Time, Eternity, and the Sacraments

Is there a transcending truth, a timeless truth, a singular moment, that unites a human’s day to day experiences? When we feel lost and uncertain, is it not because of the movement of time? It blinds us. Eternity is but a single moment. If this moment right now stood still it would be a single, eternal moment. Well, the moment does not stand still. But in each moment cannot we experience glimpses of eternity by means of that truth that transcends the immediate? If each moment was single and lost there would be no truth, no meaning, because one moment constantly replaces the other and no moment stands still. But the single moments are not lost but connected.

Humans, unable to hold still the moment, seek truth according to the continuity of passing moments. Each moment in and of itself hardly yields truth, but we glimpse truth by means of the continuous experiences of common truth that seem to transcend the individual moment. As St. Augustine argued, present awareness combined with recollection of the past and anticipation of the future, directed toward those experiences that we find meaningful, is the basis for the truth that we experience. So the continuity of moment by moment experience is a means to sense transcendent truths. The past present future continuum is a route we have to know God, for continuity shows us that each moment is not meaningless, indeed each moment provides a glimpse of the one moment in which God exists, which is still. The path to knowledge and truth is through our trying to figure out the continuity of fleeting moments. In this pursuit the Church is essential.

Death is the point of rest, being still, non-movement, which is so foreign to us constantly in movement, that it is terrifying. If I feel love, moment by moment, and it freezes, then I would feel unchanging Love; if I feel life, moment by moment, and it freezes (death), then I will feel Life. Jesus died for our sins by living in time, which is the same as sin, then He died, died to sin. The single moment (God) became a series of moments (Incarnation—Jesus) then returned to the single moment on the Cross. Likewise humans come from the single moment that we don’t recall and will go to a single moment we can’t anticipate. Jesus the Logos is our guide. The Virgin Birth means untouched by time; Mary’s womb untouched by time; for pleasure exists in time. Mary’s womb is a timeless, singular moment. God exists in the womb as a single moment then becomes flesh, becomes time. In the Resurrection, Jesus was flesh but He did not experience time the way we do who are still living. Jesus was dead, yet living. He allowed humans to see His death, allowed humans to see Him in the singular moment when time was no longer experienced.

Christ’s experience of time is eschatological and existential:

Eschatological: Jesus as mediator between God the singular moment and the inexorable movement of human existence. Time is a universal phenomenon. Jesus is the promise and fulfillment of time. The incarnation is the central moment in time. Salvation occurs in the future; sin in the past.

Existential view: time as a personal phenomenon. The Incarnation applies to each person. Jesus mediates the divine with each person’s personal teleology of birth, life, death. Salvation occurs in the present moment. One’s destiny is connected to overall human destiny. Human will is determined by time.

Jesus bridges the eschatological and the existential as follows: Jesus dies for our sins. It is a sacrifice for us. He conquers death. He dies as a sacrifice to the past. The past dominates us; it represents sin, the limitations of the body, time. How do we know that we sin save for the past? Sin is part and parcel to the body and time. When Jesus dies for our sins He conquers ignorance, time, the body, sin, and the past. On the one hand He fulfills history, the promise of the past, prophecy. On the other hand by experiencing time and the body and sin He confronts the past, His own past and the human past. His struggles to fulfill His destiny are based on the anticipation of the future by means of the contemplation of the past of Himself. He accepts the past (His destiny) and is released from uncertainty and fear—His is a perfect sacrifice to all that is human. Jesus is also, at the same time, “I am.” He is a transcendent being; He existed in the beginning and knows. He is the truth in that He encompasses the inquiries of all individual knowers. Such inquiries are historical inquiries, attempts to reconcile self with time and eternity, that is, the past (self) with time and eternity. If Jesus is throughout all lives, if He is in all times, then He transcends time, the past. The past doesn’t overwhelm or dominate Him because He is content with the present—He is. He sums the scattered moments that represent time, the past; He sums all pasts as the son of man, the son of time, the son of history. He is the offspring of time, human actions, human history. He is human history because He encompasses the entire human experience. The past comes to a head, is summoned, in His life. In dying He dies for the sum of human pasts; in living again He shows that the human past can be overcome and that the eternal present, and the escape from the ignorance and limitations of the past, can be accomplished. Each human is plagued by his past, it dominates and overwhelms his present, because no one is ever sure, ever comfortable, with the countless choices one has made amid the infinite choices possible. A person makes a choice in time in anticipation of the future, then the future becomes the present and the burden of the choice becomes apparent. A person made the choice out of ignorance (ignorance of the future, its consequences), and has to live with the choice.

But Jesus is the “I am,” meaning He sees all infinite possibilities in the present based on memory and anticipation. By encompassing our pasts and visualizing our futures in the constant unending moments, he becomes each person, as the son of man, transcending time. To accept Christ is to accept our past, accept the choices amid the infinite, and know that it was and is and will be best. Yes living in time means I am ignorant, uncertain, and guilty, but Jesus transcends all these experiences, uncertainties, guilt. My actions are my own, my will is free, but by accepting my past, accepting the Son of Man, I find redemption and am freed from the burden of the past. Jesus himself accepted His past and transcended it. So too can we.

Christ allows each person to say, “I am.” All human experience comes to a head in each person—all the good and bad. In each and every moment I have the opportunity to transcend it all, to know what is right and true. And this is by accepting time and Christ. By accepting, I accept the past of all humankind, I accept time, I accept sin, I accept ignorance. By begging for forgiveness collectively we accept and break from the burden of guilt, personal as well as collective guilt. To accept is to stop resisting. To stop replaying in one’s mind, to simply accept that I am. I simply exist, and this is enough. To experience being in the singular moment is to simply be, to transcend the burden of the past and future, hence to transcend time. To accept is to simply be. To accept is to find the truth at each moment—to experience the singularity that Jesus represents.

Infinity represents the limits of the imagination, reality greater than which cannot be conceived as Anselm said. In each moment there are infinite possibilities, infinite relationships. Life is countless people each with an infinite number of potential experiences all interacting and being experienced simultaneously. God in a single moment is able to peruse the whole of experience, the infinite plethora of human experience. God’s perusal is empathetic; God feels all of these human experiences. This is the role of the Son of Man. Empathy in the singular moment connects with transcendence of human experience. When Mary pondered in her heart she experienced this empathetic transcendence, feeling and sensing the manifold experiences that her child would enjoy and endure over His life. This empathetic transcendence occurs in a single moment of awareness. In this single moment of experience is the entrance to the transcendent truth that is God, as Caussade argued. Isolated human experiences combine into a whole (symbolized by the Son of Man), a united human experience that transcends the individual moment.

The Sacraments are the means by which we can experience the timeless even as we are living in time. Baptism is to be washed in an eternal moment like we experienced in the eternal moment when God created us in the womb. The Eucharist, the body and blood, is to experience the timeless in time, over and over. Christ the singular moment is present to us—a single, transcending act. Marriage of one person to another is in time for all eternity. Reconciliation in a moment in time unites us to the timeless God and His forgiveness. The Church is the Body of Christ in that it, too, represents the single moment, transcending time by means of the Magisterium, a single institution of varied moments tied together in a seamless continuity, the closest experience we have in this life to death and the eternal moment.