Time Out

“What­ever hap­pened to child­hood?” This ques­tion was asked a few decades ago by a seman­tics pro­fes­sor (Neil Postman’s Childhood’s End). Kids have Day Timers instead of Crayons. They speak adult words and have adult con­cerns (that some­times give them night­mares). They pack off to school with book bags that make them look like sol­diers going to war. The rules are so tight that on occa­sion a stu­dent is arrested for writ­ing on a desk (when I went to school my uncle’s name was carved into the top of one of the desks…and he did not do any jail time over it).

Our insti­tu­tions have become so seri­ous about them­selves. The have also for­got­ten the con­trol para­dox: the more you try to overtly con­trol peo­ple, the more out of con­trol they become. The rules have got­ten tighter but the grad­u­a­tion rates have dimin­ished. Insti­tu­tions tend to sta­bi­lize a cul­ture, but they can also become impos­si­ble taskmas­ters. Gov­ern­ments are sup­posed to pro­tect and serve its citizens…not become idol­a­trous overlords.

“The church is for sinners” — as Cyprian of the third cen­tury declared. It was never designed to be an exclu­sive club or polit­i­cal tool of or for any state. It is the “Ark of God” for peo­ple being res­cued from a world drown­ing in its own self-created chaos. It is to be a place to heal the soul — not just another demand­ing orga­ni­za­tion con­cerned only for its own survival.

I would like to sug­gest a world­wide time out. Let’s take a few days off and look at what we are doing to our­selves. How about putting all insti­tu­tional demands on the shelf for a while and just being human beings? What­ever hap­pened to the Sab­bath or the Year of Jubilee? How did even our cel­e­bra­tions become such burdens?

Time Out!