Why Was the Clock Invented?

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"...It is worth recalling that the clock was invented not to keep track of our work, but to remind monastic communities to stop work and turn to prayer repeatedly during the day. Rather than marking every moment as an identical and scarce commodity to be sold or invested or else lost, the monastic schedule marks time as the unfolding of God's patience...The tools invented within that life serve not to maximize speed or power, but as aids to worship.

...Time is the medium across which we receive God's gifts, in word and Eucharist, and in which we by grace are able to offer gifts in return: our praise, our love, and, in union with our brother Jesus, our own lives. A sale is about achieving a result, an exchange of goods, and can be done in a hurry, but the giving of gifts, because it is about mutual love, can't be rushed. In worship, as in other gift giving, we have to have time to look in each other's eyes. Worship is testimony that our efficiency, our excellence, and our heroism are superseded by the gracious gift of delighted communal rest in God.

...Coming out of slavery, [the Israelites] were accustomed to fear and scarcity. Learning to live in confident trust took some training, and the story tells us that God put them on a strict trust diet. Manna was given only on six days, and on the seventh the peopel were to rest and eat the extra from the sixth day. God did not teach them to rest after they were secure in their land. Rather, they learned to rest when they were at their most vulnerable...

...the idea that even in postindustrial society people could be self-sufficient is badly mistaken. That thinking depends in the first place on the assumption that childhood, sickness, and old age are times of frustration, of a lack of full humanity, not moments at which we see most clearly who we really are. In those periods when people are dependent on others and when vulnerability is exposed, they and their caretakers may enter more fully into relationships with others and with God."

Kelly Johnson in "God Does Not Hurry" from God Does Not... ed. d. brent laytham
(The boldface isn't in the book)

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