During the only slow
bit in the Thursford Christmas show (the raffle, for those like us, who didn’t have
tickets) I was thinking about how, in astronomy, when we look at something very
far away, we’re seeing it as it was in the past, not as it is now - like we
would if there was a distant mirror suspended in space. And I was thinking
about my mum being born 80 years ago, in 1945, and how, if a giant planet-sized
mirror orbiting a star roughly 40 light-years from Earth (because light has to
go there and back) existed, I could see her on her day of birth (light too
faint, interstellar dust, etc, might be a problem, but let’s pretend we’ve
solved that issue).
Now, if you think about it, that kind of conceptualisation can act as an analogy for how we temporal physical beings interface with our eternal, timeless God. So, we know from relativity that the universe can be thought of as a four-dimensional spacetime “block”. In that model, all events - past, present, and future - co-exist within a single geometric structure. From within time, we experience periods of it: “now,” “before,” and “after”. But from outside, for God, every moment simply is.
But here’s another fascinating thing, and I think you might know what I mean here; I fancy that our consciousness is a bit like a mirror that reflects the entire block at once, sensing every moment as equally present, equally real, equally vivid, but yet at every moment locked in the present ‘now’ we call the self. Through the mirror, there is a sense in which tomorrow is not really “later” and yesterday is not really “gone.” All of it - the whole history of the universe - is immediately present in the sense that we are made in God’s image and seeped in the Divine plan, like a vast landscape seen in a single glance, where we are always eyeing our past, our present and our potential, and always deeply connected and integrated in the grand narrative.
Because if we pay close attention, we can sense that in being conscious there are always glimmers of the same timeless light that holds all things together, yet always at the same time reflecting hints and yearnings of how much more we can yet become. Because we are beings of sequence who sense eternity, and fragments who are always tapping into the whole; every past, present and future thought, deed, hope, regret, mistake, act of love, and so forth is a small reflection of that greater life in which all our moments are already complete in God’s cosmic narrative.
Perhaps we can consider a symphony to further illustrate. When we listen to it, the music unfolds in time - note after note, movement after movement. The beauty exists through succession: beginnings, climaxes, resolutions, and what have you. That is a bit like how we experience our own lives - as a melody played out moment by moment. But….now imagine the symphony not as sound but as a standing wave - a single vibration that contains within its structure all the frequencies, harmonics, and resonances that the symphony would otherwise express through time. From within the music, we would hear the passing of notes; from outside it, an external cosmic mathematician could see the entire waveform at once - the total pattern of the piece existing simultaneously. That’s the difference between the human, temporal view and the Divine, eternal one. Life for us is living through the music, where God is the whole symphony, perfectly complete, with no need for sequence.