Telling Time In Tree Leaves

If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile. You know that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your ancestors, not with perishable things like silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. He was destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages for your sake.  Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.  Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.  You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and enduring word of God. 

1 Peter 1:17-23; lectionary epistle for April 26, 2020

Telling time in a pandemic.  Our sense of its passage — along with so much else — is skewed by circumstances beyond our control.  Days lead one into the next with not much to distinguish them. ‘Dear Professor,’ a student emailed me Friday morning, having missed Thursday’s Zoom lecture, ‘I am sorry but I really, really thought today was Thursday …’.  The present pattern of our lives is not bounded by the bright lines of leaving the house, driving to campus, entering other spaces.  The morning alarm is set later, and its buzz has lost some of its imperative force.  I have waked to full daylight these past weeks.  How do we mark the rhythm when the old marks no longer apply?  Is waking-to-waking even the right boundary to count?  Because I wake before daylight as well.  I wake in the night having dreamed vividly, oddly.  I get up in the dark, my steps small and slow.  I come back to bed, squinch my eyes shut against the neighbor’s bright-as-day security light, settle myself again prone, if not to sleep, lay and listen for the chime of the dining room clock, not even sure whether I hope that it is nearly morning or that I still have hours to sleep.

Telling time when the world’s turned upside down.  Maybe clock-tolled hours are not the right measure.  I sit at my bedroom desk, look out the front window at the trees.  Six weeks ago the topmost branches were knobby with leaf-buds and yellow-tan against the deep blue of the sky.  Three weeks ago, the trees were hazed with green, as if some verdant mist hung about the branches.  Now I look and see that the vague haze of earlier weeks has shifted from peridot to emerald and distilled itself into definite leaf shapes.  The leaves are still small enough to be each one distinct, not yet merged into the glossy dark green tree-shape of summer.  Yet.  There are leaves where there had not been.  That’s how long we have been in this state of waiting for we know not what. No:  that’s not so.  We know what we are waiting for.  We just don’t know the when.  We are waiting for the ‘curve to flatten,’ for testing to be more widespread, for clearer insight into this virus — its rates of contagion, of morbidity, of mortality, for a vaccine.  We know what we are waiting for.  We just don’t know the when. 

Telling time.  Count it by the calendar:  secular, academic, liturgical.  No tally has the answer.  We’ve been home since spring break.  We’ve been home since early in Lent.  We were home through Holy Week.  We’ll be home through semester’s end.  Shall we be home this whole Easter season?  Will that mark the completion of the term of this time?

Time is the preoccupation of First Peter as well.  The recipients are living a ‘time of your exile’.  The patterns of their lives have shifted; their former ways no longer apply.  When did they learn their former ways were ‘futile’?  What overset their ignorance?  What caused the realization that those everyday inequities entirely unrecognized or otherwise accommodated were in fact the proof of this world’s futility?  What called them from that barrenness to ‘new birth into a living hope’?  

Telling time.  The paradox of a single point calibrated along multiple whens.  First Peter’s hope, Christ, was ‘destined before the foundation of the world, but was revealed at the end of the ages.’  Beginning and end.  First and last.  Still this last time is not yet ended, else Peter’s audience would not be in their ‘time of exile,’ neither in the world nor out of it.  Needing to be reminded — by the writing and sending and reading of a letter — of trust, of faith, of hope.  Of how to wait for the what (or the who) when you don’t know the when.  Needing to be reminded that living in the meanwhile is a process with its own peculiar grace.  And every so often an unexpected sign that time is being told not only by we who are waiting but by God who is drawing time on and drawing us in.

Again I come awake from a dream in the night.  Again I shuffle down the hall and back.  Again, I reach for the bed, close my eyes against the piercing light, and settle myself prone to wait for the clock.  Then I realize that one of those ‘agains’ wasn’t.  I open my eyes.  The bedroom is dark.  I lift up on an elbow, look to the window, and realize that the neighbor’s light is not shining through the bedroom window because the leaves on the maple now are full enough to block the brightness.  All those weeks of days of growing leaves, from bare branch through bud to new green, and suddenly When has become Now.  This is not the end.  More growth will come.  But this ‘now’ for tonight is enough to tell me that time is being told not only by I who am waiting for God but by God who waits for me. This ‘now’ for tonight is enough to recall me to hope and to love through the ‘living and enduring word of God.’