The challenge of filling your blank page or keeping it empty

The start of a sabbatical sets Ian Hamlin thinking through the tension between contemplation and action.

Ian Hamlin

Ian Hamlin has been the minister of a Baptist church since 1994. He previously worked in financial services.

A notebook is open at two blank pages. a pen rests across the page.s.

Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

The famed anxiety inducing nemesis of any writer or creative, the ever-daunting blank page. Well, I’ve bought myself a new notebook, so I have a literal open page in front of me, but also something more.

I’m starting a three-month sabbatical from my role as a Baptist minister. Stepping down from my day-to-day responsibilities of work, but also, to a degree, away from the basic structures that define my life; the people, purpose and rhythm of, not only what I do, but who I am. It’s a weird sort of job like that.

What would you do with three months off? From work, family commitments, whatever it is that defines your day to day ordinarily? Well, buy a notebook, obviously, but after that?

I’m conscious, of course, that this is a rare privilege, a consequence, I guess, of the strange link between a professionalised clergy and academia from days past, but also, a recognition of the all-encompassing nature of the role. Maybe, because of that, it’s also a real challenge, a true ‘blank page’.

The first instinct, I guess, is to take a break, to stop, to breathe. That’s undeniably good, but how long for? Is that it? At what point does stopping and breathing become lazy indulgence? I’ve been reading quite a lot lately, perhaps subconsciously preparing for these months, about taking time out, resting, slowing down. Often, these thoughts have been expressed as an exploration of the notion of ‘Sabbath’ that Judeo-Christian notion of keeping a period of time, a day a week, special, sacred even. This, of course, is the route from which ‘sabbaticals’ have grown, not so much the ivory towers and quadrangles after all, but more the Hebrew prophets and itinerant Jewish preachers of ancient days, seeking to find the rhythms of a fulfilled life There’s John Mark Comer’s ubiquitous The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, which seems to have touched a cultural nerve, but also Ruth Haley Barton’s Invitation to Solitude and Silence. Then, out of the blue, I was invited to reflect again on Walter Brueggemann’s sense of Sabbath as:

‘the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption, and the endless pursuit of private well-being’.

He also observed that, recognizing just how we, like multiple generations before us, each in their own way, are utterly enmeshed in systems and structures designed, not so much for our well-being but rather the benefit of others,

‘the departure into restfulness is both urgent and difficult, for our motors are set to run at brick-making speed.’

(A reference to one of those earliest structures, highlighted in the Bible, where Egypt’s Pharaoh had Hebrew slaves building ever larger structures, to assuage their growing thoughts of freedom.)

Most recently of all, I’ve been struck, by following Pete Grieg’s pilgrimage walk from Iona to Lindisfarne, and the passing comment that the original Celtic monks, in making the same journey, eschewed the offer of horses to ride, preferring to walk, fearing that the increased pace of travel might cause them to miss something.

I’m sure I’ve missed lots, I’m convinced I’m caught up in a whole range of hectic, consumerist structures, and I’m often tired, so rest, gets a big tick from me. At least I think it does, but barely do I sit down, and I’m feeling restless again. How long can/should I keep this up? There are so many things to do, opportunities to explore, people to please. I need to justify this privilege of time and space.

His speaking, his marching, his campaigning and protesting, even his sitting, was driven with a passion and an urgency that was infectious, and effective.

And then there’s that ever-present sense within me, my natural instinct if you will, true, I’m sure, of many. That I like the idea of contemplation, the need for it even, but, actually, I’m more driven by activism, by getting stuff done. The focal point of my whole break, planned for quite a while now, is a trip to the USA to follow the life of one of my spiritual heroes, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Now, there’s an activist if ever there was one. His speaking, his marching, his campaigning and protesting, even his sitting, was driven with a passion and an urgency that was infectious, and effective. His consistent rage against injustice has been a call to arms, both to his immediate contemporaries, and generations subsequently, to get up, go out and do. Ultimately, of course, he poured out his whole life in the cause. It’s taking me an age to read a few preparatory biographies of him, stimulated as I am from every page, challenged to act, to never let injustice rule while I have voice and agency.

So, there we have it, another paradox, in the complicated business of being the person I’m meant to be, realizing the best of God’s investment in me. The conflict between rest and exploration, being and doing, contemplation and activism. I imagine we are all drawn to a certain place on that spectrum.

Blank pages, freed up days and diaries, only serve to underline what we already are. But, I suspect, we can all also hear the call to either end of the range; to be stirred to action by the things that break the heart of God, and to lay down our burdens, take upon ourselves the easier yoke, and live increasingly in ‘the unforced rhythms of grace’. Maybe, to start with at least, listening to that call, recognizing the tension, while not allowing it to create pressure in us, is enough. Hearing, praying, scribbling my first, semi coherent, thoughts on that vast empty page, making myself another coffee, and wondering what I might do next.

Article

Belief

Culture

Time

12 March 2024

5 min read

Ted Giola is right: we’re all addicts now

Addiction to distraction prevents deep thought about our place in time.

Jonathan Rowlands

Jonathan is a theology lecturer and Liverpool FC fan.

A clock repair peers at a clock he is repairing, amid a see of alarm and wall clocks on display

There’s a joke told by David Foster Wallace in a speech called “This is Water”. Two young fish are swimming and come across an older fish swimming the other way. The older fish says “Morning boys! How’s the water?” The two fish swim on until one of them turns and asks, “What the hell is water?” Unlike fish, however, for humans time is the water in which we swim. There can be no understanding or meaning in life without time.

Take the ending of the old BBC sitcom Blackadder Goes Forth. It’s set in World War One, as a group of soldiers try to escape the near-certain death of going over-the-top. In the last episode, they are stood at the foot of their trench, waiting to attack the enemy. Suddenly, the artillery stops. One soldier takes this as good news: “It’s over!” he shouts, “The Great War: 1914 to 1917!”

This joke only makes sense with time. I can only find this funny from the perspective of someone in a different time from those in the narrative. This only makes sense to someone who knows the war instead finished in 1918. Time makes the joke.

Robert Jenson, the late American theologian, was wrong about a lot. But he was often wrong in the right way. Jenson wasn’t afraid to follow through on the implications of some of Christianity’s most fundamental claims, even if led him down paths others would be wary of treading. If Jenson ends up entering the pantheon of the Church’s great teachers, it will be for his flaws as much as his successes.

We are, Giola argues, entering a ‘post-entertainment culture’. We’re no longer seeking entertainment. We’re seeking distraction.

One of the most helpful aspects of Jenson’s theology is on time. We often think of time as some sort of process, a way of moving through life and getting from A to B. However, Jenson stressed that time is a creature: a thing given existence by God, not just some neutral aspect of the universe to be taken for granted. God is without time and may have created us to be creatures without time, too. But God did create time and created us to live within time. This suggests we might learn something about human nature by reflecting on what it means to be creatures that inhabit time.

But time is so ubiquitous that we can’t think about time except as creatures within time. It is, in other words, like trying to bite your own teeth.

Okay, great. Time is important. Big deal. Why should you care? Isn’t this just the sort of nonsense philosophers come up with to look busy? Well, this matters because our ability to think with and in time is under serious threat. And with it, our ability to flourish as creatures.

For the last two years, the famed music critic Ted Giola has offered his thoughts on the state of culture. This year’s is a rather bleak read.

Giola argues that we’ve misunderstood the relationship between art and entertainment. We often think of art as something done for the artist, while entertainment is something done for the audience. Creatives must choose whom they create for: themselves, or their audience.

Instead, Giola suggests it’s better to think of a food chain. Entertainment is parasitic upon art and uses the artistic to fuel its inexorable growth. Recall Martin Scorsese’s infamous comments about the Marvel cinematic universe: they’re not cinema, they’re rollercoster rides; they’re not art, they’re entertainment.

But there’s always a bigger fish. We are, Giola argues, entering a ‘post-entertainment culture’. We’re no longer seeking entertainment. We’re seeking distraction.

But the short-term, instant response culture that social media habituates us to cannot come at the expense of the long-term work of genuinely deep thought.

Films become TV shows become TikToks. Books become blog posts become tweets. The ways in which we engage in reflection upon the world around us are increasingly reduced to shorter and shorter soundbites and the expense of substantive, thoughtful analysis.

Distraction involves short, repetitive interaction with stimuli to produce dopamine hits. Because this leads to pleasure, we repeat the process until we become habituated to it. We become addicted to it.

Crucially, this addiction to distraction itself is the very thing being sold. We don’t become addicted to the content of what we watch; we become addicted to the form of it. “The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously said, and so it is here too. We are becoming habituated to addiction itself. Distraction is merely the way in. We are, as Giola shows, all addicts now.

There are, of course, numerous worrying issues this raises. Giola himself does a fantastic job at covering some of them. However, in addition to all the psychological harm this addiction does, our addiction to distraction is curtailing our ability to inhabit our nature as creatures in time.

As we saw earlier, time brings perspective, and perspective brings understanding. We depend on time itself to help us make sense of events in the world and in our lives. The creature that is time is, in this respect, a gift from God and a reminder of our own limitations as co-creatures with it.

But, the more we become addicted to short-term distraction, the less able we are to inhabit understandings of the world that emerge as a result of long-term reflection and deep thought. We are becoming creatures in time who are gradually losing sight of our dependency on time itself to understand what is most in service of the common good.

Look, social media and everything that accompanies it can be great. The ability to respond to news in real time has its benefits. Public narratives have become increasingly democratised and that is only a good thing. But the short-term, instant response culture that social media habituates us to cannot come at the expense of the long-term work of genuinely deep thought.

If we are to move away from the near-universal sense that everything is on the verge of collapsing into chaos, perhaps the first step we might take is to begin again to work with, not against time. If the short-termism underwritten by addiction to distraction is one of the myriad factors that contributes to our pervasive sense of unease, perhaps we might commit to thinking more slowly?

Robert Jenson was right; time is a creature. We forget this at our peril. Some things can only be healed with patience and the slow passage of time. Until we retrieve an understanding of time as gift, not burden, our capacity to grapple meaningfully with the real substantive issues we face will remain beyond our reach.