Origin: Cityside Quiet Service Sunday 15 July, 2001.
This service is based on material and ideas from two websites, www.longnow.com and www.slowfood.com
Theme:
Slowing our lives down.
Mood:
Setup:
2x slide projector, Douglas Coupland story, NZHerald Newspaper article,
Gear:
Handout: card with plastic watch, biblical texts, watch face.
Running order:
- PRELUDE:
Candles and low light
VID: Koyaanisqatsi – factory production line, fast moving people etc
TRACK:
2. CALL TO WORSHIP:
Drop light level
TRACK: ‘Time,’ Pink Floyd, ex Time
- LINK: #1 (See below)
4. VID/AUDIO: ‘Numb’ U2, ex Zooropa
5. REFLECTION: link #2 (See below)
TRACK:
6. COMMUNION: Link 3#
TRACK: ‘59th Street Bridge Song (feeling groovy),’ Simon and Garfunkel ex The Definitive Simon and Garfunkel.
TRACK: (slower one)
TRACK: ‘59th Street Bridge Song (feeling groovy),’ Simon and Garfunkel ex The Definitive Simon and Garfunkel. (ENDS)
TRACK: (slower)
End.
Time slides — miscellaneous quotes about time.
LINK #1
The clock runs our lives, and the more we try to save time, the less we seem to have.
The alarm rings. You jump out of bed, run for the shower hoping that no one has beaten you to it, shovel down cereal while your digital watch reminds you that it’s 31 minutes and 29 seconds past 7. You run for the bus, wishing you could afford to rent a carpark in the city, making a mental note to pick up something from the supermarket on the way home that you can stick in the microwave. You arrive at work to find 15 emails and 4 voicemails waiting for you.
Speed is increasingly equated with efficiency. Every invention is designed to cut corners, to save time, to make life more efficient, so more can be achieved in our allotted time. Haste, once a vice, is now a virtue.
Klaus Schwab, president of the World Economic Forum which met in Switzerland recently said, ‘We are moving from a world in which the big eat the small to a world in which the fast eat the slow.’
We are changing the earth more rapidly than we are understanding it, yet we are so buzzing with adrenaline that we have no mental energy left to contemplate the consequences.
The sense that this is a stupid way to live is encouraging pockets of resistance and creating a movement for slowness. ‘We don’t pretend to be able to slow down life,’ says Renarto Sardo of Slow Food, ‘But we do think it is possible to stop for a bit during the day. Slow rhythms at the table are better for health.’ Slow Food began in 1986 when an Italian journalist, Carlo Petrini, was so affronted by the opening of a McDonalds restaurant in Rome that he decided something must be done. The organisation now has 60, 000 members in 45 countries and claims to be working towards the rediscovery of the richness and aromas of local cuisine by opposing the levelling effects of the Fast Life.
But they face an uphill battle. We are surrounded by devices designed to save us time — from express check out queues to remote controls. But the result of all this is, paradoxically, to make us more impatient. An American study has found that moving in and out of ‘computer time’ makes people more intolerant of interruptions from colleagues who cannot move at the the speed of software.
A hectic day is not necessarily filled with more meaning and pleasure. Racing through everything can leave you wondering what you’ve been too busy to notice, too preoccupied to savour. To counter this, in late 1999, 30 Italian towns designated themselves Slow Cities.
Perhaps the most potent symbol of the battle to slow down is the Clock of the Long Now.
LINK #2:
On her recent album, Laurie Anderson asks, ‘Is time long, or is it wide?’
Does it all happen in a rush…today, tomorrow, this week and the week after…or is it a deep flowing process in which the centuries are minor events?
It seems to me that despite having his life ‘cut short’ as we would describe it, Jesus had a long view of time. He was a practitioner of the Long Now.
(Quotes ex scripture, in Handout)
While all of these are about Jesus going off to pray, it’s not prayer that we want to focus on tonight, but Jesus’ ability to take his time, to see that the pressures didn’t always need responding to, but sometimes they did.
If anyone appeared to need more hours in the day it was Jesus. If anyone appeared to have a long view of time, it was Jesus. Maybe he knew something we don’t? Maybe what he knew is there for us to know too if we will only take the time….
Story ex Douglas Coupland re river and flood.
LINK #3: Communion and activity?
Evaluation
Not a very good service! Not enough content to engage people. Idea is good but it needs some work.