On Fragmentation: Piecemeal Days

Buddhism tells us that all worldly enterprises end in sorrow, and Christianity notes the affinity of the world for the flesh (our mortality) and the devil (the prospect that things can go Very Badly Wrong, often without warning, at any given moment in time). What happens to the time in the meantime?

            What happened, for example, to a certain journal subscription that hummed along nicely for the Carmelite Library in 2006 and then suddenly disappeared — not in evidence for years (despite correspondence) — only to reappear outside our expectations (and without staff participation) in 2013? What happened to the intervening seven years? Did they fall through a hole in space?

            Indeed this question may apply to time in general. Overheard from the middle-aged daughter of a grandma wistfully fingering a baby’s cap — “for Nathan” — that lay in the basket on the footpath: “Mum, my Nathan is a grown man now. He doesn’t need a hat.” He takes up more space now, it seems. What has been displaced by the new shift in spaces?

            Laments from vestries, vicars and voters that churches no longer fill automatically on Sundays with persons regularly in attendance at their devotions seem to proceed from a view of time that dates to the era of the 9-5 job, the guaranteed pension, and the unbroken year. Fragmentation is about the two-or-three job individual posted any time 24/7 on an irregularly changing pattern. Time isn’t the only thing that shifts, either. The days when my mother-in-law, affectionately known as Old Grandma (though called Bess in her times) could be born near Ballarat and travel no farther than Mitcham in her lifetime, have been so fragmented that many persons spend almost more time overseas than at home, and this, again, on an irregularly changing pattern.

            The shape-shifter was a feared entity as early as Roman times. Something that appears to be something actually turns out to be something else. The shape of time is shifting. Perhaps this is why so many people say they want ‘spirituality’ instead of ‘religion’. Maybe there’s a need for something we can take with us, through an irregularly changing pattern of time and place: and space — where were those seven years — the magical duration of elf kidnappings? Maybe there needs to be something that fits into the disintegrating jigsaw puzzle the world is becoming: something to place in the spaces, something you can rely on in the fragmented moments of your life.