ECCLESIOLOGICAL ETCHINGS
March 31, 2023
Is anyone else having a hard time believing tomorrow is April 1? This happens often—I wake up one morning and say to myself, “Wow! Where did the month (week, year, decade) go?” There were certain things that needed to be accomplished in March, and unless I stay up all night tonight, they will probably need to wait until April or possibly May.
I am not smart enough to understand all the discussions happening around time and how it is considered a social construct and has no inherent meaning outside of the meaning we give to it in the moment. We need to agree upon certain metrics for determining what time it is and how it is structured to help society move. Of course, as I write those words, I don’t necessarily know that to be true, as I have nothing to which I can compare it—to prove or disprove.
Most scientists would say the universe is 13.7 billion years old and the earth is a little more than 4.5 billion years old. That means the universe existed approximately 9.15 billion years before the earth came into existence, yet the word “year” is a metric of time entirely tied to the earth, as a year is that time it takes for the earth to travel around the sun. Of course, what else would we use?
Some folks probably dropped off this Etching before reaching this paragraph, and that is understandable. Yet I have been pondering the word everlasting lately, and reflecting on the use of it by the poet in Genesis 49, where we read of the blessings of the eternal mountains and the wealth of the everlasting hills. In a time (probably a poor word to choose here) when people thought the earth was a flat disc with a dome over the top, and families thought in terms of many generations, but not even a few million years, what would everlasting or eternal mean? And can mountains, something made of earth, be eternal or everlasting? Even if that is poetry, what is it suggesting? And is the idea of something being eternal or everlasting a social construct? And since the metric we use for time is based on movement, the movement of our planet through space—what happens if everything stops? There is no longer time as we know it, and is that eternal?
I’m not intending to spew nonsense or confuse. What I am pondering is the notion of what it means to speak of God as eternal. Is our definition and God’s definition anywhere even close to the same?
May the questions I have and the exploration of possible answers to those questions be a holy experience, O God. There is so much that I assume may not be what I thought it to be, and so much more than I have ever even thought of pondering. Be my guide through eternity, if something like it even exists. Amen.
