidence of the decrease in our ability to concentrate and to contemplate. The way that even having our smartphones in the same room reduces our working memory and problem solving skills. Particularly concerning (and of course something we all know) is the way that so much on the internet from Facebook to YouTube is designed to consume as much of our time and attention as possible, it is built to exploit the vulnerabilities in human psychology. It is no accident that loads of us spend hours simply scrolling through Facebook… it is built to make us do just that!
A particularly sobering statistic was the way humanities attention span is dropping year by year (as a preacher I know that!!) In 2000 it was 12 seconds but it has, apparently, now dropped to 8 seconds… and a goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds!! “Yes. That’s right. We’re losing, to a goldfish.” Now I have no idea where those statistics came from and what they really mean, but I am sure that that overall push of his argument is true, our phones constantly and incessantly distract us and that distraction pulls us away from deep and meaningful relationships with each other and also from a relationship with our creator.
I am currently sitting back at the pub on another rainy day and guess what Dave, Tom and Sam are doing? Looking at their phones. Probably if I went round the pub counting at least 50% of the people here would be? I am no better, equally addicted as the next person, but the connection between our constant sense of ‘hurry’ and our endless addiction to our phones is one to reflect on. We also need to be aware of that technology is not ‘neutral in terms of economics and politics. Our constant ‘distraction’ is motivated often for the economic benefit of others. “Others get rich; you get distracted and addicted”.
I think you all get the picture, I certainly did, knowing that I am personally someone who is prone to taking life at speed. One of the reasons I love coming to St Agnes is the way it slows me down. We used to come for two weeks and now for three and people always say, “but what do you ‘do’ for three weeks?”. The answer is the longing we are here the less we do and one of the reasons that it is so easy to slow down is because there is so little choice. The island has one pub, one tea room, one church and one shop. There are about 70 people out of the tourist season and the choice is really which way round the island to walk, when to go to the pub or the tea room, when to swim and which book to read. The hurry of life slows down and it is good for my soul. But this book (or the part I have so far read) really highlights that is isn’t only our soul it isn’t good for it is also our relationships. “Hurry kills relationships. Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have time”.
It’s time to stop writing and play a slow game of Banangrams with Tom then head back through the rain to our tent for a slow evening knitting and reading the next part of the book that is entitled “The Solution”. This was yesterdays sunset before the rain came!
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