Time After Time
How did it get so late so soon?
-Dr. Seuss, poem
Summertime is finally here, when spring has fulfilled its mission, butterflies fill fragrant gardens in full bloom, and we get to pass time in the warmth of the sun. This month Katie writes about how it is that time measures the moments of our lives. We hope you find yourselves enjoying all the wonder that summer has to offer.
Collecting Miracle Moments One Story at a Time.
Joan and Katie
P.S. Thank you to Georgetown University for a lively conversation with Flannery O'Connor scholar and VP Fr. Mark Bosco S.J. a few weeks ago.
Einstein said that time is an illusion. I’ll have to take his genius word for it since he discovered time's most alluring quality in a dimension I can only imagine. And, yet, it does not seem like an illusion to us; we live by time here on earth, in the 3 dimensions we can see and feel. Time is our most precious commodity whether we recognize it or not as we go through our days. It dictates constant choice-making in how to spend our time and who to spend it with, including time for ourselves to simply BE. Making time is an art – to listen without hurry, to show up and be fully present, to do it right. Time is predictable and rhythmic, so we can literally count on it - except time waits for no one, and eventually runs out. Which makes time a gift, every second of every minute of every day.
We heard a story from one of the radio hosts who interviewed us about an experience he had at a particular low point in his life. He was driving down the freeway, unaware the radio was even on, when he sent up a prayer for help. All of a sudden it was like someone took earplugs out of his ears and he noticed the song playing on the radio, the chorus from Cindi Lauper’s, Time After Time: “If you’re lost you can look and you will find me, time after time. If you fall I will catch you, I will be waiting, time after time.” It seems God has mastered the illusion of time to make his or her presence felt in what we call miracles. At least, this radio host saw it that way.
C. S. Lewis thought God existed in an Eternal Now outside of what we know of as Time. This makes sense to me since the concept of the Divine must be beyond our ability to comprehend, even further outside of our ability to conceive of Einstein’s relative nature of time. The great meditation gurus say that the most important, perhaps the only, point in time is now, the present moment. Me, typing this sentence. You, reading it. Life condensed to a singular moment experienced only in the Now but eventually comprising the whole of one’s life. It takes practice and focus to live your life this way. Life becomes simply a rolling over of the present, which, ironically, makes time disappear.
Perhaps the Dalai Lama has mastered actually living life this way, but most of us, myself included, struggle to live in the moment. What I have mastered is a recognition of the importance of the gift of time and that miracles are found in the moments, if we can learn not to let them pass us by. (Katie)