Bosco Peters has an excellent site on the liturgical year that I’ll be referencing, and you might find helpful as well.
Day: November 30, 2008
In my last post, I did not mean to suggest that business time is bad. The problem comes when we treat business time as exclusive time. We must earn an income as a part of supporting our families, but earning an income must not be understood as the exclusive means of supporting our families.
We support our families and our friends in ways that exceed and go far beyond money. We actually spend time with them. Business time might be understood as a way to spend time on them. When people go out and buy lots of gifts, they are spending time on the ones who will receive the gifts. This is not bad. But it cannot substitute for spending time with someone.
Scrooge is a great example of someone who lives under business time. The keeping of books and earning of money becomes the exclusive time for him. All his time is occupied by measuring accounts and keeping the books. He takes the virtue of thrift to the heresy of miserliness. His preoccupation with business time has left him impoverished. He is wealthy and poor.
Sounds like many Americans.
The Crachetts reveal another time. Relational time. Bob works and lives in business time but not under it. He is not defined by the hourly wage and by the occupation. Rather, he invests his life into the family around him. While he has little money and his family may struggle, he is wealthy.
This makes me think. I drove the neighborhood of homes that were under 1500 square feet. Some of the homes were under 1000 square feet. People were in the yards laughing and playing. People were walking in the neighborhood. I was surrounded by life.
The same week I drove through a neighborhood of homes 4000 square feet and above. No one was to be seen anywhere. These big houses looked more like giant mausoleums, housing dead people.
I would suggest that business time so prevails in our culture that we think having bigger and better and more equals having successful lives. Business time can produce amazing rewards. But it cannot be exclusive.
I would suggest that some people may try to compensate for their poverty in relationships at “Christmas time” by spending time/money on friends and family. The gift buying is not wrong, but it cannot substitute for the absence of investing these relationships in other ways. Stuff does not equal relationships. And stuff can not recreate the wonder we long for.
That wonder may be found in another time: liturgical time.
Some “times” we think that all time is the same time. This is one of the illusions of living “under” the rule of business time. What is business time? We may speak of the normal business “hours” to indicate a 9 to 5 workday Monday through Friday. These “hours” and “days” are designated for business. But business time extends far beyond these hours.
Living under the rule of business time becomes a way of thinking that defines each moment of our existence as either billable or non-billable time. We are either “earning” money or not “earning” money. We reduce time to pursuit of the dollar. We reduce economics to money as opposed to relationship.
In this way of understanding our time, we think that we don’t own our time while we are working for someone else. They’ve purchased that our of our time. And when we aren’t working, it is “free time.” Time that is free because we earn no money but it is also free because we are free to do what we want.
By living under this time, day after day, year after year, we attach personal value to the “business time.” The more money we earn, the more bonuses, the more successful we perform in “business time,” the greater sense of worth we have. Our personal worth is attached to performance.
If we live under business time, we may lose some of our humanness, our wonder, our capacity to love and our need to be loved. We may lose our power to choose, to define the times. We may lose our power to say, “No!”
I would suggest that we can move between times. We don’t have to live “under business time.” We can move between business time and other times such as Christmas time.
More later.
