Getting there on time.

"He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end."  Ecclesiates 3:11.

The title of this blog, of course, is a paraphrase of the famous passage from Ecclesiastes 3: 1 - 8.  I felt a thrill of pleasure, therefore, as I listened to it at worship this morning.  And my pleasure grew when the reading continued past the eighth verse to the end of the thirteenth verse.  It touched on the nature of time, which has long fascinated me.  In particular, the illusion of time.

I feel that I must apologize for the banality of the topic.  The observation that time is an illusion has become commonplace, particularly in the sciences.  We have learned from Einstein and others that time and space are the same thing, even if most of us don't quite understand why.  And yet we necessarily live our lives along a temporal continuum, tracing lines of cause and effect with every recollection and every decision.  Even the Buddha stooped to eat, and I will go to sleep tonight in the expectation of rising tomorrow.

Time particularly fascinates me as a unifying principle in religion.  During her sermon, Reverend Laurie quoted a less-famous passage from Mechtild of Magdeburg.  I knew the quote, but not its author:   "the day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw and knew I saw all things in God and God in all things.”  Again, this observation has become commonplace, although few of us can actually maintain such an awareness for more than a few moments, before our egos reassert themselves.  The moment of awareness, though, seems... not timeless... but somehow out of the flow of time.  Which makes sense when we think about it.  Because if all things are in God, and God is in all things, then all things are one with God.  And in oneness -- whether of the spirit or of matter -- there is no cause and effect, no time.

But if we are already in God and God in us, then why do we struggle through time?  A Buddhist might ask, "why do we cling to expectation, to the illusion of cause and effect?"  Putting the question differently, we might ask, "why is God both one and three? Why does time begin and end with the universe? Why did the chicken cross the road?"  

The Buddhist might answer, "because the path and the destination are the same."  Or, to be more plain, because it is their nature.  God... the universe... the chicken... they share... no... they constitute the same dynamic whole.  They do not exist; they become.  God is one:  but he is also the Son, separate; the Spirit, longing and striving for unity; and the Father, bringing all into unity.  Just as the seeker, the path and the destination are all one.

But does any of this really matter, except in the abstract?  What does it mean to us in our daily lives, however illusory they might be?  First, it means that our daily lives are not illusory or meaningless after all.  In our daily struggles, we embody God's own, dynamic nature.  We constitute the God that seeks to know and to become himself -- which in no way diminishes God or us.  Second, it means that we must seek the heaven within and around us -- because we cannot fathom anything else.  And, third, we must embrace Love as the true path to heaven -- because we cannot reason our way there.  As John wrote (1 John 4:16), “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”