The Time Machine
By Tom Reiber
August 4, 2002
Psalm 90
|
Lord, through all generations
You have been our strength and our home.
Before the mountains were born
Or the oceans were brought to life,
For all eternity, you are.
A thousand years in your sight
Are like yesterday when it passes.
— from Psalm 90
|
ran into Al Mac Rae, one of our resident physicists,
the other day. Knowing that I was going
to be preaching this sermon about time, I decided to pick his brain.
“Al, quick question for you.”
“Sure,” he
says, probably thinking I was going to ask him about the upcoming blood drive.
“Time. What is it?”
He thought for a second. “We think of it as the
fourth dimension.”
Worried that I was about to be left in the
theoretical dust, I pressed him a bit further. “But what's that?” I asked tentatively. “What do you mean by the fourth dimension?”
“Well, I
could tell you a little about how it functions in formulas,” he said, “but I'm
not sure we know exactly what it is.” He could tell I wanted more so he added, “We can measure it accurate as
hell.”
What a profound summation of where we're at: we can
measure things so precisely; but we're still groping around in our quest to
grasp the ultimate metaphysic, what physicists call the “grand unified field
theory” and what in religious terminology we refer to as “those things hidden
since before the foundation of the world.”
My own interest in
the mystery of time arises in part out of my frustration with injustice. We need only think of the daily headlines of
violent attacks, both realized and those being planned. We humans have gotten so good at killing
each other; but we've got so far to go, it seems, to learn how to stop the
killing—which is to say nothing about learning how to love.
When we look back
over time there are some indications that we are making headway. Historical developments such as the
abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women in western democracies
suggest a gradual illumination of injustice and the systems that sustain it. Of course these movements toward liberation
were long in coming and still won't be fully realized for some time into the
future. Women and people of color still
don't share equally in the benefits of our white-male dominated world, and
there are still pockets of slavery. If
our species survives long enough, future generations will no doubt look back on
the media images of our current world leaders and say, “Where were the
women? Where were the people of
color?” Indeed, the questions are
already being asked.
Given how far we
still have to go, it's no wonder certain creative visionaries seek to imagine a
better world. The poet Shelley was such
a visionary. His best literary work
came after a failed attempt to intervene in the political scene of his
day. When no one listened, he took to
writing his great myths and stories anticipating an audience in the
future. Harvard trained Psychiatrist
John Weir Perry, a scholar of social change and social visionaries writes: “Shelley was clearly concerned with world
regeneration, and understood it in its psychological as well as political
sense. As he perceived it, our fixed assumptions and habits of thought have a
deadening and stultifying effect when they become unreflecting, and hence
automatic; only the revivifying light of the divine in [humanity] can speak
through this darkness and renew one's experience of the world” (Perry, The
Heart of History, p. 149).
Perry's book, The
Heart of History, lays out his theory that in times of social crisis,
visionary leaders rise up and articulate a new paradigm. Often times the birthing of that new
paradigm is a very intense experience in which the human vessel of the new,
emerging myth, experiences the death of the old world and the beginning of the
new. This isn't exactly light summer
reading, but the Monday night book group might want to take a look at it.
Describing
Shelley's experience of these forces and his role in relation to them, Perry
writes that Shelley “begged the wind to grant him the gift of the charisma that
would make his voice heard through the world.” He then quotes Shelley directly:
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is….
…Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth…
Be through my lips to the unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy…”
[1]
Perry describes Shelley's work as emblematic of the
artist's ultimate task: that of envisioning a new world and birthing it into
existence. “Poets,” wrote Shelley, “are
the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”[2] In Shelley we hear an echo of Christ's
teaching, a call to live in the world in a way that refuses to collude with its
violence and hatred. Shelley envisions
a new response to the world's violence rooted in an all consuming love:
Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms, and looks which are
Weapons of an unvanquished war.
And if then the tyrants dare,
Let them ride among you there;
Slash and stab and maim, and hew;
What they like, that let them do.
With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay,
Till their rage has died away.
Then they will return with shame,
To the place from which they came.
And that slaughter to the nation
Shall steam up like inspiration
Eloquent, oracular
A volcano heard afar:
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
While in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many—they are few.
Beautiful, almost
on the level of the Sermon on the Mount, and no doubt inspired by it. Of course this kind of thinking is not very
realistic! Well, one person thought it
was. He attended several Shelley
Society meetings in England. His
name? Mohandas Gandhi.
I invoke Shelley
to make the point that there are many ways to work for the transformation of
the world, including those who seek to bring it about through literature. The literary artist seeks to shape and
transform the world in hopes of moving us a little closer to a distant
ideal. This may seem to over-estimate
the societal role of the writer, but Camus reminds us that totalitarian regimes
have a long history of persecuting them.[3]
Those who suppress the truth are threatened by it, which is why Jesus was
persecuted for his ideas.
For today's sermon
I'd like to take a quick look H. G. Wells and his novel, The Time Machine. Wells himself was a visionary who, like
Shelley, deeply lamented the suffering going on in the world. He was actually instrumental in the founding
of the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. Through imagining a time in the distant
future, Wells gives us a collective Rorschach that we can analyze and explore
in hopes of advancing our own quest for spiritual evolution.
The protagonist of
The Time Machine is a well-intentioned scientist who travels far into
the future where he discovers a world inhabit by two groups of people. On the surface of the Earth are the “Eloi.”
They live a blissful existence in which all their needs on met. But as the plot develops, we discover there
is a more sinister race of beings beneath the Earth, the Morlochs. In a new introduction to the novel Wells'
great grandson notes that this was part social commentary: the two classes of
beings reflected the growing division between rich and poor characteristic of
19th century England. Later
on in that same introduction, though, Wells' great grandson hits upon what to
me is the story's deeper meaning. He
writes: “Science fiction …is at its
best when it works as an allegory, as a reflection or illustration of our own
lives. The body of the story of The
Time Machine operates on that … level: the light and dark worlds of the
Eloi and the Morlocks evoke the Jekyll and Hyde-like divisions within the human
psyche” (Simon Finlay Wells, in his 2001 introduction to The Time Machine,
p. xvii)
It's worth noting
that The Time Machine was published in 1895, five years prior to Freud's
first major publication. So it's all
the more remarkable that his futuristic vision of the world evokes the basic
psychoanalytic division between consciousness and unconscious. Wells was in effect offering a prophetic description
of human nature writ large with the brush strokes of fiction. The creatures living above ground reflect
our conscious way of being in the world. The creatures living below the ground represent our shadow side, the raw
and dangerous drives and instincts which human beings were—at the time the
novel came out—just then beginning to become consciously aware of. Wells certainly was aware of humanity's
destructive tendencies and it's clear from his life and his work that he was
deeply committed illuminating and transforming that darkness.
Here today at the
dawn of the 21st century, we are still trying to illuminate the dark
drives and forces that seem to incessantly pull us toward war and
destruction. Like the surface dwellers
in Wells' fiction, we're for the most part blissfully unaware of the enormous
cost our life style is exacting from the Earth and its people. Yes, on some level we know that species are
vanishing, that labor is being exacted under less than ideal conditions, yet by
virtue of the powers of denial we're able to suppress these unpleasant truths
to a level that rarely interferes with our day-to-day lives. But the Earth is beginning to talk back, as
are its people. We Americans and other
post-colonial powers are being challenged to transition into a new way of
being: one which is no longer characterized by waste and consumption, but
rather by a vision of a sustainable, mutual interdependence.
I suppose it's
reasonable to ask if an evolved species of primate is capable of extricating
itself from its drive toward domination. After all, we didn't climb the latter out of the primordial mists by
turning the other cheek. The more sober
among us fear that our violence is hard-wired in, that we are incurably
vicious, that our surface dweller smiles conceal a bloodlust that is rooted in
a far deeper place.
While readily
admitting that there's plenty of evidence to support such a view, I have to say
that I'm an incurable optimist on this front. The way I figure it, we're either going to annihilate ourselves in a
nuclear conflagration, or we'll gradually grow to see through all of the
mystifications around violence and cruelty and move on to create a just
world. After all, a world without violence
would free up an unimaginable wellspring of material and spiritual resources,
transforming the planet and ushering in a mode of existence we can hardly
imagine.
This is, I
believe, what the Christian tradition is all about. Last week in my sermon on Paul we saw how he is first presented within
the Biblical narrative as a persecutor of the church. We saw that he was arresting Christians and dragging them off to
jail, standing by at public executions, and thinking that this was okay,
that it was in fact the right thing. But then something happened and his eyes were opened and suddenly he
realized that the founder of this religion had been executed unjustly. And he begins to talk about a wisdom of the
cross that's juxtaposed to the wisdom of the world. This is a fundamentally new way of seeing the world that takes
the world's violence, mostly shrouded in darkness, and trains a spotlight on
it.
You get the
feeling sometimes when Paul is writing that he's glimpsing something that
exists outside of the temporal limitations of this world. His conversion experience has broken him
loose from the world's grip, from the mentality he once was slave to. Writing to the church in Corinth he says “We
do speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age
or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, a
wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time
began. None of the rulers of this age
understood it, for if they had, they would net have crucified the Lord of
glory” (Acts 2:6-8).
Paul is in effect
saying that something is in the process of being revealed that has been hidden
since the beginning. Whereas the
world's wisdom says that some people matter more than others, that some people
are expendable, that some people can be wiped away and called “collateral
damage,” there is a different kind of wisdom that exists outside the temporal,
half-evolved mindset of our species: this wisdom affirms the worth and dignity
of all people. If the rulers in Jesus'
day had grasped it, the killing would have stopped. But they didn't, just as they don't today, and the killing
machine is revving up for the next war.
But maybe, just
maybe, there's hope. Just like we have
gradually come to see that slavery is bad, perhaps eventually we'll come to a
collective awareness concerning injustices such as the death penalty and war.
I have my own
futuristic fantasy in which a young child is with her grandmother in a
beautiful park. This is so far in the
future that all war has long ceased. Poverty has been eradicated, as has hunger. The educational system no longer churns out people with skills to
exploit the Earth, but rather it produces people with a profound respect for
its delicate and fragile harmonies. The
religions of the world no longer serve to justify violence, but instead are
free to celebrate peace, worship God, and help people harmonize their lives
with the natural rhythms of Nature and the Cosmos.
Grandmother and
grandchild walk up to an old cannon, with some cannon balls piled up next to it
for show. Its very presence in the park
is anachronistic, but it's there as a reminder. The little girl, sensing the absurdity of firing these huge steel
projectiles at other human beings asks her grandmother how people could have
ever done that. And the grandmother, a
wise Crone with wisdom beyond her many years replies, “There was a time when
fear ruled the world. But that was a
long time ago. Gradually, over many
centuries, we came to understand that love is stronger than fear, and that
changed the world.”
The beauty of the
spiritual life is that it empowers us to act outside of the box. We begin to see that the tapestry of human
history is but the lace fringe of the unfurling history of a far more ancient
cosmos. We begin to see that we are the
species tasked with consciousness, fated with the ability to reflect back on
the sacred majesty of it all. We begin
to see each person as sacred, the product of billions of years of divine
creativity.
This is the world
Jesus moved in. He spoke on its
behalf. He knew the world was not ready
for his message, that it would lash at out him and at anyone who followed in
his path. This is why it's not easy to
go through a spiritual conversion, to stand up on behalf of the truth: it goes
against the way of the world.
If the human race
is going to survive into the future, we will eventually rise above the forces
that lead us into war. Should that time
come, you can bet people will be looking back at us just as we look back at
slave owning Christians. They'll ask,
“How could they have done that?” They'll wish we had seen sooner that dropping bombs on people is not the
path to peace. Looking back as if from
a long way into the future, you can almost see it that way now….
But we're so
captivated by the powers that be. Like
Paul prior to his conversion, we're convinced violence is necessary and
right. People in high places are trying
to convince us that attacking Iraq is the right thing to do, that it's for the
Iraqi's own good. Of course there
aren't any Gallup polls saying that the majority of Iraqi citizens favor the
bombing of Baghdad. And please trust
me, if we could poll them, they wouldn't be in favor of it. If we believe they want us to attack them,
we're fooling ourselves. If we think we
can decide what's in their best interest, we're creating the same sort of
rationalization that has mystified unprovoked attacks since the beginning of
time. That whole mindset is what Paul
referred to as “the wisdom of this age,” which he contrasts with the wisdom of
Christ.
Jesus was born
into a violent, oppressive world much like our own. He sized up what was going on around him and refused to play the
game. He said, in effect, “I choose
love, even at the risk of my own life.” Can you imagine a planet of people taking that stand? Jesus could. He seems to have imagined that there would be others like him,
who would come together out of a shared belief that everyone is welcome at the
table, that everyone on Earth is created in the image of God.
A few minutes
after that conversation with Al Mac Rae
he came bounding up the stairs to my office with one more thought. “When you try to plug in negative time,” he
said, “it throws off the formula. It
just doesn't work. You can't reverse
time.”
Isn't that
interesting. It gives you the feeling
that what's done is done.
And so we gather to remember. We can't undo the crucifixion. But we can tell the story of a man who
risked it all in a spirit of love, and who called us to do the same. May today's shared meal bring us all to a
place of deep remembrance, from which we can turn and face the future.
Amen.
[1] Shelley, as
found in Perry (The Heart of History, p. 153).
[2] Shelley, as
found in Camus (The Rebel, p. 269).
[3] Camus,
The Rebel, pp. 253- 4.
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