Bud and flower turn under ambers in the seasonal eddies that flow at the bottom of a familiar valley. It leaves scars and weathered wrinkles when renewing the spring growth of yet another year. And each day that one of the family returns to that quiet hollow, upon reflection, she knows that just a little more stone has been pulled away. But tomorrow night the moon will be full once more.
Another thing begins again as the last walks on in a straight line. Still, each end we see is just one of the countless iterations in which the river seeps indistinguishably into a particularly high tide returning to the delta what had been left to more powerful forces. The particulate decay and the spirit of a thing breathe on. The memory, at very least, lingers as night nuzzles silently at the nape of the day.
Shifting sands of time blow miles across wide deserts and fall through a narrow glass, grain by grain. Hands whirl circuits around our days. What we have too little of to begin with escapes the nimblest fingers. Do not presume to hold the rolling river in your slippery digits.
Instead of herding and harnessing what will not be tamed, we apply a domestic utility to itemize, prioritize, and schedulize. We give our powerlessness a name, jot it over next Tuesday’s block, and by this we feel we’ve mastered a thing. Still, time shivers and shakes off our hubris like a dog on the bank. It stalks our steps in the nearest undergrowth, ignored or forgotten, always attendant and menacing.
Perhaps in spite, with few enough years under the belt to know it, young enough to be my own, a confident voice intones, “Time is on your side,” to no one in particular.
Time:
- Past. That growing wave that urges you forward as it builds behind. That is, until you realize that its incessant rolling bulk rolls away. It grows more impressive by day, but will not crash.
- Future. Ifs shifting with listless decisions beginning in every instant.
- Present. Nothing else is so utterly encapsulating and maddeningly unattainable. The realest real that lingers ever tantalizing on the tip of time’s tongue.
Is:
- Third person singular of “to be.” Observable existence exemplified, distilled.
On your side:
- A covenant friend tending to that which has been given and that which will be demanded in the fullness of time. A gift that will be received and cannot be returned, it requires a return and will bring the receipts.
Last night, as every night, an ancient saint lay on her deathbed. Slow breaths slipped noiselessly from her mouth whispering for her soul to go. She once had a childhood and a nightmare of heaven, of never being content in a single good for infinity and sensing the multiplication of infinite infinities that would satisfy too briefly then rot within her cloud and rust her untarnishable harp. Panic in quick breaths caught short of her lungs.
This lasted until she breathed deeply of the promise: good changeless perfection unending. End needs time. Time, the very definition of change, has no place there or then or whatever we call a thing that we cannot comprehend in a language formed in a dying world. Time is not evaporating in a steamy delta to fly to another headwaters. Time is not the moon face full to the sun once more and ever. Time had a beginning. It will end with itself. Change cannot abide. It too must pass as it is always passing.
But another thing lives on, endures beyond ends. When asked by a grandson if she is alright, if she was quite comfortable, if she is at peace, her last words rattle out, “I am.”
I am:
- First person singular of “to be.” Ownership of existence. Definition of life. Ever-present wellspring of essence.
Up among the dry rocks and gaping crags on the eastern Mediterranean shore ascended a spirituality that expressed so exquisitely the absolute refinement of philosophy, the verity of life with all its existential meaning. YHWH. I AM. Reality himself.
She once talked to an old friend, who in sterile, institutionalized despair bemoaned life and claimed that time had only made her older. The reply was that time had certainly but not only made her older. In fact, time is the only gift ever given, so fundamental a blessing it is, that presented the opportunity for improvement, to go from worse to better. Without that blessing, without a life lived, what hope could there be? Time was on her side, even as dusk was upon her, ever as dusk comes to all.
Indeed, hope without time cannot be conceived. Only living time from future to past could engender hope, as we hope for something different and difference depends on change, passing, time. Hope is at every turn. Life is nothing but turn after turn, the invitation to hope and do, for always something is done, even if that something is nothing, that nothing is a thing indeed, a refusal, if no thing else.
Refusal is hopelessness. Desire without hope is a daydream, despair.
On a float in a tired river, flowing water almost unfelt between the fingers of a dangling hand, he is carried downstream. He knows where he is going, and there he goes. He can dream of going elsewhere, but refusing to act, to take up the opportunity each second affords, what he calls hope calls him a liar and a fraud and hardly a man.
Aboard a train, the world rushes by, and sitting still without considering anything philosophical or existential, he knows movement, change, and time. Propelled through the landscape and those rolling country hills, be and is are his attendants, stamping his ticket, telling him that he was there and then there and no longer.
Standing on the track, obstinate and unwilling to move, without considering anything philosophical or existential, he knows movement, change, and time. Witnessing the engine propelled from the far distance, be and is are his attendants, which at his peril may stamp him flat there where he was but no longer.
It is time that calls the bluff of those who think of hope as a word instead of being it. Hope is lived in time. And for all time, time has done and will do and continues to do the same; it affects change unwillingly, calls up hope haplessly. Forever. There will never be a time that time will do differently, for forever too is time.
But there is something other than forever, something outside of time. Time, like its dutiful twin space, never held all in its very wide arms; it is not absolute and will not enjoy the final and abiding word. With a fiat it was birthed, and birthed, it will die. But another thing will eternally be, with or without let it be.
Eternity:
- Not all time. Not time at all. Not the hypothetical, imaginative infinity forward and infinity back. Infinity nothing.
Once a wise bishop considered God’s character. He considered this character in relation to everything he could use to frame it. He considered this character in relation to all the very strange and seemingly contradictory and definitely paradoxical and gloriously rich and living combination of the holy scriptures. In other words, he considered it as well as he could.
What he finally committed to paper was that he could not really understand what Truth is at all. Individual truths affirmed this way and others affirmed that and impossibilities affirmed in this pair, true nonetheless. Nothing has ever been truer than the Word affirmed in total. This philosopher theologian decided that he lacked the capacity to comprehend even the simplest truths, for the simplest was inextricably tied to the whole, and the whole was very complicated. But this philosopher theologian also decided that he would not be found at fault, supposing no one could discover, understand, and describe this reality, for refusing to seek the truth as earnestly as he could, knowing he had already found it while still a fool and sinner.
That is hope.
Living at all is hope. Living with eyes open is more hope still. Perpetuating life with eyes open is the pinnacle of the human capacity to hope.
Oh really? you might say. How’s that? you may ask.
With eyes open, knowing what pain occurred in my twenty-fifth year, looking toward my thirty-fifth and its tireless anxieties, living in the present I affirm that life is good and worthwhile. Why? Because the present is not the past and it is not the future. The present is not as determined by the past as Newton supposed. Thus, the future is not doomed to be a pure conditioned continuation of the past, though it may appear so in hindsight (but only in hindsight). The events leading to war last time may not again. The choice leading to the death of one need not be made by another.
Again, why? How? Well, in a word, the present. Time is entirely synonymous with change and as long as it passes from future to past via the present, each moment is an opportunity to affect change. Not only an opportunity, a necessity. The train and river, moon and clock press on with or without consent, but never without deed. The present is an RSVP with only one box to check. You will be going. Will you choose your dish?
The present, the only shred of time you and I have ever known, is pure reality. There are no ifs or maybes or what ifs or perhapses. There is only active actuality. To obey what we know we ought or to ignore the spirit within.
For decades she has known as much. She has not, as many have, tried to live outside time to know nirvana prematurely. She has not succumbed to the despair of pre-determination and regret. She has not whiled away her life spiteful of what was or what will not be. She has not held grudge nor intended evil. No.
Instead our saint has met, as well as she could, each present moment with her Lord’s words, “Go, and do likewise.” She loves God and neighbor. She repents and supplicates and communes continually as if the kingdom were truly within reach, as if there is a part of God’s providence that lives within. Hers is not theory, nor philosophy. Hers is life and its meaning. In doing, she has transcended every thinker. In doing, she has found the assurance of the future that was already. This is blessed peace.
The Word is living and active, wielding so narrow an edge between past and future, cutting through the sliver we call now. Eternal God pierces the heart of his creation in the person and presence of his Word, creating and coming into our reality at just the right time and times and in the fullness of time and eternally.
There is never a time that time will stop, as if we could measure when it was no more without it. Time will, however, end. Time is movement and change. God is not. Eternity is coming and is here and has always been and no one will ever tell you this with the words of time. Look to the Word instead.
Do you fear Time’s scythe? Do you carry fear, anger, anxiety, resentment? Do you doubt predestined perfection? Do you not dare to believe that judgment, justification could be just?
Do not be afraid. Be strong and courageous. Time is on your side.
Leave your worries where a single act ushers eternity in for all those who are being brought into life, who have and will always abide in God’s pure, unaffected good. Lay it at the cross, take up your own, and follow, do, be now.
If these words on time have piqued your interest, do yourself a favor and read my book, Marvelous Light.
Others’ words contributed to the writing of this post:
Saint Augustine: Confessions
Doug Mains & the City Folk: Broken Windows
Down Like Silver: Broken Coastline
John Donne: A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning