Genesis 2:4-9.
This meditation is all around the connectedness we have to the earth. The word ‘Adam’ means humankind, with its basic meaning as ‘earth’. The implication is that humans are drawn primarily from the earth.
No wonder the indigenous peoples such as the Australian Aboriginals and Native Americans feel such a connection with the earth, and that their spirituality and sense of meaning, purpose, and place is so intimately and powerfully connected with the earth.
It’s interesting to note how they like to walk barefoot, and sit on the ground, feeling its warmth and texture.
How very different to us modern, post-industrialised urban westerners who wear footwear, sit on chairs, raise our homes from the ground, and generally try to insulate ourselves from the earth and nature. What richness and deep communion from mother earth do we forfeit in our efforts to be clean and comfortable…?
I remember several years ago at a C&CC Retreat that I organised, spending an hour or two sitting outside under a tree, on the ground. The day was warm and so was the ground, and it felt good to be sitting ‘in’ nature. There was a sense of timelessness about it.
After I’d finished my readings this afternoon, the sun went down and stars came out. I turned the lights off and had the curtains open. The only light came from the radiator, and that light was almost like a small open-fire (it has one of those fake coal fire tops on it that glows).
It was beautiful to watch the stars in the ever-darkening night sky while listening to the gentle sound of the sea.
The longer I sat and looked, the closer I felt to God. And I realised that there is a sense of timelessness when you have nothing else to do but be with God. The timelessness includes a richness of being that seems to be rarely found in normal, everyday life.
On the train journey to this retreat, I was reading an article in the Financial Times about GPS (Global Satellite Positioning) integration with mobile phones, and some of the issues that go along with knowing where anybody is at any given time of the day or night. One of the issues was around how quickly time seems to go when you have to account for every minute of it.
There’s an interesting thread between that thought, our mortality, and our sense of truly ‘being’. I know that the busier I am the more quickly time seems to pass. Next week I’ll be 42 years old; more than half my life has gone – and it seems to go by more quickly each year!
When I come away on Retreat, I take my watch off and put the clock in another room so that I’m not aware of what time it is. And as I surrender myself and my ‘time’ to simply being with God, the day and a bit that I actually spend in this house with God seems to take a longer time than what a day and a bit at work would seem like.
I was also thinking about indigenous peoples and how they don’t seem to have a sense of ‘time’ like we do. Some of them in Africa call us ‘the people who worship the clock’. They might turn up to see you ‘when the time is right’, not at 10am. And yet, they often have a sense of joy and richness to their lives because they can relax into ‘being’ who they are in their sense of connectedness to the earth. Perhaps time really does pass more slowly for them. Perhaps they don’t feel as though they’re being rushed to their grave. And even when they approach death, there’s a sense of welcoming the return home to the earth from which they were drawn in the first place.
I know how busy my life is, and how quickly the time is going by. I’m the one who makes myself so busy, trying to achieve as much as I can in the time that I have on earth.
But do I have time to simply ‘be’ with people, and with God?
And if I did give more time to simply ‘being’, would time go more slowly, would the experience of each day be richer?
How far have we really gone from being truly ‘Adam’?
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