Led Into the Truth The Time that Matters

Feb 13, 2009

Time is an odd thing. We mostly have too much or too little; if too much, we are bored, desperate to find something to occupy our minds, our hands, and our hearts; if too little, we are frenzied, caught up in a relentless desire to be efficient that too often ends in exhaustion and mediocrity. We are squeezed between the past and the future; the present is but a moment. It is sometimes as if our entire being wants to cling to one of those moments, grasping terribly to it as it passes—like a moment of joy, the last precious word of a loved one breathing his last, some lamented missed opportunity—or we long for some not yet realized moment in the future. These fleeting moments of time as they presently pass, so strange and wondrous in themselves, cobble together our history, and in some way, the existence of the present moment creates for us the hope of a future one. St. Augustine calls time a "distension," a certain stretching: we are stretched between the past and the future, reaching for divine perspective but limited by human perception (Confessions, Book XI). While God can see eternity at once; man can only perceive an echo of eternity in the past and its shadowy promise in the future.

Time is one of our greatest gifts; it allows us the possibility to simply be with those whom the Lord has given us to love for whatever period his wisdom ordains and to quietly do those things to which he has asked us to apply our received talents.

But time can also be one of the greatest barriers to listening to God. While the past and the future occupy our minds most frequently, it is only the present moment in which we can act and in which we receive grace. Blaise Pascal, the eminent logician and apologist, wrote in his Pensées:

We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching. (#47).

The future indeed offers us hope, and the past can show us the way God’s grace has worked in our lives. Nevertheless, it is crucial to distinguish that the hope we receive from considering the future and the reassurance we receive from reflecting upon the past actually occur in the present moment. We can only listen to God in the present moment, perhaps using as fodder for our meditation the actions of the past or the hope in the future, but always remaining deeply and firmly grounded on the grace necessary for this moment, this action, this challenge. The sly seductiveness of the future is that we can mistakenly place our hope in it, forgetting that the hope we receive in contemplating the future is a present hope. The future can be a dangerous thing, for while we can see the hazy outlines of things we think might happen, the providence of God is inscrutable; the future rests in an opaque uncertainty. We must be careful not to mistake authentic hope, which is linked to the future but is ultimately a gratuitous gift of God, with dreams mostly based in realizing our human desires.

C.S. Lewis, the prolific Christian author, wrote The Screwtape Letters as a series of letters from a "senior" tempter in Hell (Screwtape) to a junior tempter, sharing with him certain tricks for preventing the Enemy (God) from winning souls. Aside from being monumentally entertaining, Lewis is remarkably insightful:

He [God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other—dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see (XV).

When we resolve to be happy, to finally give up on the various schemes that have occupied our minds and our hearts and to turn our attention to the Lord, it is essential that we rest in the present moment. We give to God our past, and we must be prepared to trust the one who has first loved us to tend to our future needs. It is this element of trust that is so often lacking in our efforts to follow the will of God. The tendency to constantly look to the future, while failing to trust God in the present moment, keeps many young men out of the seminary—it kept me out for a number of years. We allow our fears to overtake us, to become the driving force in our decision making. Instead, we ought to be driven by the quiet confidence that, should we give ourselves to the ocean waves of grace always washing over us, we can be saints in this moment, enjoying the blessedness of children of God.