or, if a clock implies a clock-maker, what does a broken clock imply?
by Galen T. Pickett.
The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old;
I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be.
Proverbs 8 22,23.
Sophia was walking along the edge of the water, close enough that the spray of the surf was salty and tangible on her lips and the powerful waves just offshore barely managed to push a pleasant, gentle foam up the beach to cool her toes.
It was mid-morning on a brilliant day, just as the one before, just as it should be the day next. Birds were wheeling in the sky, from small piping things to great troops of pelicans, wings spread. Some followed the crestline of the breaking waves. Occasionally, one of the pelicans would peel off from the formation, soar, and then dive into the water, wings stretched behind. It was the very picture of pure joy in motion.
“Ouch!” Sophia said as she stubbed her toe on half-buried object on the beach. She bent down, and dug a bit, freeing an oblong box. Standing with her treasure, she brushed the sand from it. “A clock!” she said.
But there was something dreadfully wrong with the clock. She held it to her ear, and there was no sign of its inner life. No “tick, tock, tick, tock…” There was just silence. The glass protecting the face was cracked, and the minute hand had broken as well. Just its rusty stub was still on the face of the clock. The back of the clock was held closed with a small tab, and she released it. Dregs of foul-smelling sea water and accumulated sludge dribbled from the case. The balance wheel was bent and encrusted with rust, and it looked like at least one of the geared wheels was missing entirely. The ones that remained were missing teeth and had worked free from their pivot holes. There was a great spiral mess of a rusty coil – the mainspring was corroded and broken in at least one place.
The clock would clearly never function this way, which was a tremendous puzzlement for Sophia.
“What have you got there?” asked a young man, sporting a dapper goatee and an ebony walking stick and exquisitely tailored suit of clothes. “Never seen one of those before.”
“Neither have I. The other clocks I have known are nothing like this. I wonder what purpose was served by creating it thus?”
“Surely you do not think it was made this way. There certainly must be a clock-maker,” and Sophia naturally nodded in agreement, “because, well, here we have a clock. But do you mean today there is a ‘broken-clock maker’ as well? Someone who made this device in its state as you find it?”
“Well of course. What a question! Have you ever seen a clock in this state?”
“Well … not clocks per se, but other objects, sure. All the time, believe me, Ms. …?” he left the question hanging.
“Sophia, sir. I am pleased to meet you.”
“Lovely to make you acquaintance, Sophia. I am Mr. Chance,” Chance said, bowing low and removing his bowler.
“What an odd name? ‘Chance’ … I do not believe I have ever heard that before. What is its meaning?”
“Dear lady, ‘chance’ is one of those funny words that means nothing at all. Nothing at all,” Chance answered.
“But surely there is some meaning? Words don’t just have no meaning,” Sophia insisted.
“You might say my name has an un-meaning, if you wanted to force me to make some sort of sense here. But I well know that ‘wisdom’ is the meaning of your name.” said Chance.
“Oh, you have heard of me?” asked Sophia.
“Indeed. I know all about you.”
“Well, Mr. Chance, this,” she held out the battered and damaged clock, “is a mystery to me. How can I understand a clock-maker making a clock that clearly does not function?”
“You do not suppose this is the way it has always been, do you?” Chance asked one more time.
“Well, of course I do,” she said. She motioned toward a flock of birds, and then toward a field of flowers off in the distance. “These have always been exactly as designed.”
“Are you sure about that? Let’s look here,” Chance said as he bent down and scooped up sand. Sifting it through his fingers, there was a mussel revealed. He looked about and saw a group of gulls eyeing him intently. He said to Sophia, “Observe,” and then tossed the mussel toward the gulls.
One gull grabbed the mussel out of the air and began flapping dramatically, and another gull flew up harassing the bird until it dropped its prize, which was then scooped up by another. It flew off a short distance, and then climbed up into the sky before letting the shelled creature fall to an outcropping of rocks. Chance and Sophia ran up to where the poor creature lay dying. “What in the world?” Sophia asked. She put her clock on the ground, and gently picked the creature up and tried to pick a splintered bit of shell from the wreck that had been made of the small thing. “This can’t be,” Sophia gasped. “This creature was alive when you selected it. It was as alive and as happy as it had ever been. And then you did this, somehow, you did this.”
“My apologies, Sophia, but you are going to see an awful lot more of this as time goes on.”
“You said that word again … time. What has that to do with anything? You destroyed a creature of the creator. Did you also destroy this clock? What a wicked, evil man! Did you feel its pain? The poor little mussel. It was consumed by it.”
Chance took off his hat, revealing a shock of white hair to match the long white and full beard he sported. The stick he had been twirling gracefully he now leaned upon heavily. He again bowed deeply, and when he arose with difficulty, he did not seem to be able to regain his full standing height. His eyes were watery and clouded and were now behind a set of spectacles. His suit was shabby at the elbows and had been patched at the knees.
“Ah, Sophia. All you know is the togetherness, the wisdom of the whole. The apeiron is not just the boundless source of creation, dear Wisdom. It is also the chance element of destruction, and decay.” Sophia frowned with her lips pursed, and her entire body was shaking at this affront to the designed creation. She was about to speak when Chance held up a hand. “Ah Sophia. I do want us to be friends, but surely you know we both have jobs to do. Jobs that were given us the same way the mussel was given life, and the gull and the flower of the field.”
Chance motioned toward the broken clock with his weathered and worn cane. “You know about clocks, and know the Clock Maker, do you not?”
Holding back biter tears, Sophia said “Yes, I have seen many clocks, and I have seen the Clock Maker at work.”
“And what is a clock? What does it do? I know it ticks and it tocks, and I have seen the Workshop as well. But what purpose does it serve? What does it do?”
“Each creature is an expression of the Creator. Are you saying it is your purpose to de-create the Creation? To simply destroy what is? How can you live with yourself?”
“Ah, how do I live with myself,” Chance replied, wheezing in a whisper. “Everything in the Creation serves the Purpose. My name is Chance, but it could just as well be Change.” Chance reached out for Sophia’s hand. She reluctantly took his hand and began to understand. The day was the day, it seemed perpetually mid-morning, but now the light was different in a subtle way. The shadows they cast, the shadows everything cast in the bright sunshine, were pointing in the wrong direction, a slightly different direction. The crashing of the waves and the soaring of the birds had been timeless, the sequence of their beings laid out to see in an instant. The entirety of the wave from swell to foam was there as a single whole, at least before speaking with Mr. Chance. The crashing and the soaring now displayed the serial ordering Sophia was now experiencing. Each instant was now truly its own, each leading from its own past toward its own future. She detected a deep thrumming as if the clockwork of the world had finally been sent running. The changes piled up.
“Dear Sophia,” Chance said. “What are the clocks for? To give time its meaning. To have a beginning, and a middle, and an ending, that is what a clock does. A clock changes. You have never seen the hands move?” Sophia shook her head. “They do now. Time is now marching, and the Creator had added a random element to the creation, Blind Chance, as it were.” Chance’s spectacles were now blacked-out. “I am the Clock-Breaker.” Chance removed a handkerchief and dabbed at his hidden eyes. “Not just the mussel, Sophia. Everything you see. Every bird, every creature, the plants themselves. Even that,” he motioned up in the sky toward the warmth he felt but could no longer see. “Even the Sun. Time and Chance will destroy everything.” Chance caught a sob. “It is not what I’d choose for myself. It is my given purpose.”
Sophia thought about that. About the Creator creating a Destructor. How would anything survive? What wisdom could there be in such a world?
Chance whispered, “It will be pain, and it will be change. And we will be forever against each other. But it is the nature of Wisdom to bind up and understand – to create and to recreate in this great Creation. The clocks will wear down, and the changes will make changes. I think you can see it now, how this world will evolve into its designed grandeur.”
Narrowing her eyes, Sophia knelt, and looking up at Chance, she held the poor mussel. She spoke a word of blessing, and without knowing quite why, she dug a shallow grave and placed the mussel there. “You are simply a monster,” she managed without her voice breaking, standing to her full height, shoulders squared in the presence of her Adversary. “To have a purpose in this is bad enough. But to make this happen without reason or cause – I ask again: how can you live with that? There are reasons for everything. Is it not enough for you that Wisdom herself says it is so?”
Chance jumped up with glee and clapped his hands, his shirt-tales untucked, and he was now barefoot. “My dear Sophia!” he said, throwing his ballcap in the air, “of course there is a reason! Of course there is!” Chance waved his arm. “Look around you! Six perfect days of creation, and the last, the seventh is the day of rest. Did you think the Creator did this to make one perfect day for Sophia and Chance to meet at the beach? The clocks are ticking, and the hands of fate are now moving, and those,” he gestured toward the gulls, “are not the last of their kind. They will have children, and those children will eat and be eaten, and the wholeness of perfection you only now intuit will become clearer and clearer. There is a contrast between what mere random Chance does and what you will guide us all toward. You won’t be able to do your job without me. And without you, I would be a monster.”
“And now you are just a child?”
Chance looked up at Sophia and winked. “Golly, sure! And what about the clock?”
Sophia bent down and reclaimed the clock. Its two hands were gleaming with a deep blue finish, and the time stood at nine and a quarter hours after Alpha on the dial, and she could feel the faint beating, tick-tock-tick-tock, as she held it in her hands. “You – you – fixed the clock? How can that be?”
Sophia looked suspiciously at Chance who was now slowly breaking from a sly towards a broadly open grin. “Everything runs down, everything runs out, and nothing lasts, my Dear Sophia. Except for one thing, and for one person. Even as this,” he motioned at the clock, “runs toward Omega,” he gestured to the face of the clock, “all change and chance disrupts and destroys. But there is a change in you isn’t there, dear Sophia? Have you changed at all in the last minute?”
Sophia thought about that. For the longest time, everything was as it should be. The gulls over the wave, the glittering of the sunlight, the mussels burrowing, and Sophia was at the water’s edge enjoying it all. But she had changed. She had now learned something. Change was coming, and Chance was driving that change, but Wisdom would accumulate. What was understood would be understood and not lost to the darkness.
“You see, Sophia. We will occupy the two ends of the great equilibrium. I will destroy, you will create, and I will run down.” Chance stroked the salt-and-pepper imperial beard on his mature face. “But everything you stitch together will leave something inside you. I will teach you what you need. Only Wisdom, in all of creation, will grow, and only because of all of this.” Chance motioned to the clock that was now dead and broken and drenched with salt water. “It will not be pleasant, but how else could you learn what needs to be learned? You are the great animating Spirit of this world.”
And Sophia saw that it was true. And she gently placed the clock on the ground, and she turned toward Chance and said, “I think I see the wisdom of this now. And I am sorry you have been given this role, Mr. Chance. And I will remember you in the fullness of time.”
Chance would have smiled in gratitude as the sky wheeled on toward its end-time, but he was laying at the edge of the surf, coins upon his eyes, in a repose that only the just earn after hard toil.
END