12 October 2008

Hurry as violence

In a thought-provoking article a colleague pointed out to me comes this new-to-me quote:
“Hurry is actually a form of violence exercised upon God’s time in order to make it ‘my time’.”
(Donald Nicholl, Holiness.
)
Credo: Living in time with the rhythm of the Church’s year -Times Online.
It's a terrific soundbite. Is it true (or true enough to use)? It's true in that it should help us to recognised that there are limits to our efforts at time-saving and that hurry builds into our habiti (habituses?) things that tend to rush us past people and events that we really should attend to . At the same time, I'm concerned that it could generate a rather luddite backlash: it seems to me that it could be taken to mean that we should walk everywhere rather than take a bus or a train (we know of course that taking a car is a more environmentally perilous option, so I don't mention it in the main bit)...
Am I being a bit oversensitive? -not to mention enjoying the time I have on trains for working on stuff and reading.

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