Been There, Done That, Bought the T-shirt

      So do some young people, barely eighteen, sum up their “wide” and “deep” experience of being human.  Adults too, often flippantly, declare the same about themselves.  But have I really been there?  Have I really done so much?  Is, that is, my experience of life on this earth really all that wide and deep?  How much, really, can a single human life, of and by itself, take in of life?  Is the T-shirt enough to hold a memory and secure some wisdom?  Is there much wisdom to be gained from the places so many go and from the things so many do? 

      Sometimes I get the distinct impression that people are just “killing time,” waiting for the next thing.  Events and experiences fly by with little or no attention – certainly, except in rare cases, with no intention toward wisdom – or attention only to the extent of entertainment.  People have become very passive even as they keep declaiming about autonomy and freedom. 

      They wait, wait for the roulette wheel of life to spin in their favor…and they then reap their reward.  (And, as we’ve been so assiduously assured, it’s only fair that it land on my number eventually, and yet most human lives point to the reality that there is no such “justice.”)  Meanwhile, what does one do, as novelist Walker Percy described the ennui, what does one do on those long, weekly Wednesday afternoons, when one has had a miniscule epiphany that the TV soaps and game shows really are boring, and the nightly news is all but irrelevant to one’s particular existence in Peoria or Sarasota? 

      I’ve been privileged far beyond my deserts in having opportunities to live and travel abroad.  The benefit, I believe, comes from being in a foreign place long enough to be close to it so as to get on comfortably and yet remain distant enough to see it more objectively.  This I have learned:  that people for the most part – people tired of repeating Wednesday afternoons, people able and prepared to travel – visit and enjoy those places where the “locals” live most in the present.  Of course, there’s no other place in time in which to really live, and that’s why it’s so attractive, because the past is over, and the future has not happened.  The present is.  Some cultures and societies provide a worldview that better recognizes that fact.  That’s where most of the tourists go, those who are tired of that superbly cyclic device, the treadmill. 

      This is no call, on my part, for that now old and worn-out battle-cry of the worldly, carpe diem {“seize the day”), but rather just the opposite:  the day cannot be seized, grasped, controlled in the human hand; rather, the day, this day, given to us, should be lived as the gift it is, a little taste, now, of eternity.  It is our every moment on this earth of contact with the Eternal.  Then the past seems, and is, so very intimately preparatory to the now, and the future – present moments yet to come – is colored by hope. 

      I confess that I have introduced here a Christian understanding of time.  Nothing else seems to work; nothing else is truly livable.  For if time is only the registry of the movement of sun, earth, moon and stars – marking the cyclic pattern of the heavens, round and round – then it is all rather meaningless.  But what if a star should appear, as predicted according to some wise men’s calculations, but with a message beyond the fact that another cycle has ended or begun?  What if this star, shining over Bethlehem, were to point to the present now pregnant with eternity?  That is, what if time is not merely a measurement of movement in space, but also a pathway (not going in circles) that leads from beginning to end, that time marks the movement of all things from their creation to their consummation – all things, including you and me? 

       That, no less, is the claim of the Christian faith.  And this has amazing implications:  the Christian, yes, like all people grows old (like all things in nature, we are conceived, born and die), but the Christian, as well as the whole universe, is going somewhere.  We are not waiting for the wheel of fortune to finally favor us with something to relieve us from our cyclic boredom; we, rather, have a purpose present at every moment, a pathway, a goal, and so a hope.  Every day of the dawning sun is not merely the repetition of a pattern, but also a sign of that hope, a reminder that the Sun of Justice will one day – the Last Day – arise in the East with healing under His wings.  Our purpose, then, is to live in the light of that day.

      “But is that not simply escapist, futuristic?”  Glad you asked.  No, rather, I think, trusting in some wheel of fortune is escapist, waiting for the next round of distracting entertainment, or staring mindlessly at TV and pretending that this will just all go on and on and on….  The Christian knows better.  Every conscious moment in a human life, in the midst of the changing hours of the day, the changing signs of the seasons, the changing colors of the liturgical seasons, in the midst of the expanding universe or on the occasion of the germination of a seed (“unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die…”) – every such conscious moment is the present touching eternity, pointing to it, and, better, providing an avenue of eternal communications with us, experienced so forcefully in our encounter, if we pay attention, with beauty.  Something from Beyond beckons us.

      So for us the future – the coming passage of time – is the road to glory; and the past, far from being dead, the mere record of the rise and fall of so many human things, is also the record of God’s activity in our world, His work of preparing for and accomplishing our redemption two thousand years ago and the story of that message, the message of Jesus of Nazareth, preserved and still preached now and until the end of time:  that He died and rose again, breaking the cycle of life and death.  And more:  His promise to be with us always, effectively assured us when at one moment there is only bread and wine on the altar and a moment later the Body and Blood of Christ, a foretaste of what is to come, given to us in the present, and the nourishment of that eternality planted in us by God’s grace which will carry us Home.