ALL ABOUT TIME AS IT REALLY IS
This picture of a stopwatch
reminded me that in life we are all bit like an athlete running a race, as St.
Paul has it in his writings, but more than this we are running in a straight
line through time. In fact it is easy to think that all time is
like a race with a beginning and end and then to try to apply the same criteria
to the things of God as apply to the things of humankind. There have for
example, been many attempts to work out when the world is going to end using the
Bible as their source all of which have proved to be wrong and this is hardly
surprising for we are dealing with a God who, if He is to be thought of at all,
must surely be thought of as being without a beginning and also without an end.
Which is indeed how the Bible sees God describing Himself. “I am the
Alpha and the Omega” Clearly therefore there is something different
about the way God deals with time, time which in the first place He must have
created, time in fact with no beginning and no end which makes it very
difficult for we poor human beings to equate “God-time” with a time which
for us goes from birth to death in a continuos straight line.
Some
years ago a friend and I came up with an idea, which seems to work and helps us
to equate time, as God sees it, with our time. It relies largely on the concept
that time for us can be thought of as being analogous to a geometrical figure
and the nearest we can come to represent this is the straight line But what of
God’s time how are we to deal with this? Well what better way to represent this
than a circle, which in fact has no beginning and therefore no end and can be
thought of as the circle of eternity or indeed, the circle of God-time? If
we now put the two together with the straight line at a tangent to the circle
we find an infinitesimal point of contact, so infinite in fact as to be beyond
our human comprehension. So using this contact we can now carry our analogy a
bit further.
This is point of contact is like the point where God-time and our time come together, the contact point where God is still carrying out the work of creation, the contact point where He is still giving Moses the Commandments, and the contact point where He sends His Son to atone for our sins as He acts out the events of the crucifixion in God-time and, at the self same moment, in our time. More than this however, through the Sacrament of Communion, God the Son continues to intercede for us all before God so that as we come to the end of time as we know it we are enabled at the last to understand and to be with Him in God-time or time as it really is.