There were at least a half dozen of these juggernauts buzzing around the feeder when we spotted them, jumpy and nervous and wary. I don't know if I could have taken home a better picture even with my best camera--I had only a little one--given time and space. But he's here, caught in a moment in which his own quest for food has been interrupted a bit by a bee--see him right there at the spout where the hummingbird would like to get his own fill? Dang bee.
There's a little drama here, going on quite beneath human radar. Bee and bird, hunger pains, a day's work. A tiny, tiny drama in the middle of a trip in which every day it's not hard to believe that time itself is plainly immaterial. Look at this--
Most geologists estimate the time it took to create this massive masterpiece in gadzillions of years. Creationists may well differ. I'll let others slug that one out. What's undeniable is that this kind of massive sculpture wasn't done yesterday. That little hummingbird and that busy bee know absolutely nothing at all about a millennium.
And neither do we, really.
Last night a veteran missionary gave us his take on an undeniable difference between cultures. Anglos worship God on Sunday between ten and twelve, he said; Navajos worship God on Sunday. I suppose it's a mark of our accomplishment as tour guides that our guests chuckled, understanding.
At a forum two days ago, I listened to a woman speak passionately about her education as a girl on the reservation, a recitation that went on and on and on and on. I was the appointed moderator, the one who had to administer control, and I realized, even as she explained her life in thoughtful ways that I wish I would have recorded, that right there at my back was time's winged chariot. The clock was ticking. My clock. Not hers. I had to watch it. She didn't.
Thoreau claims, in Walden, that time is to blame for our "quiet desperation," when to him, he bragged, it is "but the stream I go a-fishing in." Sure. Must be nice. Even now, at this moment I write this, I'm glancing intermittently at the bottom right corner of my screen. There's no sweeping second hand, but the digits march along in a way that make me nervous because the day's orders are implicit in the way the numbers change--there goes another minute in fact: get this done, get in the shower, get breakfast, and get going.
Today, we'll visit the Anasazi ruins, the ancient pueblo people who carved their dwellings into the sandstone. No one on the face of the earth knows exactly what happened to them, the men and woman who built these astonishing apartment buildings, the children who once played in their dusty neighborhoods.
They're long gone, of course, as is all their joy and pain, all their losses and gains. We know what little we do about their lives--their food, their comforts, their deaths--from what they quite inadvertently left behind.
It's easy, I suppose, to get escapist about all of this--about the tedious energy of a hummingbird flitting around a backyard feeder creating a drama I wouldn't even noticed if I hadn't enlarged a digital photo. It's similar maybe to my own life, ours, amid the pageant of endless centuries. It's tempting, really tempting, to say, "this world is not my own--I'm just a passin' through" because we are no more substantial in the scope of things, I suppose, than that bee in the feeder who happened on a free lunch.
But that equation is not the whole story. If it were, why enjoy a dawn or try to paint God's grandeur or make it as real as we can with the gift of language? Why build a house on stone or sand? If what we do and say and think and feel is only dust in the wind, then why raise a fuss at all?
Right now, one of the couples on our trip is arising to a very special morning--their fiftieth anniversary. Fifty years is but a pittance, of course, when compared to the timelessness we've been witnessing in so many ways. Fifty years flits by like those nervous hummingbirds I could barely catch with a camera.
But fifty years of love, I'm thinking, ain't nothing to sneeze at; and if I figure that God almighty sees the sparrows and the hummingbirds and even the bees in this vast and timeless world, then it's impossible to imagine that right now, this morning, some part of his own gargantuan eternal nature isn't itching for a bite of the cake we'll use to celebrate that wonderful anniversary of love.
Time is a gift, Abraham Kuyper once taught me. It's a splendid beautiful gift he gave us, but it's not real. It's only a means to an end, a construct, a management tool. Only eternity is real.
But it's still a gift. I wear around my neck right now a necklace designed and created by a good friend who, just this week, gave it to me as a gift--for my retirement, he told me. It'll be a while before I take it off. It's a gift, something to treasure, like time itself.
For all of us, I suppose, the only way to even begin to understand the nature of eternity, the only way we know, is by looking and listening and watching and loving here, in this world, in what we determine our time. What's of substance here is our taking note of his love and doing what we can of that love ourselves.
And fifty years of that--fifty years!--by golly, is worth one grand celebration.
No comments:
Post a Comment