"Once I had a dream.
I stepped before the throne of God.
He (sic) asked only one question:
'Did you become what you were supposed to be?'
'I'm not sure,' I told Him (sic).
But when I died, I had so much stuff, it took three days to find me."[1]
These words from a poem by Fredrick Zydek aptly describe my situation as I begin to make the transition to retirement. You may have read the piece about me in City Newspaper: It began with these ominous words: "The walls are barely visible in minister Richard Gilbert's office at First Unitarian Church. They are lined floor to ceiling with thousands of books on philosophy, literature, ethics, politics, religion and poetry."[2]
My office is so full that I am tempted to ask for a Sabbatical from now until June 30 to clear it out and make way for the next minister. By last count, I have 24 file drawers full of papers I have carefully collected over my 41 years of ministry. And there are several more file drawers worth neatly hidden beneath one long drop-leaf table waiting to be filed. Paintings adorn the walls; there are several dozen tapes and CD's along with my boom box, a small refrigerator and a 5-inch black and white TV set so I can sneak a look at games while pretending to be working. Artifacts from around the world occupy virtually every horizontal space except my desk, which is a model of order. I don't believe the person who said that a neat desk is the sign of a sick mind. And, of course, there is the computer, a compact data storage unit that would fill several more drawers if reduced to paper. When I head for Staff King School for the Ministry in Berkeley this fall I hope to take with me all the data I will need on my laptop computer. We shall see. But it is still overwhelming.
My office is merely symptomatic of what has been called "The Age of Overwhelming."[3] One of the most common expressions these days is "I'm feeling overwhelmed." I don't know if is the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, the aftermath of 9/11, the accelerating speed of technology, our highly competitive economy or our inner compulsions, but we are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information, the pace of our lives, the increasing complexity of living. It is data, data everywhere, but not the time to think. We are over-informed intellectually and under-developed spiritually. I wonder if Ralph Waldo Emerson was right over a century-and-a-half ago when he said things are in the saddle riding us.
The Jungian analyst James Hillman said a few years ago, "Look, a great deal of our lives are manic. I can watch 34 channels of TV, I can get on the fax and communicate with people anywhere, I can be everywhere at once, I can fly across the country, I've got call waiting so that I can make two calls at once. I live everywhere and nowhere. But I don't know who lives next door to me. Who's in the next flat? Who's in 14-B? I don't know who they are, but boy, I'm on the phone, car phone, toilet phone, plane phone; my mistress is in Chicago, the other woman I'm with is in D.C., my ex-wife is in Phoenix, my mother in Hawaii, and I have four children living all over the country. I have faxes coming in day and night, I can plug into all the world's stock prices, commodity exchanges, I am everywhere, man - but I don't know who's in 14-B."[4] And that was before the scourge and blessing of e-mail!
This is not a diatribe against technology. As one who manipulates words for a living I know how indebted I am to the computer for making it so much easier to write and to communicate so quickly with so many people. I can recall the days when I would laboriously write three drafts of a sermon - all by typewriter - until my arms would nearly fall off in fatigue. Now I can concentrate on the words, not the mechanics of producing the words. No, I am not a candidate for the pencil club. But computer efficiency merely serves to enable me to be busy about other things. I am a self-described workaholic, a 60-something hyperactive.
I can identify with humorist Robert Benchley when he writes, "A great many people have come up to me and asked how I manage to get so much work done and still keep looking so dissipated."
We have a new phone system at church, a very efficient phone system, but one aspect does bother me, and it is perhaps indicative of our predicament. I am now a proud possessor of voice mail - people calling the church when I am unavailable can leave a private message in my voice mailbox. When I access those messages a female voice comes on to remind me to press "1" if I want to listen to the message. When I have finished, this same voice asks me if I want to respond - I press "2" "no," I'll respond later; if I want to archive - "no"; and a few other options; I again press "2" for "no." Then she asks "would you like to do anything else?" By this time I am exasperated and press "2" once more, thinking that is the end of the matter. But no, she goes right on and asks me if I want to change anything. At that point I lose it and press "2" as many times and as quickly as I can and slam the receiver down. Enough already! I have been overwhelmed with options. I am overwhelmed, period!
It is at such times that I think of the unknown author who wisely suggested the remedy for such a situation. "For people who like peace and quiet: a phoneless cord."
We are a well-informed generation - information is everywhere. We are drunk on data. As one observer puts it, "We're awash in a sea of information, and the tide is rising. Information everywhere, but not the time to think." Measuring computer space in bytes, the total amount of unique information generated worldwide each year is about 1.5 exabytes. One exabyte is 1 followed by 18 zeroes. Stored on floppy disks, the information would stack 2 million miles high. Divided among all the people of earth, it would be the per capita equivalent of a library of 250 books or roughly 250 megabytes of data.[5]
Scientific knowledge doubles every 6 years. But I don't know that has made us any better people - which I presume to be what religion is designed to do. There's no book title called Religion for Dummies to which we can turn. Maybe that's a retirement project.
I think I'd begin with a cartoon of two men talking - one sitting at his computer. He says: "I telecommute to work; I get my information from the net, and my entertainment; send e-mail to acquaintances, and now I shopping online, too." His friend says, "What are you looking for?" to which the first responds, "A life. There must be a good website for one."[6]
The corruptions of overwhelmedness are pervasive. One theologian, traveling to give a talk, "the market has won," describing the domination of consumer culture, stopped at a toll-road, fast-food, fast-fuel station in Indiana. There, in the long list of tourist attractions that could be visited, was an ad for the local Amish attractions. It read: "We're on the Web:www.AmishCountry.org. When you surf the Web, stop in and visit us."[7]
T. S. Eliot understood the problem may years ago when he wrote, "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
I try to respond to Emerson's quip about things being in the saddle riding us with another Unitarian Universalist saint, Henry David Thoreau. Well over 150 years ago he told his readers: "Life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify." I don't have cable TV; I don't have a cell phone; I don't have a DVD; I don't even have Roadrunner as my e-mail server. Not that I haven't coveted all these technological toys from time to time.
But still I am overwhelmed by what has been called "data smog" and "technostress." One student of culture wrote about "surviving the information glut" by carrying on an experiment. He said, "Pretend that you were forced to make a choice between giving up one of your fingers and giving up use of your computer for the rest of your life. Which would you choose?" In his survey, one-third chose to give up a finger.[8] Hmmmmmm.
In my computer set-up I have Microsoft Outlook, a devilish and insidious program that upsets my equilibrium. If you are not familiar with this invention of Satan, let me introduce it to you. It contains an address book, in and out boxes for e-mail, deleted e-mail messages, a planning calendar, journal, notes and a task menu. Outlook is calibrated to interface - hot synch - with my Palm Pilot, which was given to me two Christmases ago by my sons, who wondered if I'd ever use it.
Use it? I'm imprisoned - or liberated - by it, depending on the moment. The task menu enables me to set a due date for each task, which becomes red when I miss a deadline. On the plus side, I do manage to keep track of a multitude of tasks which fall to the very modern minister. On the minus side it is just plain discouraging to see all that red, to find that one screen does not contain all the tasks that await doing. The guilt-load of ministry is written all over Microsoft Outlook and I carry that with me on my Palm Pilot wherever I go.
I am like the cartoon character looking at a poster: "Things to do today. See Things to do yesterday."
The reigning image of a good minister in our time is to be a "non-anxious presence" in the midst of a very uptight world. But how can I be non-anxious when my computer tells me how much I have yet to do before it will let me sleep in peace? I am comforted by some anonymous soul who said: "God is not dead, but alive and well and working on a much less ambitious project."
But is that what we want - a "less ambitious project"? Isn't some stress, some sense of busyness, some feeling of engagement desirable?
Recently I read of a retired theologian who bought an old Vermont farm. He wrote, "The previous owner walked me along the boundaries of the property in the slushy snow of early spring. 'I guess it's time for you to take the helm. I had to live here for a while before I realized that I would never 'get caught up' on this old place.' I have now lived here three times as long as he did and come to the same conclusion. At other times, though, when I look out over the wooded hills across the valley, or at a pair of hawks circling overhead, I feel overwhelmed by the beauty of what I see. There is that kind of overwhelming, too."[9]
I take on hope for my overwhelmed self when I read Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem:
"My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light."
We can, of course, simply retreat from the world and seek to go back to a simpler time. We can say "no" to technology, "no" to engagement with society, "no" to the pressures of the age and hunker down. We can take on the ancient wisdom of Lao Tzu: "In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped." But I'm not sure how wise that is, or if I would accept those words even if they were wise.
Or, we can acknowledge that being overwhelmed is a condition of modern life and grin and bear it, get with the program, try to stay ahead of the curve.
Or, we can seek some kind of balance that enables us to be in the saddle riding our things, not the other way around.
I have learned how to push the delete button on all the "spam" that corrupts my computer screen, and even how not to feel I must answer every e-mail message that comes to me. I can learn to say "no" to the trivial and self-indulgent, and "yes" to what is important to living the good life; I can say that I don't have to know everything about every issue before I take my stand. Someone has defined spiritual as the capacity to distinguish what is humanly important from what is not. I at least can be busy - even overwhelmed - by important things.
A religious educator colleague of mine wrote, "I am often asked what to tell parents when they ask, 'Why should we go to church? We are so busy and our kids are so busy...' The simple answer is: 'Because you're so busy!'"[10]
Church is a place where we can learn to take charge of our lives, however bombarded they are by the culture, and ask ourselves, "What did you do yesterday today that is worth mentioning? What are you doing today that is vitally important? What will you do tomorrow that will make a difference in someone's life?"
Here we can wonder with my poet friend, as God asked him, "Did you become what you were supposed to be?" We can realize that life is and always will be unfinished business. We don't have to know everything, do everything, be everything to everybody to become who we're supposed to be.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer writes that she doesn't care what you do for a living, but what you ache for. She wants to know "what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself, and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments." The most important knowledge is self-knowledge - knowing who and why we are and what we can usefully do.
There are times when we feel overwhelmed by being,
We are on a treadmill walking hurriedly, going nowhere;
The images of our lives fly past us as on a movie screen,
The hands of the clock we see actually moving - too quickly.
At such times we need to gather ourselves together,
Slacken our pace,
Blank out the screen,
Ignore the clock.
Then we can remind ourselves that we are in charge of our lives,
That it is we who dictate the pace,
That we can set the rhythm of our own lives.
It will not be easy - it never is easy to convert ourselves,
To turn ourselves around,
To get a handle on the story of our own lives,
To realize that we are the architects of our own fate.
To be sure, there are powers that confront us,
And principalities that confound us.
The demands on our time and energy are endless;
We cannot fully control our environment;
We are, after all, finite and flawed creatures.
But out of that finitude comes a yearning for meaning,
Out of the flawed nature of our being we yearn for purpose,
Out of the hectic rush of events we can still set our own pace.
We are the only ones who can.
Well, someday soon I'll make some order out of the chaos in my overwhelmed office. I'll pare my library down to a few books that are important to me. I'll reduce my files to what can be stored on a laptop that I can take with me. I'll try to remember that what is most important in my life is not what I know, but what I am and do with what I know. I'm the only one who can clear the clutter of my office and out of my life. One day soon I'll learn to look up from the clutter of my office and look out my window to the beauty of the world. And it will be overwhelming.
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