Prisoners of Time

Themes in the Doctrine & Covenants Series

Adapted from Time, by Philip L. Barlow, part of the Maxwell Institute’s Themes in the Doctrine and Covenants series.

As part of a course I taught years ago on religion and the concept of time at Hanover College in Indiana, a bright college sophomore conducted an informal survey among her peers around campus. Her initial question was: “What is the first thing that comes to mind when I say the word ‘time’?” The first twenty responses she received were: “stress,” “intense,” “hourglass,” “goes fast,” “schedules,” “stress,” “always going,” “never enough,” “calendar,” “wasted,” “stress,” “restriction,” “chases us,” “clock,” “goes fast,” “ahhh! Stressful,” “running out,” “in motion,” “time flies,” and “stressful.” The students not only strained to learn and perform while navigating deadlines among their several courses in any given semester but also amidst larger pressing time structures. To remain enrolled, for example, they were forced to choose their “major” subject by the beginning of their sophomore year—well before many of them could detect where their vocational passions might lie. This choice and its forced timing bred anxiety. Many felt compelled, internally or by social pressure, to choose a “safe” and efficient major—one they perceived likely to provide them immediate, practical employment upon graduation, which would arrive all too soon—with its requirements of clusters of courses that must be taken soon or immediately.

Hanover undergraduates do not adequately represent society, but not all of their lives became more leisurely following graduation as they took on employment, more bills, and families. The survey reflects a state of mind widely noticed not just on campuses but in the American workplace and elsewhere, especially by visitors from abroad who comment that Americans do not know how to stop working. Poverty can grind, and we may work and study in part to avoid it and to assist others. However, sociologists in several nations have also concluded that a sense of tension about time correlates with an increase in education and wealth. “Stuff” (information, news, choices, possessions that require maintenance and attention and protection) “means speed.” “If you make haste,” writes historian of science and culture James Gleick, “you probably make it in the technology-driven Western world, probably in the United States, probably in a large city—including, certainly, the most prosperous cities of Europe and Asia.” This tendency of technologized societies has advantages and can be efficient and productive, but it can also spawn anxiety, perfectionism, and exhaustion, as well as undercut prayerful contemplation, erode poise, crimp patience, promote endless desires and trivial pursuits (rapid-paced electronic games and social media as ends in themselves), and incubate the fanaticism of doubling of our speed and halving our joy when we’ve lost our way. This cultural disorder can also undermine attention spans, ironically spawning the pathetic sin of boredom amid excess stimulation.

What has all this to do with our anticipation of the Lord’s return? The caution offered here is that our religious beliefs are neither taken in nor acted out in a vacuum. As in the secular world with its motivations, we within the kingdom, partly with millennial-inspired motivation, encourage ourselves to fulfill our duties, to pick up the pace, to lengthen our stride—all good things if done well, with good judgment, with balance, in the right spirit, toward a worthy end. But healthy understandings of diligence are not inevitable. Strong, recurrent, millennially-inflected admonitions toward urgent diligence are encouraging and inspiring to many but may exacerbate anxiety in others, especially when conflated with pressures from the bustling secular sphere.

If we imagine healthy diligence as a good, strait, and narrow path, we can envision to its left the quicksand of inaction, of sloth, fear, apathy, and procrastination, which are the opposites of true faith in the Savior. In the Church, we appropriately and often warn ourselves away from this left side of the trail. But there is more than one way to depart from the proper path, for to its right lies the entangling brush of relentless urgency, overwork, exhaustion, hopelessness, depression, and neurotic perfectionism–by-products of our age of anxiety. Just as there are souls mired in the quagmire of indolence on the left trailside, so there are others overwhelmed in the thorns of the brush on the trail’s opposite side. The name of these others is Legion. It may be that, for a considerable minority, our urgings toward lengthening our stride at the virtual onset of the Millennium inverts what they need to hear. We would do well to diagnose before we prescribe en masse.

Samuel Johnson told his biographer, Boswell, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” But mortal life is for more than looking ahead; it is not merely for enduring to get to a heavenly reward. “Now” matters—it is our immediate reality. And tomorrow, and next year, “now” will also be where we really are. As with our own not-far-distant personal death, perhaps the issue is not so different for the world’s end of days, differing only in scale. In Hugh Nibley’s assessment, “The message of the restored gospel is that one phase of the earth’s existence is coming to a close, and another phase, a phase in which God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven, is about to become the order of life on earth.” Perhaps this horizon, an expectancy bred into latter-day Christians from our beginnings, ought not distract us to the future but should rather concentrate our minds—wonderfully—on today. How shall we respond to this horizon now? What, today, shall we be? What shall we choose?

The Doctrine and Covenants answers. The crucial takeaway from its warnings of future judgment, as also those of contemporary leaders, is to prepare. “Prepare” implies a forward horizon, but in the revelations, it is a relentless, imperative, active, present-tense verb. How am I to prepare now?

Study of the revelations helps us to realize that we already know the answer, or should. We are to beware the times in which we live, yet remain unafraid. We are to look with joy as the bride to the bridegroom. To call upon, to listen, and to hearken to the Lord’s voice. To look to him in every thought. To repent. Not to harden our hearts. To forgive, letting God play His role as judge. To be faithful, to do good, to stand in holy places, and to sanctify ourselves. To share the gospel, to live into our covenants. “If we knew that we would meet the Lord tomorrow—through our premature death or through His unexpected coming—what would we do today? What confessions would we make? What practices would we discontinue? What accounts would we settle? What forgivenesses would we extend?”

As we wait upon the Lord, we might remain alert to the possibility that he may be near in more than one sense. And that the fulfillment of some prophecy hinges less on some threatening, relentless, ticking cosmic clock, but rather on our response to prophetic warnings. We might take care not to look beyond the mark by allowing our fascination toward the Millennium to distract from our responsibilities in the place and time where God has placed us. We might embrace humility in the face of all we do not know, hold fast to our faith in a loving and merciful God, be thoughtful about portrayals of His strong displeasure, and welcome correction where it is due. We might remain diligent without succumbing to angst, remembering to balance our labors not with sloth, but with Sabbath, with contemplation, with stillness, with wonder, with joy at being alive and learning, sharing, creating, loving our neighbor, and building up Zion.

And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,

where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.

Wherefore, may the kingdom of God go forth, that the kingdom of heaven may come (D&C 65:6).

Philip Barlow served as the Maxwell Institute’s associate director and is a Neal A. Maxwell Research Associate. Having previously served as the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History & Culture at Utah State University, his teaching engages religion and human suffering, religion and the concept of “time,” American religious history, and Restoration movements.

Art by Leslie Graff.