Often when I wake up on a morning of early January, and it’s completely dark outside, and sunrise is still getting later even though the days have started to grow longer again, I find myself wishing for spring and the lighter mornings. And then catch myself, and realize how foolish it is to wish my life away like this. Of my three score years and ten (or possibly fourscore), most will not come again, and how much better it would be to savour every minute, every hour and every day of what remains, instead of wanting to jump over the weeks of winter that still lie ahead.
Yet we all do things like this, don’t we? It can be so hard to sit comfortably in the present moment we actually inhabit, so easy to hanker for the future, or to wish for the return of some golden past.
Another New Year’s Day invites us to think about time passing, and how we experience this inevitable aspect of being human. New Year is traditionally an excuse for thinking back on the past year’s events, maybe with thanksgiving for good things, regret for lost opportunities, relief that some things are now behind us for ever. 2008 has left some difficult and painful legacies, whose outworkings will remain with us for many months if not years to come. So as we look forward to the future, it may be not only with excitement and eager expectation of happiness to come, but also with trepidation about the things that are unknown, and fear of what we imagine is all too likely.
How would it be, I wonder, if we all tried to savour the present moment a bit more? Isn’t this what Jesus was teaching his disciples to do, when he told them not to worry about tomorrow, but simply to enjoy the good things God had provided for them, just as he provides for the birds or the wild flowers? The reason he told them to do this, is that by living more consciously in the present moment, we approach most nearly to the nature and presence of God.
God is not in time, but in eternity. All time is present to him, there is no past or future, just the eternal Now. And though it is far beyond our powers to imagine it, this is the existence for which God destines us. He has created us and placed us in a time-bound universe, but only to provide the essential environment to prepare us for the next stage of our development, which is eternal life. We could think of it as being something like the life cycle of a caterpillar, which has to crawl along the ground and eat leaves, and then slumber in a dark chrysalis, before emerging at last into the new, colourful, airborne life of the butterfly.
We human beings are a kind of amphibian, as C. S. Lewis has put it, living in two worlds at once. We have a very material existence, with an earthbound body prone to sickness, death, and all the accidents of a world of natural laws. But we also have a spiritual existence, in which we are able to respond to beauty, goodness, and the realm of God. We live in time, and die in time; yet we also have a sense of the eternal, a longing for something more. The writer of Ecclesiastes says: “God has set eternity in the human heart,” almost as if it were a pledge, or maybe a lure, to draw us on to the life that God really intends for us. Because we are made for eternity, the things of time can never fully or permanently satisfy, and many people have seen this as one of the most compelling evidences of the truth of Christianity.
A new calendar year is just a milestone along the march of time. But if we reflect carefully about what it means, it may perhaps open our hearts and minds to receive the eternal truth that God wants us to know.
Published in the Marston Times, January 2009