This week’s service commemorates the centenary of the institution of “the pips”, the Greenwich Time Signal…
Prelude Air from Water Music Suite No. 1 by Handel
Opening Words from the Sanskrit
Look to this day –
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the verities
And realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action, the splendour of beauty.
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.
Chalice Lighting (you may wish to light a candle in your own home at this point).
words by Charles Howe
We light this chalice to affirm that new light is ever waiting
to break through to enlighten our ways,
that new truth is ever waiting
to break through to illumine our minds,
and that new love is ever waiting
to break through to warm our hearts.
May we be open to this light and to the rich possibilities that it brings us.
Opening Prayer
Spirit of Life and Love,
be with us as we gather for worship,
each in our own place.
Help us to feel a sense of community,
even though we are physically apart.
Help us to care for each other,
in this world in which Covid has not yet gone away,
and the clouds of war and climate change overshadow us.
May we keep in touch however we can,
and help each other, however we may.
May we remember that
caution is still needed,
that close contact is still unwise.
Help us to be grateful for the freedoms we have
and to respect the wishes of others.
May we hold in our hearts all those
who are grieving, lost, alone,
victims of violence and war,
suffering in any way, Amen
Reading from Greenwich Time Signal, on Wikipedia
The pips have been broadcast daily since 5 February 1924, and were the idea of the Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Watson Dyson, and the head of the BBC, John Reith. The pips were originally controlled by two mechanical clocks located in the Royal Greenwich Observatory that had electrical contacts attached to their pendula. Two clocks were used in case of a breakdown of one. These sent a signal each second to the BBC, which converted them to the audible oscillatory tone broadcast.
The Royal Greenwich Observatory moved to Herstmonceux Castle in 1957 and the G[reenwich] T[ime] S[ignal] equipment followed a few years later in the form of an electronic clock. Reliability was improved by renting two lines for the service between Herstmonceux and the BBC, with a changeover between the two at Broadcasting House if the main line became disconnected.
The tone sent on the lines was inverted: the signal sent to the BBC was a steady 1 kHz tone when no pip was required, and no tone when a pip should be sounded. This let faults on the line be detected immediately by automated monitoring for loss of audio.
The Greenwich Time Signal was the first sound heard in the handover to the London 2012 Olympics during the Beijing 2008 Olympics closing ceremony.
The pips were also broadcast by the BBC Television Service, but this practice was discontinued by the 1960s.
Alternative Lord’s Prayer
Spirit of Life and Love, here and everywhere,
may we be aware of your presence in our lives.
May our world be blessed.
May our daily needs be met,
and may our shortcomings be forgiven,
as we forgive those of others.
Give us the strength to resist wrong-doing,
the inspiration and guidance to do right,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
We are your hands in the world; help us to grow.
May we have compassion for all living beings,
and receive whatever life brings,
with courage and trust. Amen
Reading from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
And an astronomer said, Master, what of Time?
And he answered:
You would measure time, the measureless and immeasurable.
You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons.
Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing.
Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness,
And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.
And that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.
Who among you does not feel that his power to love is boundless?
And yet who does not feel that very love, though boundless, encompassed within the centre of his being, and moving not from love thought to love thought, nor from love deeds to other love deeds?
And is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless?
But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons, let each season encircle all the other seasons,
And let today embrace the past with remembrance and the future with longing.
Prayer Serenity Prayer, Redux by Laura Dobson (adapted)
Eternal One,
Grace us with serenity to accept the things we cannot change,
courage to change the things we can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
May we live one day at a time,
being present, one moment at a time,
taking the world as it is, not as we would have it,
trusting that all will be well,
surrendering to the heart’s desire,
and knowing Heaven as Earth,
here and now.
Amen
Reading from Enough: Breaking Free from the World of Excess by John Naish
We are constantly encouraged to ignore another of our nourishing never-enoughs – the bounty of the infinite present moment. Everyday life is accelerating ever faster. We work more quickly, talk more quickly, walk more quickly, read more quickly, feed more quickly, and now, thanks to rapid rehab, we can sin, repent and reinvent ourselves as born-again consumers more quickly too. We feel compelled to rush ever onwards – but towards what?…
Why the hurry? But how else could we pack more into our busy lives? We cram it all in. Then we try to cram more on top. One in five Britons believes that they have ‘run out of time’. And if we don’t actually seem to have time to pause to savour all the stuff that we’re doing, being and consuming, then we can always look back and savour it some time later, whenever later is. Maybe we’ll have some time in the non-existent afterlife…
Generally we believe we were worse off in the past and will be far better off in the future. Instead of treasuring our arrival in this constantly comfortable now, we feel stuck in life’s grim waiting room with an unsatisfactory yesterday and a so-so today – but a glittering tomorrow.
Time of Stillness and Reflection Life is Always Unfinished Business from In the Holy Quiet by Richard S. Gilbert (adapted)
In the midst of the whirling day,
in the hectic rush to be doing,
in the frantic pace of life,
pause here for a moment.
Catch your breath;
relax your body;
loosen your grip on life.
Consider that our lives are always unfinished business.
Imagine that the picture of our being is never complete.
Allow your life to be a work in progress.
Do not hurry to mould the masterpiece.
Do not rush to finish the picture.
Do not be impatient to complete the drawing.
From beckoning birth to dawning death we are in process,
and always there is more to be done.
Do not let the incompleteness weigh on your spirit.
Do not despair that imperfection marks your every day.
Do not fear that you are still in the making.
[silence]
Let us instead be grateful that the world is still to be created.
Let us give thanks that we can be more than we are.
Let us celebrate the power of the incomplete,
for life is always unfinished business.
Musical Interlude Canon in D by Pachelbel
Address We Live in Time
One hundred years ago tomorrow, listeners to BBC radio first heard the six short beeps which have become known as “the pips”, their proper name being the Greenwich Time Signal. The Royal Greenwich Observatory began broadcasting the hourly time signals on 5th February 1924. For decades, they were what everyone in this country relied on, if they wanted to know the exact time. Now, of course, with the advent of smartphones, which have the correct time built into them, they are slightly redundant.
But the introduction of the pips a century ago was not the first attempt to impose some standardisation of time on our random human lives. Until the mid-18th century, the exact time was only an approximation, relying on local sundials. This was replaced by local mean time, which got rid of the variations due to seasonal differences and other anomalies. It also took account of the longitude of a particular location. Yet there were still differences between the local times of neighbouring towns. According to Wikipedia, “In Britain, local time differed by up to 20 minutes from that of London. For example, Oxford Time was 5 minutes behind Greenwich Time, Leeds Time 6 minutes behind, Carnforth 11 minutes behind, and Barrow almost 13 minutes behind. In India and North America, these differences could be 60 minutes or more. Almanacs containing tables were published and instructions attached to sundials to enable the differences between local times to be computed.”
It was only when Railway Time was introduced in November 1840 by the Great Western Railway (shortly followed by other railway companies) that Greenwich Mean Time was accepted as a national standard time, and it took until 1880, when the government passed the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act that “a unified standard time for the whole of Great Britain achieved legal status.” (Wikipedia)
“Time” is an extraordinary concept, when you really start to think about it. The Prophet sums it up beautifully. “You would measure time, the measureless and immeasurable.
You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons… Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness and knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream. And that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.”
We cannot touch time, feel it, sense its passing, except by using human-made devices such as the pips, clocks, diaries and calendars. And yet time is central to our lives. Most of us get up at a regular time each morning, do our “morning tasks”, stop for lunch, do different tasks after lunch, then eat our evening meal and wind down before it is time (that word again!) to sleep.
When we interact with other people, it is very often at pre-appointed times – our congregations gather to worship at a particular time each Sunday and get together in between for other-than-Sunday groups or committee meetings at other pre-arranged times. Even during lockdown, Zoom meetings, for worship and other purposes, were scheduled for particular times. I would be lost without my watch, and my faithful Filofax, in which I keep track of where I need to be, when, and what I need to get done on any particular day.
Which is why holidays, time away from the tyranny of the diary, are so important. Usually the time flies by – Maz and I love visiting new cities, walking the streets, admiring the architecture, and visiting churches and museums. We walk all day, but take breaks by sitting in outdoor cafés, enjoying the chance to people watch. But the time seems to go so fast. When we arrive, we have a “whole week” ahead of us, but in no time at all, it is the final evening, and we are packing our suitcases in preparation for travelling back home. I usually feel in need of an extra week off to recover!
But sometimes, just sometimes, we have a more relaxing break. One of the best holidays I ever had was a few years ago, when Maz and I, together with my daughter and her fiancé, spent a week in our favourite part of Wales. Becky and Arran were both suffering from overwork, so we decided to get up when we awoke, go where we felt like, according to the weather, and just blob if we didn’t feel like going anywhere. Meals were eaten when we felt hungry. It was fabulous. Both of the young people regressed to being “children” with no responsibilities and felt so much better for their rest by the end of the week. As did I.
When I want to get away from being ruled by the passing of time, I have a special watch, whose face is divided into the normal twelve hours. But it has only one hand, and that hand takes an hour to move from one hour marking to the next. So when I look at it, I can only judge roughly what the time is “somewhere between nine and ten in the morning.” It is very liberating.
Yet, without time, we would have no sense of ourselves as moving through the universe, growing older, at a rate of 24 hours every day. And even that measure varies from person to person. I can remember being five and wanting desperately to be five and a half, because that was so much older than just five. And when we are children, I think that time tends to pass much more slowly (except for the hour just before bedtime, which always rushes by). A school year seems to last “forever” and the months leading up to Christmas or our birthdays simply crawl by. I wonder whether that is why we have such clear memories of our childhoods – because we lived at a much slower pace?
Once we become adults, and start to do all the things that being an adult means – working for a living, moving into our own property, shopping and cooking for ourselves, travelling, doing housework – time starts to race by. Most adults greet Friday evening with joy, because they have a whole weekend without working ahead of them. But then it goes by in a flash and it is Monday morning again. Looking at the longer picture, our twenties go fast, but then each succeeding decade seems to speed up. I cannot believe I am nearly 64 – how did that happen? And yet, when I think back to who I was, what I was doing, a few years ago, I can see how much my life has changed.
Without our memories of the past, and our imagination, to see the future, we would be poorer, I think. Yet as John Naish points out, “We are constantly encouraged to ignore another of our nourishing never-enoughs – the bounty of the infinite present moment.” We seem to live our lives on the run, always rushing, always busy, dashing past every moment towards a future we will never, ever arrive at. As he says, “Instead of treasuring our arrival in this constantly comfortable now, we feel stuck in life’s grim waiting room with an unsatisfactory yesterday and a so-so today – but a glittering tomorrow.”
I do believe that we spend too little time living in the Now. Too much of our time is spent either regretting or feeling nostalgic for an imperfectly-remembered past, or planning or feeling anxious about what the future may hold for us. We find it hard to get away from the “what ifs” and “if onlys”. Yet, if we could only stop for a moment, we might realise that how we spend our days is, to a great extent, our choice. Which involves being conscious of the need to step back one pace and consider how we are living, right this moment. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, now.
I loved the advice of Richard S. Gilbert in the words of our Time of Stillness and Reflection, appropriately titled, Life is Always Unfinished Business. He suggests that we, “pause here for a moment. / Catch your breath; relax your body; loosen your grip on life.” And to, “Consider that our lives are always unfinished business. Imagine that the picture of our being is never complete. Allow your life to be a work in progress.”
Imagine how different our lives would be if we were able to follow this excellent advice. If we chose to simply stop, and breathe, and be in the moment. And then move on with our lives, quietly, peacefully, without rush. Unitarian minister Bob Wightman once wrote, that each “Today stretches ahead of me, waiting to be shaped. And here I am, the sculptor who gets to do the shaping. What today will be like is up to me. I get to choose what kind of day I will have!”
Obviously, this is not entirely true. To a large extent, our circumstances will dictate the shape of our days. BUT it is our choice how we react to what happens to us. Unless, of course, we are suffering from depression or some other debilitating mental illness. For those of us in those situations, on a bad day, even getting out of bed and getting dressed can be a major achievement.
I would like to finish by repeating the beautiful opening words I shared at the beginning of our service:
Look to this day –
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the verities
And realities of your existence:
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action, the splendour of beauty.
For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.
May it be so, for all of us. Amen
Closing Words
Spirit of Life and Love,
May we remember to pause awhile,
and rest in the stillness of the present moment,
ao that we can recalibrate our lives,
let go of the busyness and haste,
and learn to be more content
with what we have now, today.
May we return to our everyday world refreshed,
may we share the love we feel,
may we look out for each other,
and may we keep up our hearts,
now and in the days to come,
Amen
Postlude Le Onde by Einaudi (arr. Ogden)