Diary of a Theologian

Four Thousand Weeks

It’s a best-selling book from 2021, Four Thousand Weeks, with the subtitle “Time Management for Mortals.” If you live to be 80 years old, your life will have had about 4,000 weeks. Put that way, a human life seems pathetically short particularly over against the wide range of things we feel we could do, and want to do. There’s never enough time to do what I want! Oliver Burkeman, the author, invites us to take limitations, human finitude, seriously. We are built to have more capacities than we can turn into actions and products. We are built to desire to do more than we are capable of doing. Wisdom begins with the realization: we are mortals. We are called to accept that we cannot do everything, and there is no time-management-system that can fix our problem. 

End Road Work

    They are welcome signs on a highway. After miles of slow traffic, driving on irregular and temporary pavement while the main road is being repaired or improved, there appears the sign. It’s over. “End Road Work” it says.

    Good signs convey their message in as few letters as needed. This sign means “End of Road Work,” but you don’t need the preposition to know what it means. Nonetheless, my wife and I, being perhaps two birds of a mischievous feather, decided early in our married life that that sign conveyed a secret protest message. We saw that “End” could be a verb rather than a noun, that in fact it makes more sense (linguistically) for it to be a verb. We imagined a secret society of road sign makers who were opposed to road work, who were constantly on the alert to make their mark on the roadside landscape, to say: Enough of this road work already! Let’s stop!

    To hope for an end to road work is to desire to “immanentize the eschaton.” (Grandfather, what big words you use!) I mean, it’s to want all things to be at their end. But this side of the eschaton, roads are going to deteriorate and need repair, and new roads will need to be built. If we really ended road work, then at some future time we would cease to have useable roads. The cycle is our human trap: we need road work in order to have useable roads, but while road work is going on, we some roads we already have aren’t useable. What I’m saying is, the longed-for state of having really great roads never arrives. Somewhere near you, right now, you are having to put up with road work. 

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    I lived in New York City for fifteen years. At any given time about one-sixth of the city blocks of Manhattan have “sidewalk sheds” over them. These are ugly, temporary constructions that protect pedestrians while work goes on above. All building exteriors have to be checked every few years. The sheds are temporary, yet they stay in place so long that you forget when they first went up. Once the work is finished and the sidewalk sheds come down, however, there is a beautiful view of a building rising high in its glory.

I’m told that Richard John Neuhaus, when showing visitors around the City he loved, would stop before some sidewalk sheds and gesture broadly, saying with his characteristic irony, “Someday, this is going to look really good.” Of course, it never does. As soon as one sidewalk shed comes down, another goes up. As soon as one skyscraper is completed, another is underway. It’s true the City never sleeps. It’s also never finished.

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    T. S. Eliot has a line, “Where is there an end of it?” Where does all this work of our lives end, where is the beautiful city, where is the end of our restlessness, our waiting? Where is the end of the temporary pavement? Eliot uses this line in “The Dry Salvages,” the third poem in Four Quartets and the one that has always seemed most challenging to me. Soundless wailing, the withering of flowers, drifting wreckage: with such deft images he evokes the relentlessness of loss, the ultimate fruitlessness of repair. He speaks of a bone praying. 

    One answer: there is no end. There just is the piling up of one thing after another. A highway may crumble; another will be built; it too will crumble. No day marks a lasting accomplishment; it just has a successor. One building is torn down and another is built to its own decay. Eliot calls this absence of an end, “addition.”

    He also speaks of “the final addition,” which takes us to our personal end. It comes after much has been lost: speech perhaps, physical energy certainly. You get weaker and finally, one day, you have your final addition: there is for you no day after that day. 

    Then, provocatively, he says the only alternative is to pray Mary’s prayer, her response to Gabriel, her willingness to be God’s vessel and thereby to do God’s will. This prayer is almost unprayable. Yet she did pray it. “Be it unto me according to thy word.”

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    How I wish there could be an end to road work! How I wish we could stop construction and enjoy the cities that we have! How I wish we could do something—anything—that would have meaning and last! How I wish we could end our social hostilities! How I wish it were possible for there to be a sign that says “End Election Season” with “end” as a verb!

    But the only human action that is an end in itself, the only human action that might truly bear fruit, is the one articulated, the barely prayable turning over of all things to God.

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    Out & About. This Sunday, Nov. 10, I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas; the Eucharists are at 9 and 11:15 a.m.

    The next “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will be on Sunday evening at 5 p.m. on Charis in the World of Wonders by Marly Youmans. Cathedral parking is on the lower levels of the new apartment building; when you walk out, Garrett Hall is the right of the close. At the door, select “St. Matthew’s” and then “reception” and you will be buzzed in. This will be our last seminar in 2024.