Lessons of Time – Sunday, September 26, 1982
If history can teach us anything, perhaps it is modesty about who we are and what we are. What seems permanent from the vantage of a single life caught in the present is as transient as the wind which erodes a desert city. Institutions and the people who create them burn bright for their moment and then flicker and fail.
Haughty pharaoh who once strode Egyptian palaces wildly dreaming of conquest is now just a fossil in the earth. Sumeria, Babylonia and Persia, whose soldiers shook the world, are only so much dust. And excessive South American jungles have buried entire cities out of memory.
Yes, man has less control here than he wants, far less time than he dreams. He acts his part intensely, believing he is all—and then is gone.
Even a glimpse at our personal history teaches us how time moves us on from who we were. The long days of school which seemed to last forever come and go. When we visit school again, we have changed and the cheers we hear in the halls are only echoes of the past. The football hero has moved on to sell insurance; the prom queen now has wrinkles. Time, which seemed to stand still, did not keep its promise and we look back from the mirror with older eyes than we remembered.
The poet, Shelley, said it this way, “We are as smoke that drifts above the vale / Whose ever changing shape the breezes tend.”1
Now all of this is not to make us despair, but to give perspective. Time in its relentlessness will push us on from any heartache. The most intense sorrow, the agitating anger will soon be but a memory.
Life’s hurry and impermanence must teach us, too, to be less eager to embrace the current thought, less willing to sell our security for the latest model, less impressed by those who seem high style.
Today’s styles, gadgets, and thought will be tomorrow’s antiques. The goals we suffer for may, in retrospect, be just so much trivia. So, in these moments here let us evaluate the pull of the present with a wise distance, let us put our hearts on what will not fade, and finally let us love what we love with more intent. The moment will not come again.
1 Shelley, Percy Bysshe as quoted in “Clouds that Veil the Midnight Moon,” Shawnee Press, Inc., Delaware Water Gap, PA.
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September 26, 1982
Broadcast Number 2,771