According to Alan Watts, “The great symbols of our culture are the rocket and the bulldozer.”
Each is a conqueror of space. Since we cannot go too much farther in outer space in our era, and there is little land left to explore below the stars and above the oceans, we turn back to time. We try to conquer time by transforming time into another space which we refer to as the calendar and the ‘to-do list and fill every minute with as much ‘stuff’ every day making our schedules as tightly packed as our closets and our attics. To encounter God, we are called out to a place beyond our understandings of both time and space. Here is my version of an ancient story I heard from Alan Watts,
Once there was a fisherman. He cast his net into the water. After fishing for a while, he held up his net and looked through the squares and into the horizon. Off in the distance, he saw the mountain. He had been there when he was younger but found the mountain too difficult to climb. Now that he was older, there was something comforting about looking through his net at the mountain in the distance. What he could not climb, he reduced to what he could count and measure The mountain was six spaces across and four high.
He took his net with him. Through the spaces, he measured and compared his hut to other huts. That night he had a disagreement with his son, he held up the net to see how many squares tall his son was.
Others adopted his way of measuring and made similar grids putting space on parchment and then paper. Even time was transformed to space as days were given formal boundaries on calendars. Moments gave way to minutes and lives transformed to lists.
In the midst of this objectifying of time and space walked a rabbi. He approached the shore and some fishermen casting their nets into the sea. “Follow me,” he called. They did. He had one initial requirement. They had to leave their nets behind.
What are your nets? Spaces you use to gain control of your life unaware they can become barriers to the call of God.
