With all the hoop-la, extra chores and events alongside the inevitable yet unexpected catastrophes of the season--this year the waste pipe decided to slow down and back up just as all the kids (as usual) brought dirty laundry along with packages for their Christmas visits--with all that behind me and things getting more or less back to normal, I fin myself listening to the echoes of my own voice wailing,"Ther isn't enough time!" And I know that I need to get back in touch with the deeper significance of the givens of human eixistence. So this morning I invite you to share that consideration.

There seem to be but three dimensions of human experience: Space; Memory; Time. Physical activity is limited by height and width and depth; while motion within that space depends on what we have called time; and change is apprehended by means of our mental ability to recall the similar and dissimilar positions and events which we once experienced but may no longer exactly reproduce in the here and now. These are the dimensions, the inventions and conventions, which enable us to name our collective experience so that we might communicate with each other and embrace and affirm the commonality of our existence.

Space with its material givens seems at first glance to be the most elemental; indeed, when memory is gone and one's time is used up, the survivors are left with the doleful chore of disposing of the material remains which still must have a place. But since we're talking of human experience, memory may more likely replace space as most basic; for it enables recognition of faces and places once encountered, retention of knowledge and events, and a curious but real ability to imagine and create from that store of experience--combined, they amount to the peculiarities and particulairties of personality and individuality. However, when you look more closely at all three dimensions, it is time that so pervades both space and memory that the old saw: "Time is of the essence" comes more clearly into focus suggesting that it is indeed Time that is the unifying something which defines us and our world.

There are often occasions-- rites of passage, moments of special awareness, and such-- that call us to reckon with time. For, no matter what our position or circumstance, each of us has time to spend. How little or how much it is not usually ours to know. Each next minute could be our last or could multiply minute on minute for many, many years to come. Only at life's end may someone else survey our life's expanse and judge it to have been short or long. Moreover, time as experienced by each of us is seldom apprehended as regular in its movement. Sometimes it passes at breakneck speed; occasionally it seems not to move at all; nonetheless it is always and inevitably passing, leaving ripples, waves, currents of change in its wake. Time, if not synonymous with life itself, is certainly the water in the River of Life.

Nations, communities, and individuals take note of time in various ways depending on stages and cycles and circumstance; since time shows experience to have a certain repetitious quality despite its alterations. Calendars, for instance, have been designed and promoted to facilitate common agreement within the human community all the while indicating the peculiar and particular situation of their inventors whose cultural and belief systems are thus overlaid on the amorphous nature of time. For seasons come and seasons go depending, not on us, but on the continuing relationship of this small globe-home of ours to its energizing sun and perhaps other influences we can not now know or imagine. In addition to the apparent motion of our sun, the great sidereal clock overhead moves much more slowly though still perceptibly for those who know to watch. And lesser circles and cycles depend on moon and planets. Just the same we have made calendars to measure the motion of time more often than not to suit some sense of our own neat mathematical convention and historical significance. As a result we are often caught by surprise when the "times are out of joint" and we cannot quite ascertain what ought to be an accepted center of time. Not necessarily an unpleasant situation, it is still a curiosity to note that we have been marking one year end/year beginning after another since last September, beginning with the start of the church year for Unitarian Universalists, High Holy Days for the Jews, Halloween for those who are reclaiming the pagan traditions of old Europe, the Feast of Booths and Thanksgiving for those still tied (however tenuously) to an agrarian mode, Christmas for the Christians, Kwanzaa for those who have only recently sought to reclaim and renew their African heritage, and then what we simply designate as the New Year according to the commercial and fiscal-- the so-called secular, calendar. What's more, we could probably continue finding New Year celebrations at least till spring, depending on what cultures and climates we consider.

Individual lifetimes are punctuated by occasions not always synchonized with what is accepted as the common calendar. So religious communities from time out of mind have instituted rites of passage alongside the marking of seasonal changes and the celebration of historical moments and arbitrary calendars. And each individual, each one of us, prompted by memory and stirred by the inventions of our imagination's creation of new configurations of known experience--we each note the changes that we have assimilated into ourselves. That, in turn, makes periodic restatements of our identities necessary as we perceive the passing of time lest the constancy of change leave us lost and wandering. So I would share with you some examples of my perceptions of time as an invitation to you to recapitulate your own experience that together we may renew our appreciation of the temporal aspect of our human being.

The anthropmorphic representation of Time as a winged and swiftly moving figure was beyond my ken when I was a child. I remember long, hot summer afternoons when time simply crawled along while I would skate on the cement walkway from one clothesline post to the other down our long backyard. I would sing and pretend I was Judy Garland. I preferred June Allyson, but she was blonde and I was not. (There always seems to be some reality grounding even in our pretense.) Those afternoons were a timelessness caught in an equally timeless somewhen between the forever since the last day of school and the day after forever when school would start up again. There were other days, too, when the neighborhood kids were there and three or four of us would climb into the big porch swing my father had mounted in a heavy pipe frame of his own devising at the end of the yard. Some of the older kids would check to see that the broomstick handle was safely in place just inside the screweyes that held the front chains and then give us a push. The bunch of us, crowded together, hanging onto the security of that broom handle would fly up and back, up and back, singing at the top of our lungs about the heart of Texas with its sage in bloom. (The odd thing about it was we were all growing up in Maryland and none of us had ever seen Texas; we had no idea what sage looked like outside of the two-dimensional, black and white kind we might have seen Saturday afternoons in Gene Autry movies.)

The timelessness that is the freedom of childhood depended on letting the adults keep an eye on the clock of growing.

Waiting seems to make time slow down. I have known moments when time was so out of joint that minutes slowed to years! Many occasions during those first few months after our high school graduation when I was working as a crafts counselor at camp and HE had gone off to college for summer school hundreds of miles away, I spent years that were probably only minutes by the conventional clock waiting for the mail to arrive. When a letter did arrive the contrast was, as the kids now say, awesome! for time and space melted away for the so-short duration of the reading of that letter only to come crashing back again after the first reading.

Years later, time slowed to a crawl and flew by simultaneously as I lay on a hospital bed in Chicago one cold and dark December night awaiting the arrival of our first child. I remember now only the interminable darkness, the sense of floating in time and space with a mountain-sized abdomen, and then the flurry of excitement as I was wheeled into the delivery room soon to greet the gray dawn with a red and screechy new son. After that, time began again to flow more realistically.

Neither passing imperceptibly, nor dragging nor flying, time does occasionally disappear-- especially in moments of high emotion. I have known time to cease in a moment of panic as the news of a presidential assassination was juxtaposed with the clamorings of a roly-poly cherub at his playpen fence. I have known time to stop in its tracks, freezing me in an attitude of terror as the news arrived of my father's heart attack. And I have known time to be held in some sort of strange abeyance while we stood watch as a family, grieving yet privileged to be able to witness the ebbing lifetide of Mother's breathing until it stopped forever except as it continues in us and our progeny.