WHAT LIFE IN A CAVE CAN TEACH US ABOUT ADVENT
Imagine living in hundreds of feet below the surface of the earth in a cave, with only one dim light source, no way of telling time and no human contact for sixty days. Beyond the feeling of claustrophobia that could set in – it sounds awful. Damp, dark, strange creatures lurking about.
Yet, in 1962 this is exactly what Michel Siffre did. He descended into a cave outside of Nice, France because he wanted to see what would happen to a person who was cut off from any notion of time. Decades later Joshua Foer interviewed Siffre about the time he spent in the cave. He reported:
“Very quickly Siffre’s memory deteriorated. In the dreary darkness, his days melded into one another and became one continuous, indistinguishable blob. Since there was nobody to talk to, and not much to do, there was nothing novel to impress itself upon his memory. There were no chronological landmarks by which he could measure the passage of time. At some point he stopped being able to remember what happened even the day before. His experience in isolation had turned him into EP. As time began to blur, he became effectively amnesic. Soon, his sleep patterns disintegrated. Some days he’d stay awake for thirty-six straight hours, other days for eight—without being able to tell the difference. When his support team on the surface finally called down to him on September 14, the day his experiment was scheduled to wrap up, it was only August 20 in his journal. He thought only a month had gone by. His experience of time’s passage had compressed by a factor of two.” Excerpt From: Foer, Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein.
What Siffre experienced was not life apart from time, but life apart from rhythm. He was still living in time, but had no way to measure it. What he learned is humans need rhythms, as they are a way of measuring time. It’s no surprise then that rhythm is woven into the fabric of creation.
In Genesis 1 the writer speaks of how God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years” (Gen 1:14, NIV). The ancient used these signs in the sky as a gauge for measuring time. But they did not stop there. They learned that anything that has a constant and consistent rhythm can be used to measure time, and ever since we have been able to measure time more accurately.
Now we measure time according the frequency of a cesium atom. We call the rhythm of this atom the atomic clock which ticks tick 9,192,631,770 every second. It is so accurate it can gain or lose a second every 100 million years. You may find all this to be interesting or boring, but it does raise a question.
Why is it that humans have such a fascination with measuring and tracking time? Why, when Siffre descended into a cave for sixty days did his mind get mushy?
Perhaps it is because we all have a rhythm inside us. Heart beat, breathing rate, brain waves, sleep patterns – all these things go on without our being fully aware of it. Something inside us is keenly aware of time ... all the time. Take away the rhythms woven into the fabric of creation, and it makes an impact on our rhythms. So what happens, then, what happens when we are out of rhythm? When we fail to stop, slow down and allow ourselves to simply be?
Yesterday a friend said to me, “I cannot believe it’s almost Christmas. Where has time gone?” We all hear comments like this – maybe it’s because we live our lives much the way Siffre did in that cave.
Many of us have no rhythms. These days, most people I know move fast, stay busy, work too much, sleep too little and have an inability to stand still or enjoy silence. It's no wonder we lose track of time. And our maddening pace only gets worse during the Advent Season.
We gorge ourselves on Thanksgiving, sleep off the tryptophan induced coma and then … go! Parties, lights, decorations, gifts, wrapping, family Christmas card, egg nog, get the tree and the list goes on. By the time Christmas Day rolls around we finally stop and crash into it wondering what just happened.
All the while we fail to see that Advent is a season given to us. A time that invites us back into rhythm, to slow down, to measure time so that we can both remember and look ahead. Perhaps this year we can receive the gift of Advent. We can allow ourselves to hear its rhythm and know where we are in time.
How will you live according to the rhythm of Advent this year? How will you slow down? Stop? Be still? Be Silent? Be? - so that you can remember and long for the hope that has come and will come again.