BY RICHARD GILBERT, MINISTER EMERITUS, FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF ROCHESTER, NEW YORK
Once I had a dream.
I stepped before the throne of God...
He asked only one question:
“Did you become what you were supposed to be?”
“I’m not sure,” I told Him.
But when I died, I had so much stuff, it took three days to find me. —Fredrick Zydek
My office is so full that I am afraid I may be doomed to a similar fate as the man in the poem. By last count, I have 24 file drawers full of papers I have carefully collected over my decades of ministry. And there are several more file drawers worth neatly hidden beneath one long drop-leaf table waiting to be filed. Paintings adorn the walls; there are several dozen tapes and CDs along with my boom box, a small refrigerator and a 5-inch black and white TV set so I can sneak a look at games while pretending to be working. Artifacts from around the world occupy virtually every horizontal space except my desk, which is a model of order. I don’t believe the person who said that a neat desk is the sign of a sick mind. And, of course, there is the computer, a compact data storage unit that would fill several more drawers if reduced to paper.
My office is merely symptomatic of what has been called “The Age of Overwhelming.” One of the most common expressions these days is “I’m feeling overwhelmed.” I don’t know if this is the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, the accelerating speed of technology, our highly competitive economy or our inner compulsions, but so many of us feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, the pace of our lives, the increasing complexity of living. It is data, data everywhere, but not the time to think. We are over-informed intellectually and under-developed spiritually. I wonder if Ralph Waldo Emerson was right over a century and a half ago when he said that things are in the saddle riding us.
The Jungian analyst James Hillman said a number of years back:
Look, a great deal of our lives are manic. I can watch 34 channels of TV, I can communicate with people anywhere, I can be everywhere at once, I can fly across the country, I’ve got call waiting so that I can make two calls at once. I live everywhere and nowhere. But I don’t know who lives next door to me.
Who’s in the next flat? Who’s in 14-B?
And that was without a Blackberry or Wi-Fi on his laptop!
This is not a diatribe against technology. As one who manipulates words for a living I know how indebted I am to the computer for making it so much easier to write and to communicate so quickly with so many people. I can recall the days when I would laboriously write three drafts of a sermon—all by typewriter—until my arms would nearly fall off in fatigue. Now I can concentrate on the words, not the mechanics of producing the words. No, I am not a candidate for the pencil club. But computer efficiency merely serves to enable me to be busy about other things. I am a self-described workaholic, a 60-something hyperactive.
I can identify with humorist Robert Benchley when he writes, “A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated.”
I have a phone system, a very efficient phone system. But one aspect does bother me, and it is perhaps indicative of our predicament. I am a proud possessor of voice mail. When I access those messages a female voice comes on to remind me to press “1” if I want to listen to the message. When I have finished, this same voice asks me if I want to respond—I press 2, “no,” I’ll respond later; if I want to archive—“no;” and a few other options. I again press 2 for “no.” Then she asks “would you like to do anything else?” By this time I am exasperated and press 2 once more, thinking that is the end of the matter. But no, she goes right on and asks me if I want to change anything. At that point I lose it and press 2 as many times and as quickly as I can and slam the receiver down. Enough already! I have been overwhelmed with options. I am overwhelmed, period!
It is at such times that I think of the unknown author who wisely suggested the remedy for such a situation. “For people who like peace and quiet: a phoneless cord.”
We are a well-informed generation—information is everywhere. We are drunk on data. I’ve heard that scientific knowledge doubles every 6 years. But I don’t know that has made us any better people—which I presume to be what religion is designed to do.
I try to respond to Emerson’s quip about things being in the saddle riding us with another man whom Unitarian Universalists hold as a saint, Henry DavidThoreau. Well over 150 years ago he told his readers: “Life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify.” I don’t have cable TV. I don’t have a cell phone. I don’t have a DVD player. Not that I haven’t coveted all these technological toys from time to time, but still I am overwhelmed by what has been called “data smog” and “techno-stress.”
The reigning image of a good minister in our time is to be a “non-anxious presence” in the midst of a very uptight world. But how can I be non-anxious when my computer-generated calendar reminds me how much I have yet to do before it will let me sleep in peace? I am comforted by some anonymous soul who said: “God is not dead, but alive and well and working on a much less ambitious project.”
But is that what we want— a “less ambitious project”? Isn’t some stress, some sense of busyness, some feeling of engagement desirable?
We could, of course, simply retreat from the world and seek to go back to a simpler time. We can say “no” to technology, “no” to engagement with society, “no” to the pressures of the age and hunker down. We can take on the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu: “In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.” But I’m not sure how wise that is, or if I would accept those words even if they were wise.
Or, we can acknowledge that being overwhelmed is a condition of modern life and grin and bear it, get with the program, try to stay ahead of the curve.
Or, we can seek some kind of balance that enables us to be in the saddle riding our things, not the other way around.
I have learned how to push the delete button on all the spam that enters my e-mail box, and even how not to feel I must answer every e-mail message that comes to me. I can learn to say “no” to the trivial and self-indulgent, and “yes” to what is important to living the good life; I can say that I don’t have to know everything about every issue before I take my stand. Someone has defined spirituality as the capacity to distinguish what is humanly important from what is not. I at least can be busy with — even overwhelmed by—important things.
We can ask ourselves, “What did I do yesterday that is worth mentioning? What am I doing today that is vitally important? What will I do tomorrow that will make a difference in someone’s life?”
We can realize that life is and always will be unfinished business. We don’t have to know everything, do everything, be everything to everybody to become who we’re supposed to be.
There are times when we feel overwhelmed by being. We are on a treadmill walking hurriedly, going nowhere; the images of our lives fly past us as on a movie screen. At such times we need to gather ourselves together, slacken our pace, blank out the screen, ignore the clock. Then we can remind ourselves that we are in charge of our lives—that it is we who dictate the pace, that we can set the rhythm of our own lives. It will not be easy—it never is easy to convert ourselves, to turn ourselves around, to get a handle on the story of our own lives, to realize that we are the architects of our own fate. To be sure, there are powers that confront us and principalities that confound us. The demands on our time and energy are endless; we cannot fully control our environment. We are, after all, finite and flawed creatures. But out of that finitude comes a yearning for meaning. Out of the flawed nature of our being we yearn for purpose. Out of the hectic rush of events we can still set our own pace. We are the only ones who can.
