The Religion Works

Essays by Harry T. Cook

August 22, 2008

A good many 21st Century human beings seem to like the concept of “clockwork” because it implies dependability, promptness and what my German-speaking friends call Deutsche punkt!

Truth to tell, I am bound head, foot, heart and mind to the near-precise movements made by the hour, minute and second hands of my Seiko analog watch. I awake around 5:00 in the morning to give the freshest time of the day to research. I begin my daily walk at 6:45, returning no later than 7:40, to breakfast with my wife and to digest the New York Times and Wall Street Journal between then and 9 a.m. Then I am ready to continue work in my study at home or at my church office. The routine varies on Saturday and Sunday, though each of those has its clock-oriented order.

I always knew when my best high school friend school would be home, because his mother once told me, “We eat at 8, 12 and 6.” And she meant it. You could always find the Ungers at home upon those hours. There is much anxiety at my church around beginning the 8 a.m. Sunday service precisely on the hour – mostly, I think, because certain members of the congregation wish to repair no later than 8:45 to the restaurant across the way for their ritual breakfast ahead of the crowd. A primal wickedness in me sometimes lengthens the homily by a minute or two just to establish Sabbath priorities. Radio and television air what they make bold to call “news” exactly at the hour-mark. One station to which I listen features the Greenwich Observatory tone that marks the exact time with sidereal precision. In my newspaper days I learned to work on deadline, having to complete an assignment by the appointed hour that the edition might be gotten out on time. In retrospect, I now understand how my mental and physical health declined under that regimen, given its daily dollops of anxiety. In much younger years, I hung out at the local railroad depot in our little village, occasionally being of actual use to an aging station agent. He taught me that everything on the railroad had to run by the clock. The northbound train was due in at 12:35 and due out at 12:37 p.m. Thus did the detraining and entraining of passengers, and the loading and unloading of express parcels, baggage and mail have to be done in a hurry. In cases when they were not, everyone from the division superintendent on down would want to know why departure was delayed. That was because the scheduled progress of other trains along the road depended on each fulfilling its own timetable requirements.

A Benedictine abbot once told me that clocks were invented by monks in monasteries to remind them of the appointed hours for their prayers: Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline repeated daily across the 24-hour span from the first hour of the new day to the moments before going to bed. Now we use clocks to motivate us to be on our way at warp speed to both work and play. Fred Andrews was a fruit farmer near the northwestern Michigan hamlet in which I began to grow up. An older relative had owned the farm before him – and before the Chicago & West Michigan Railroad right-of-way had been laid just a half-mile away from his orchards. Fred said his elder relative had reckoned time “by the sun; and by the rumble in his stomach, he knew when it was time to go in for dinner.” After the railroad came, it was the whistle of the 12:35 arriving that signaled time for the midday meal – and then in later years, the noon whistle at the fire house down in the village. I remember Fred saying he thought the sun and “the rumble of the stomach” were better time keepers: “We should eat when we’re hungry, not when the whistle blows.” Life apart from the metrics of the clock seems impossible to me until I call to mind this paraphrase of a portion of the 90th Psalm:

Time, like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away;

They die, forgotten as a dream, dies at the opening day.

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.