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The Owner of Time

Many years ago, struggling to finish some apparently urgent job before lunchtime, and with some other apparently equally urgent thing to do during the break, I found myself flustered and pressed for time, cursing every snag and delay.

Then a strange thing happened.

A small voice whispered, not in my ear but in my mind, ‘Calm down. I own time. I made it and I own it.’

The job entailed fixing something, I don’t know what, to a wall or a desk. The screws would not turn, their heads were burred, nothing aligned. I had tried all the usual cuss words, slamming things down, blaming other things for being out of reach or just not being where I had only just put them…

… ‘So,’ I said, whether out loud or in my head, I don’t remember, ‘then why is it taking so long? My wrists and fingers ache, and my chance of getting across town to the lab and back is getting close to nil.’

Suddenly the last screw – it’s always the last one –gave a little jump sideways. The screwdriver went one way, the screw several feet the other. I had already used up my supply of magic words, none of which will bear repeating here. I simply stared after it, paused and trudged to pick it up. At the next try it went in like a dream. Job done. I looked at my watch. Five minutes to lunchtime, not umpteen past as I had expected, just time enough to pack up and set off.

‘O.K.’ I said, ‘If you own time I’ll take you at your word.’

I took off my watch and set off for the lab, nearly half an hour’s walk away across Cambridge, where Ian Manick and David Beale produced rigid contact lenses in what would later become Contact Lens Precision Laboratories. My first afternoon patient was booked for two o’clock. I don’t remember now, but the most likely reason for the trip was for lenses for that appointment.

When I first took the position at Haldyn Clamp’s contact lens practice in Bridge Street near St John’s College, Ian and David were restricted in one small kitchen at the back. They soon outgrew this and were now a mile or so away in much better premises in Fitzroy Street. Hence my trip. Cambridge does not have easy, cross-city car or bus routes so I had to walk.

The weather was fine, the distance was the problem. Nevertheless, having discarded my watch I avoided looking at any clocks on the way. Time was passing but I told myself it was not mine; I was trusting the owner.

I enjoyed the walk, determinedly at first but gradually easier and easier. The weather was certainly good and the sun pleasantly warm. I found I was no longer saying, ‘If you own time I will take your word.’ The if had gone. It was going to be alright.

I went by Midsummer Common, a longer route but pleasant. It was not as late as I had feared and I felt increasingly, though still a tad wilfully, that time was not in my hands. I strolled in the sun.

Eventually I arrived at the lab.

‘Hi!’

‘Ah…’

The lenses were not ready. Heads shook ruefully, reasons were given, promises – no – hopes were expressed.

‘Later this afternoon?’ No, too late.

‘Why not go into the Grafton Centre and have some lunch? Perhaps…’

Suddenly, greatly missing my watch but determined not to ask the time, I felt very hungry. The Grafton Centre was just minutes away and soon I was going up in a lift to an unusual restaurant that only sold starters. Nowadays we might call it tapas. Because of the time involved I told myself to only order one, but there were several voices competing now: one telling me what a fool I was being; another, my stomach, telling me I was far too hungry for just one starter, and anyway I would arrive back at the lab too soon; another saying, ‘Just go back to the practice and make your excuses.’ And a quiet one persisting, ‘Time is mine, leave it to me.’

Fortunately none of them made any difference to the direction the lift was going and shortly I found myself at a white-cloth table with three assorted starters and a small glass of wine, with nothing to be gained from hurrying.

In case you think there was an obvious thing I should have done, this was in the nineteen-sixties, long before the invention of mobile phones.

Meal over, wine finished, lift down and a short walk to the lab where there was a phone. The lenses were still being edged.

I asked to use the phone and as I dialled the whisper cautioned, ‘No need, no hurry, time is mine.’

I hung up. The lenses were having a final polish and in a few minutes I was on my way. I did not take the walk back across Midsummer Common, that seemed too much of a liberty, but I still did not hurry. I gave in to the whisper and walked steadily back along Maid’s Causeway and Jesus Lane, passing Jesus College and the back of Sydney Sussex. Eventually I passed the Round Church and back to the practice in Bridge Street. As I approached there was a large clock over the jewellers before it which I refused to look at, went in the practice door, into my consulting room, picked up my watch and put it on my wrist. A minute or so later I heard the patient arrive.

I looked at my watch, checking it for the first time. Two o’clock. He was spot on.

I do not remember if the lenses were for him or a later patient but the sense that there was something other than time, something personal that owns time, has grown with me over the years.

Eternity is far more than endless time.

The Eternal possesses time.

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Saving the Earth

Many denominations celebrate creation in September, calling the month Creation-tide, thinking particularly of mankind’s care, or lack of care, for it. I wrote these lines to remind myself not to forget, in my love and hope for God’s world, that there is a greater work to be done.

If lightly we forsake the upward way
and Earth’s green pastures seem a worthy goal,
and if we save the forests and the seas,
the elephant, the tiger and the bees,
shall we then ask, ‘What profit is in these?’
if light along the way we lose our soul?

We who hold creation’s Word in trust,
were chosen by our Father as trustees.
Lilies fade in just a day to die,
and yet God sees.
Birds drop to dust beneath a soaring sky
as surely as one day will you and I,
and yet God sees.

We are worth more to him than these.

Guardians of this globe and all its gain,
its mountains and the mosses and the rain,
the slime moulds and the seas,
the wasps, the flies, the bees,
the sparrows, and the lilies, and the trees.

Are we worth more than these?

What is man?
When I consider the heavens,
what is man?

We hold this world in trust,
raised, like it, from dust,
with souls as fertile seed within us sown.
Though we dig and we preserve
we must risk the Living word,
or say, abashed , absurd,

‘Thou hast thine own.’

And will he say, ‘Well done!’?

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Genesis

You can talk of the Day of the Jackal.
You can talk of the Day of the Dead.
In Cromwell’s day, so it is said,
the days were black and the days ran red.

But the days that are as a thousand years,
and the thousand years as a day,
belong to Him who made the world
in six, plus one for play.

I have long wondered at the scientific accuracy of the biblical seven days as described in the first chapter of Genesis and the beginning of the second, and how few Christians think it has any accuracy at all, usually describing it as ‘truth dressed in story’. Its accuracy is particularly remarkable as it bears all the hallmarks of an oral tradition which predated writing. Even in the bronze age when it probably first found written form there was little scientific basis to draw on.

As in the poem above, biblical folk used day in the same varied way that we do. Peter, quoted in the second verse, gave an inspired explanation of this (2 Peter 3:8). I have interleaved the complementary biblical and scientific accounts below (or see children’s version, September 2016).

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void,
Space-time traces back to a chaotic void, in which possibilities, eventualites, shimmer in and out of being.
darkness covered the deep
an unstable, pregnant darkness.
and the spirit brooded over the waters.
The initial conditions had to be just right, in perfect balance…
God said, ‘Let there be light.’
… for electromagnetic waveforms to survive.
He separated the light from the darkness
Those first waves separated, producing others in the primaeval void.
***
God said, ‘Let there be an expanse…to separate waters from waters
The new waveforms burst in a vast expansion…
God called the expanse ‘sky’
… and space was created.
***
God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be drawn together…’
Waveforms condensed to particles, protons, neutrons, electrons…
… and let dry ground appear.’
… atoms condensed out of this ‘soup’ of particles, …
God called the dry ground land, … the waters he called seas.
… mass and gravity brought them together. Solids and liquids formed and eventually the Earth with its amazing landforms and sea-scapes.
Then God said, ‘let the land produce vegetation…
Primitive vegetal life began, probably in hot inland springs, and travelled to the seas.
***
God said, ‘Let there be lights in the sky to separate day from night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons, days and years…
The tidal forces of the sun and moon and stars drive and mark the seasons, days and years, which in turn drive evolution.
***
God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures…
Animal life, primitive at first, formed in the oceans…
… and let birds fly above the earth and across the expanse of the sky…
… then spread to land. Many early forms perished, including the dinosaurs, of which birds are probably the only descendants.
***
God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals each according to its kind…
After the great Permian extinction mammals proliferated and became the predominant large creatures on land…
God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in our likeness…
…of which man, the latecomer, came with the ability to wonder at creation and to love it…
… and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over livestock over all the earth and the creatures that move on the ground.
… and with the immense responsibility this brought.
***
... on the seventh day God rested from all his labour…
… like the first it lasted less than a millisecond.

Then the real work began.

The events and order in this early creation account match modern science almost too accurately. Then there is the coincidence of waters and waves and the apparently contradictary concept of a formless or chaotic void, translations of the original which quantum physics now supports. Those with a statistical bent may work out the odds. But whether we can, whether we want or need to, we can still be amazed. We should still wonder.

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Existence is Coexistence

Born during the Second World War, on the edge of London’s East End, too young to be evacuated to the countryside, I have remarkably early memories back into my first year, including my cot, being given snow off my pram coverlet, barrage balloons, the bomb shelter, a doodlebug and a window blown in by blast. My father, unfit for service from a heart condition, joined the ARP in which he volunteered to enter a bombed building at night to comfort a woman trapped in rubble. He was refused permission at first but, having been given no more than two years to live anyway, he went in. Sadly his heart did not stand the strain and he died shortly after.

Those days and my mother’s compassionate attitude, to the Germans and the Allies, probably contributed much to my interest in how we relate to one another, the way the world works and the nature of existence. It set the seed of seeing all existence as co-existence. At school my main interests were in the arts, but my chosen occupation was science based. Nevertheless a foot in each camp gives better balance.

The war ended when I was three years old. With other boys I collected small beads of shrapnel with magnets from roadsides and gardens. I had a number of inspirational teachers in my early years, but there was another component. My first senior school gave boys the morning off if we went to church on the morning of Ascension Day. This made me very religious! I went to St. Mary the Virgin, Ilford, where the vicar, Fr. Alexander Colvin, learning I had not been christened in the turmoil of wartime East End, gave me baptismal classes in the Resurrection Chapel below the Pieta of Mary grieving over Jesus’s body. That image has stayed with me all my life. In spite of, or because of, St. Mary’s High Church position, Father Colvin made a special effort to state the one-ness of the Christian community, describing how the different traditions recognised baptism and Mass but that there was only one Church. Again, though in other words, was the sense that existence was co-existence.

I have a mongrel faith. St Mary’s was High Anglican; I was briefly a Boys’ Brigader in a Baptist Church, then a boy scout in a Methodist church. Since then, mainly for geographical reasons, I have attended Anglican, Congregational, Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, and Presbyterian churches in ‘traditional’ and ‘evangelical’ forms. I was a Baptist church deacon, and Sunday School teacher for many years.

In my early twenties I edited a Presbyterian Fellowship of Youth magazine, and later a Baptist Church Magazine, Outlook, for which I enjoyed writing a monthly Schultz-style strip cartoon. Later I have written articles for other church publications. I think of myself as an essayist, dipping my pen in a subject to let it flow where it will, contributing off-the-wall articles to church magazines. Increasingly I am drawn to a mixture of poetry and prose and have written plays, articles and short stories.

My thriller, Namestone, builds on the theme of co-existence. Two men, a 15th century monk and a 21st century scientist, are brought together by a series of horrific events which stretch loyalty, trust and friendship to their limits. They become bound up with the enigmatic Hérault – a man with exceptional fighting skills and even more deadly persuasive powers, who seeks power beyond anything else, using evil as a practical tool. Power for him means total freedom, depending on no-one, neither in this world nor any other. There is interplay between age-old faith and a scientific undercurrent. We depend not only on each other, in whom we find the image of God, but on the universe, spacetime, in which we find ourselves.

It is not a simple ‘baddies get their come-uppance’ story. Hérault, makes no excuses or pretence of goodness or of being misunderstood, instead he makes as strong an argument for being evil as possible. I wanted to present challenges we all face one way or another, through the lens of an adventure story of ordinary people under extra-ordinary stresses.

I have always been fascinated by the impact of Quantum Physics on our everyday attitude to life and faith; that the harmonic trinity of energy, matter and observation mirrors that of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Ultimately philosophies that try hardest to understand the way the world is must resemble each other and each contain fundamental truths. The cosmos is a harmony of matter and energy; it has been suggested that matter as we see it does not exist, that it is ultimately the interaction of energy fields; that we are each a harmonic in a greater symphony. Existence is Co-existence: we cannot and should not separate the how from the why.