The Mystery of Time

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.