Jesus and the Long Now

An organization called the "Long Now Foundation" is planning to build a mechanical clock that will keep time for the next 10,000 years. They call it "The Clock of the Long Now." The goal of the project is to inspire long-term thinking in a world where our whole sense of time is organized around increasingly ephemeral time-spans. I have trouble imagining the next ten years (sometimes 10 minutes is a stretch): this clock ticks once a year, with a "century hand" that advances every hundred years and a cuckoo that comes out every millenium.

Prototypes of the clock are now running in museums in London and San Fransisco, but the actual clock will be housed in a cave on top of Mt. Washington, Nevada, a region that is home, incidentally, to some 5000-year-old bristlecone pines (nature's-own Long Now Clocks).

You can click here to listen to Steward Brand talk about the search for a home for the Clock of the Long Now.

The whole aim of the Long Now Foundation is to promote slower thinking-- thinking on a scale of 10,000 years-- thinking about the long-range impact of our actions -- in contrast to the faster/cheaper/disposable/expedient mentality that has wreaked so much havoc on our environment, our cultures, our planet.

Treebeard, I think, would love these guys.

But I have to confess, when I first heard about the Clock of the Long Now, my cynicism reflex twitched involuntarily for just a moment: Yeah, right... who's gonna be around 10,000 years from now to hear that final chime?

And then it hit me, a crashing wave of conviction with an undertow of repentance, dragging my heart out into a sea of deeper faith: as a Christian, I confess Jesus Christ, coming again to judge the living and the dead. I'm the subject of a once, now and future king. And if anyone has reason for long-range thinking, I should. Because whenever Christians confess his coming to judge the living and the dead, in that very act we confess also our expectation that there will be still be some "living" around when he arrives.

Ten thousand years from now, either Christ will have returned, or we'll still be here proclaiming his death until he comes. And because we'll still be marrying and giving in marriage until the end-- and because no one knows the hour or the day-- and because a day is like a thousand years to the Lord-- because of all this, the Christian life has a future orientation that should make long-range thinking second nature to us.

In fact, the paradox of the term "the long now" itself seems to capture something about the whole Christian posture towards time: in expecting his return instantly but being prepared to wait ten thousand years, Christians are indeed living in the "long now." And whether it's tomorrow or ten millennia from now, our hope that Christ will return at last to reclaim this labouring world should inspire us to think deeply about the long-range impact of our ethical, environmental or cultural decisions in and on behalf of his world, even as we wait for him to come quickly.