How does a novice dare to speak of time? As I have stated before, it is with immense trepidation that I dare to write about anything. For an incredible explanation of the sanctification of time that we experience through the Church, many have recommended the third chapter of Father Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World. For the beautiful insight that "the present is the moment that touches eternity," I see the Holy Spirit speak through both CS Lewis in chapter 15 of The Screwtape Letters and Metropolitan Anthony Bloom in the chapter of Beginning to Pray on Managing Time. For a timeless study of human nature in general, and specifically on our (mis)perception of time, I am blown away by book 11 of The Confessions of St. Augustine, where much of this contemplation is drawn from. Having properly tried to deflect you to multiple other sources, I will try to here conform to St. Augustine's exhortation to "increase and multiply" our understanding of our created world, by reinterpreting current scientific knowledge in the Light of God.
Before getting into the spiritual interpretation, I must first catch up the non-nerds on a few scientific concepts that will be relevant to our discussion here:
1) Time is relative. If person A is moving more quickly than person B, then time will move more quickly for person B than for person A. This was first theorized by Einstein in a thought experiment where he imagined himself traveling alongside a beam of light and concluded that, if the speed of light is constant for any observer, then time must be relative. This video is an excellent explanation of why reference frame is so important, and I encourage you to watch it before moving any further along. If you already knew this "simple stuff" and want something else to blow your mind and make you question our perception of time and space, then you can check this video out instead.
2) Mass and energy are the same thing. One of the most famous equations in the history of science is E=mc2, in which E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light. This interchangeable nature of mass and energy is seen in the resurrected Christ, Who is a flash of light imprinted on the Shroud of Turin when He exits the tomb, and reconstitutes himself into a physical presence that is not only touched by the disciples but is even able to eat in their presence (Luke 24; John 20).
Fifteen hundred years before Einstein's scientific theory of relativity, St. Augustine philosophically mused that "we measure the passage of time when we measure the intervals of perception." Wisdom is again justified by her children, science and philosophy, both teaching us that time is an example where "perception is reality" and the frame of reference of the observer determines not just how time is perceived but determines the actual, real passage of time. Again, I cannot stress enough the importance of spending even a little bit of time allowing your mind to be blown by the experimentally verified scientific reality that time moves more slowly for objects that move more quickly. If we accept that time is dependent on your frame of reference, then we can see time differently if we understand that a spiritual reference frame will have a very different perception of time from a physical reference frame. I deliberately use spiritual vs. physical and not God vs. man because 1) when God was incarnate as the person of Jesus Christ, He submitted himself to the constraints of time and space as any human, and 2) man is not just body but also soul and spirit, and if we are led by the Holy Spirit we can partake of the divine nature and perhaps see with our spiritual eyes how God sees time.
How then does God see time? We turn here to St. Augustine and without adding or taking away I will try my best to summarize two key points he makes in book 11 of The Confessions:
1) Time is an illusion and the only reality is the present. The past is not real because it only exists as a memory. The future is not real because it only exists as an expectation. Therefore, instead of thinking of time as "past, present and future" we should consider the alternate interpretation of "three tenses or times: the present of past things, the present of present things, and the present of future things."
2) Even the present does not really exist because it is undefinable. He explains this by dividing a year, into a month, into a day, into a second, into a fraction of a second, and finally into an indivisible, infinitely small unit of time, which we can then label "the present." Unfortunately, "even this flies by from the future into the past with such haste that it seems to last no time at all." Therefore, even the present is a fleeting illusion.
How can we then see we with our spiritual eyes the Eternal Present, with which God sees all of history? It is not by ignoring the past and the future because they are both part of this Eternal Present. It is not by denying the fact that we are not just spiritual beings but also physical beings that are constrained, for now, by the limits of space and time. This is precisely why the sanctification of time by our life in the Church is so important because "if Christianity were a purely 'spiritual' and eschatological faith there would have been no need for a [Church calendar]*, because mysticism has no interest in time" (Schmemann). By His Incarnation, God has blessed time and allowed us to participate in His Eternal Present through the anamnesis of our experience of God in the Church. Putting this together with Einstein's relativity of time, we can see that anamnesis makes it possible that the spiritual frame of reference and physical frame of reference are both valid interpretations because they have different observers. For example, the Eucharist is timeless from a spiritual frame of reference and a discrete event from a physical frame of reference.
The real life implications of how we perceive time are not trivial. While the physical frame of reference may be "real and valid" it is not necessarily beneficial to us. It traps us into a purely physical existence that ignores our needs as partially spiritual beings. A misconception of time may lead to depression/anxiety, false notions about prayer, confusion about free will, and other time sensitive theological and christian anthropological subjects. So what is the solution? As much as possible, we must try to live in His Eternal Kingdom while we are still here on earth. Once again, this is where the anamnesis of the Church experience is invaluable. Ultimately, what we are truly seeking is to "become human" and fulfill God's desire to create us in His image and likeness. To tie in the equivalence of mass and energy, we can now contemplate on the fact that the resurrected Christ was not physically constrained as He was prior to the crucifixion, and we can do a thought experiment as Einstein did with the beam of light. What if we followed Christ around as He left the tomb and joined the disciples on the road to Emmaus. When He was "pure energy" and "purely spiritual," what was His perception of time? When He reconstituted his mass to be physically present with the disciples, did his perception of time change? The more we can comprehend of this mystery, the more we are able to live in the present physical world, while knowing there is a deeper, more meaningful spiritual existence that we were created to discover. Without extracting ourselves from the physical, linear, discrete, event-dependent perception of time, we can appreciate the spiritual, eternal, incorporeal, Divine perception of time.
Two major criticisms I often get when tying physics into spirituality, are 1) who cares?, and 2) are you trying to explain God with science? I answer the first criticism with "sorry, it's ok, don't worry about it, this is much less important than the Presence of Christ on the altar." I answer the second criticism with St. Augustine's apophatic encouragement to perpetually try to increase our knowledge of God: "Quaeramus inveniendum, quaeramus inventum. Let us seek him till we have found him; and still seek him when we have found him." Clearly there is more to God than we will ever be able to grasp. I am not trying to intellectualize our Faith, but rather appreciate the beauty of His creation and in some small way try to see it through His eyes. May God help us to see time how He sees it so that we may continue live in the mystery of His Eternal Present.
* I have taken here Father Alexander Schmemann's discussion of Sunday as the day of the lord and substituted the exact text of "fixed day" with "Church calendar" to extrapolate the same logic to the sanctification of any day by the Church.
Friday, November 27, 2015
Thursday, November 12, 2015
You Can't Change the World
"I can't believe you said that. It's so defeatist. What are you going to do, just hide under your bed?"
Ok, now that we got that out of the way, let's all take a deep breath. And #sorrynotsorry but I mean it, sincerely, you can't change the world. One of the paradoxes of Christianity is that we are called on to change the world without expecting it to change. Christ Himself promised us that the world would not accept us, just as it did not accept Him (John 15:18-21), which kind of makes no sense when He later tells us to "be of good cheer" because He "has overcome the world" (John 16:33). What gives?
Before we even talk about changing the world, let us first admit that we can't even change ourselves. The person in the world that you have the most control over is yourself, and if you are anything like me, it is just as hard (if not harder) to change yourself as it is to change anyone else around you. Think about it. Even St. Paul himself struggled with this problem in Romans 7, where his confession comforts me in my burden that I am not the only one who feels like a captive to Sin. Against my will, I find myself to be falling short of a standard. This feeling of perpetual imperfection is normal, but the key is that we must have the self-awareness to readily confess that the power to change comes not from the self but from God, the physician of our souls.
So then let me get this straight. You can't fix yourself, but you want to change the world? Why? How? As the metaphoric athletes spoken of by St. Paul, we are exhorted to worry more about ourselves than our preaching, lest we become disqualified (1 Corinthians 9:27). If I were the one on the cross and the chief priests mocked me and said "he saved others, himself he cannot save," they would be completely correct (Matthew 27:42). Why do I say that? Because my response to the cross is not the same as Christ's. He stayed on the cross and saved us by accepting His call to suffer.
If the injustice we see around us is the suffering, if that is our cross, then how do we respond to that injustice? Do we respond as Christ did? Do we stay on the cross? Do we stick it out and witness to the Truth? Or, rather, do we see the cross as an affront to our ego? Do we see the humiliation of our failures as servants as something that we cannot accept? I feel like sometimes I decide that "enough is enough and this needs to get better," so I get down from the cross to save the world. Is that what Christ did?
If anyone reading this knows me, they are thinking to themselves "what a hypocrite!" Yes, I am a hypocrite and much worse. I get down from my cross on a daily basis. I can't take the suffering. I can't take the tension. I want it gone. I want it to go away. I'm tired. I want things to get better so we can all take a break. Christ felt the same way. He felt the same stress. He felt the same temptation to escape. The difference is that He stayed on the cross. He endured the shame and the suffering, not just as an atonement but as an example. May God help us to keep our eyes on His cross, that He may help us do our best not to get down from our cross, and change the world.
Ok, now that we got that out of the way, let's all take a deep breath. And #sorrynotsorry but I mean it, sincerely, you can't change the world. One of the paradoxes of Christianity is that we are called on to change the world without expecting it to change. Christ Himself promised us that the world would not accept us, just as it did not accept Him (John 15:18-21), which kind of makes no sense when He later tells us to "be of good cheer" because He "has overcome the world" (John 16:33). What gives?
Before we even talk about changing the world, let us first admit that we can't even change ourselves. The person in the world that you have the most control over is yourself, and if you are anything like me, it is just as hard (if not harder) to change yourself as it is to change anyone else around you. Think about it. Even St. Paul himself struggled with this problem in Romans 7, where his confession comforts me in my burden that I am not the only one who feels like a captive to Sin. Against my will, I find myself to be falling short of a standard. This feeling of perpetual imperfection is normal, but the key is that we must have the self-awareness to readily confess that the power to change comes not from the self but from God, the physician of our souls.
So then let me get this straight. You can't fix yourself, but you want to change the world? Why? How? As the metaphoric athletes spoken of by St. Paul, we are exhorted to worry more about ourselves than our preaching, lest we become disqualified (1 Corinthians 9:27). If I were the one on the cross and the chief priests mocked me and said "he saved others, himself he cannot save," they would be completely correct (Matthew 27:42). Why do I say that? Because my response to the cross is not the same as Christ's. He stayed on the cross and saved us by accepting His call to suffer.
If the injustice we see around us is the suffering, if that is our cross, then how do we respond to that injustice? Do we respond as Christ did? Do we stay on the cross? Do we stick it out and witness to the Truth? Or, rather, do we see the cross as an affront to our ego? Do we see the humiliation of our failures as servants as something that we cannot accept? I feel like sometimes I decide that "enough is enough and this needs to get better," so I get down from the cross to save the world. Is that what Christ did?
If anyone reading this knows me, they are thinking to themselves "what a hypocrite!" Yes, I am a hypocrite and much worse. I get down from my cross on a daily basis. I can't take the suffering. I can't take the tension. I want it gone. I want it to go away. I'm tired. I want things to get better so we can all take a break. Christ felt the same way. He felt the same stress. He felt the same temptation to escape. The difference is that He stayed on the cross. He endured the shame and the suffering, not just as an atonement but as an example. May God help us to keep our eyes on His cross, that He may help us do our best not to get down from our cross, and change the world.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
Personhood and Free Will
What is our interpretation of the human person? Are we just a body? If so, then books like The Illusion of Conscious Will make perfect sense in explaining the world around us and our consciousness in deterministic terms, using physical and biological processes as the explanation for everything, making free will an illusion.
As a thought experiment, let us ask that, if we are just a body and we could "make a human" with a 3D atomic printer - is that a product considered a person?
YES ABSOLUTELY! For someone who believes that the universe is fundamentally a physical place with no such thing as a spiritual world, then I would understand completely if they said "yes, that is a person made up of the same atoms as you and me and is, therefore, a person." In that case, the reductionism of the person to their physical and biological processes makes perfect sense. In that case, free will is on shaky ground because if everything is a physical process then there is some credibility to the idea that "I know your brain, so I know you." The advent of biological processes being subject to the uncertainty paradigms of quantum physics will call much of this physical determinism into question even within the purely scientific realm.
I DON'T KNOW, MAYBE? The next layer is someone who doesn't believe in God but believes, for any reason, that there is something "more" to the universe than the four dimensions of space and time. They may believe in "a spiritual interpretation of string theory," they may believe in non-physical human elements, they may believe that they are "not religious but spiritual," or any other belief that questions the premise that "if you know the physical state of a brain then you know the brain." For this person, who doesn't necessarily ascribe to Christian anthropology, it would still not make sense that just by knowing where all the atoms are in my brain right now, you could theoretically tell me what I will choose to do tomorrow.
ONLY GOD KNOWS - Our opinion should be framed by a Christian anthropological world view that teaches us that the person is made up of not just a body, but also a soul and the spirit. Without getting into the far-reaching implications of this definition of personhood, we can just say here that a human body printed on a 3D printer needs to be more than just a body to be a person. The obvious next question is - "well, does that printed body get a soul and spirit from God?" This is a similar question to "if we clone a human, are they a person?" In both cases, it is beyond the scope of my understanding, but I welcome your thoughts in the comments section, below.
The conclusion I want to make is that our anthropology will have a direct effect on our interpretation of free will. If we see a person as just a physical body, then free will is questionable. If we see a person as an image of God, then free will is an essential part of our nature as physical, emotional and spiritual beings.
As a thought experiment, let us ask that, if we are just a body and we could "make a human" with a 3D atomic printer - is that a product considered a person?
YES ABSOLUTELY! For someone who believes that the universe is fundamentally a physical place with no such thing as a spiritual world, then I would understand completely if they said "yes, that is a person made up of the same atoms as you and me and is, therefore, a person." In that case, the reductionism of the person to their physical and biological processes makes perfect sense. In that case, free will is on shaky ground because if everything is a physical process then there is some credibility to the idea that "I know your brain, so I know you." The advent of biological processes being subject to the uncertainty paradigms of quantum physics will call much of this physical determinism into question even within the purely scientific realm.
I DON'T KNOW, MAYBE? The next layer is someone who doesn't believe in God but believes, for any reason, that there is something "more" to the universe than the four dimensions of space and time. They may believe in "a spiritual interpretation of string theory," they may believe in non-physical human elements, they may believe that they are "not religious but spiritual," or any other belief that questions the premise that "if you know the physical state of a brain then you know the brain." For this person, who doesn't necessarily ascribe to Christian anthropology, it would still not make sense that just by knowing where all the atoms are in my brain right now, you could theoretically tell me what I will choose to do tomorrow.
ONLY GOD KNOWS - Our opinion should be framed by a Christian anthropological world view that teaches us that the person is made up of not just a body, but also a soul and the spirit. Without getting into the far-reaching implications of this definition of personhood, we can just say here that a human body printed on a 3D printer needs to be more than just a body to be a person. The obvious next question is - "well, does that printed body get a soul and spirit from God?" This is a similar question to "if we clone a human, are they a person?" In both cases, it is beyond the scope of my understanding, but I welcome your thoughts in the comments section, below.
The conclusion I want to make is that our anthropology will have a direct effect on our interpretation of free will. If we see a person as just a physical body, then free will is questionable. If we see a person as an image of God, then free will is an essential part of our nature as physical, emotional and spiritual beings.
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