[Dialogue] God's Time

[KroegerD@aol.com]

Published on Tuesday, December 14, 2004 by the Boston Globe 
God's Clock 
by James Carroll
 
Once a week or so, I come downstairs in the morning to find that the three 
weights of the grandfather clock in the living room have fallen to the bottom of 
the oaken cabinet. To keep the clock going, they must be lifted on their 
chains. I dutifully open the glass-fronted door and grasp each brass cylinder, 
pulling down on the chain as I bring the weight up -- first one, then another, 
then the other. I close the door carefully, waiting for its fitted snap. 
Once again, the weights will do their work to keep the pendulum swinging, the 
chimes sounding every 15 minutes and the gong striking on the hour. In this 
way, in concert with the force of gravity, I assure that time does not stop in 
our house.
I must occasionally remind myself that in fact, nothing important depends on 
this clock's ticking. When, through my neglect, the weights descend to the 
cabinet floor, the chains become twisted and askew, the pendulum drifts to a 
halt, and the chimes fall silent. A precious harmony is broken, but the earth 
stops neither its rotation nor its course around the sun. Time does not stop. 
Birds chirp in the morning and darkness later descends no matter what happens in 
the living room.
The clock is a sacrament of the passage of time, a way to note the movement 
of one day into the next, a method of location in the otherwise uncharted ocean 
whose two horizons are the past and the future. Mariners are fond of saying, 
especially when the ship unexpectedly runs aground, that the chart is not the 
sea; similarly, the clock is not time.
I propose this image for our new and urgent discussions about religion. In 
America, a religious divide has suddenly emerged as politically decisive, and in 
the world, religion is a runaway engine of violence. A fanatic fringe of 
Islam asserts its doctrine by joining suicide to murder in Allah's name. In Gaza 
and the West Bank, some hypernationalist religious Jews stake claims to land 
with God as guarantor -- disastrous consequences to Palestinians and Israel both 
be damned. Similarly, America's war in Iraq has evolved into a two-sided holy 
war, even if only one side explicitly defines it as such.
Meanwhile, mainstream churches waste themselves in conflicts over sexual 
identity, the new meanings of marriage, and mysteries of the medical frontier -- 
arguments in which "God's will" is invoked as if sacred texts elucidated the 
biology of genetics, postsexual reproduction, open-ended lifespan. The 
"religious right" fervently seeks to impose its definitions of the social good on the 
devout and the indifferent alike. "Bright" nonbelievers, in turn, match the 
absolutism of the zealots of faith with absolute rejection.
Such ferocity of human arguments over God, whether in affirmation or denial, 
reflects a terrible forgetfulness. Religion is to God what the clock is to 
time. Religion participates in the mystery of what it represents but does not 
embody that mystery. Not even Christianity, with its self-understanding as a 
religion of the incarnate Word, does more than enshrine that Word in symbol and 
sacrament. Indeed, "Word" is the clue, since all religion, however infinite the 
object of its worship, remains bound by the finitude of language -- and 
language always falls short of its purpose. That truth applies to religion and 
science both. Words are to what they aim to express as the clock is to time. That 
is why silence, too, is a mode of worship. And it is why, also, the language of 
science always leaves room for what is not known.
When I come down in the morning and see the weights of the clock near the 
bottom of the case again, my heart sinks at the evidence of the passage of time. 
But the clock is not the motor of such transience. Arguing over religion is 
like arguing over a clock, which is precisely what happens, for example, when 
Darwinists and creationists clash. Their great fight is less over the deep 
mystery of being than over which timeframe to use in measuring it.
We humans naturally reach toward transcendence, seeking symbols with which to 
make it present. Religion and science are ways of doing this. So are poetry 
and music. So, for that matter, is clockmaking. Yet transcendence, by 
definition, transcends. We should be modest, therefore, in the claims we make on the 
absolute. And equally modest in the claims we make on one another in its name.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. His most recent book 
is "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War."
© 2004 Boston Globe


Dick Kroeger
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Maple Plain, MN 55359
952-476-6126