Passing the time. Part 5

Passing the time

Part 5: Summing up with God

We seem to have two strands of thought running in parallel. On the one hand, it is true that – although we are rarely conscious of the passing of our lives – our lives gain importance from being limited in time. It is because we don’t have time to make infinite choices that the choices we do make become so significant. That wonderful experience of fullness and completeness that I experienced on a family celebration is important because it was a special moment: specially blessed by being overflowing with goodness, and blessed because it a rare moment of wholeness, rather than just one more in an endless series of great parties. On the other hand, our experience of the moment is not impeded or interrupted or spoilt by the sense of, “Oh, but this is passing away”. Our good experiences exist in an experience of timeless bliss. (We must consider what this means for our experiences of suffering).

Let’s finish for now with God. If God is a reality – and I very much hope he is, then he is an eternal being. In the world of philosophers, this raises enormous problems. Aquinas may have got the best idea with his concept that – even better than an eternal God – God is timeless. Sceptics who raise genuine difficulties about how a being such as God could possibly exist may be having difficulties because they do not appreciate just how awesomely wonderful God is. So, even though our “normal” understanding of God is ineffably wonderful, the problems raised may be removed if we enhance our concept of God even further. So, a timeless God is experiencing everything that has ever happened, everything that is happening, and everything that is going to happen, everywhere in the universe, and he is experiencing all this simultaneously in a timeless present. It might be helpful to envisage this for us beings that do live in time as though God was experiencing everything I’ve just said, simultaneously, in each moment of time, over and over again, second by second. For us, as time ticks by, we experience one moment – and then the next. But for God, he experiences everything, every second, forever. Now, I think this is a more mind-blowing stupendously awesome God than even the God that we usually think of.

And, it might be, that such a God is an impossibility. But if God is possible, then I think this is what he must be doing/be like. And, interestingly, this takes me back to sitting by the window, basking in the sunlight this morning. My experience of the moment was of a timeless, eternally present bliss. Rather like God’s experience you might say. Of course, I am only capable of being aware of a very limited range of things at once, while God is capable of being aware of everything at once. But this is not impossible to conceive of: God simply has a greater awareness than we do – no surprise there. And as we consider it, we realise that he must have infinite awareness, and so is capable of experiencing everything at once. Now, if we, in our best moments, are capable of experiencing events as timeless, complete, whole, full (whether they be of bliss or suffering, in fact) then are we not already sharing in the experience of God? And if there is some way of translating our ability to experience from a physical body to a metaphysical reality, then will we not be experiencing an ongoing timeless bliss forever, in the life of heaven, in union with God?