Msgr. Charles Pope posted this brief reflection on, as it turns out, my birthday. I’d been hoping for some kind of little present from the Lord, and I think this may be it. Msgr. Pope says,

“I have considered the task that God has appointed for the sons of men to be busied about. He has made everything appropriate to its time, and has put the timeless into their hearts, without man’s ever discovering, from beginning to end, the work which God has done (Eccles 3:10-11).

“Somewhere in our hearts is something that the world cannot, and did not give us. It is something that is nowhere evident in the world, and yet, though not perceiving it, we still know it. This passage from Ecclesiastes calls it ‘the timeless.’ We also often refer to it as eternity, or even infinity.”

He goes on to explain the difference between kairos (the “timeless,” or eternity) and chronos. I recall teaching my students about the six points in time of which the indicative mood of the English language permits us to speak. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any other points in time, only that we cannot refer to any other points in language. After all, time is not “real”; it’s something we made up so that we could set our clocks and mark our calendars (and have our birthdays). It’s a necessary and very clever invention of humanity that has allowed us to establish order (however artificial) sufficient for communication, and therefore, for civilization. Without it, there is no order, no communication beyond the very primitive, and consequently, no civilization.

Yet we are all aware that it isn’t really “real.” We all know somewhere in our hearts that that linear bit we call a “chronology of events” signifies nothing. In fact, we know it to be a false reality—we just don’t know how to “say” it. Indeed, without a consciousness of God, we are almost forbidden to speak of it—yet another example of the many limitations on human intelligence that materialistic science has imposed on us. Thus does science fiction come up with such things as “time travel.”

I think it is this consciousness of something inarticulable that accounts for the gnostics’ (both ancient and modern “new-agers”) belief that they have access to “secret” knowledge.  Something common to every person who ever lived they take to be something that sets them apart and makes them superior to believers. This is one of several examples of the fallacy of narcissism, which, rightly understood, is not a character flaw so much as an intellectual one. I remember watching a film called “Eat, Pray, Love,” in which the character played by Julia Roberts discovers God. She’s asked, So who is God? and she answers, “I am.” It’s a clever allusion to God’s words to Moses on Sinai, but it’s more revealing than it is clever, and provides fresh understanding of why those words were forbidden to the Hebrews. Lucky Hebrews; unlucky Julia. The discovery of the Infinite within you doesn’t make you “it.” If you believe it does, as narcissism must, that belief will lead not to unity with God or with others but to utter desolation, for it is its unspeakable Otherness that makes intimacy conceivable. (But that awareness is impossible humility is absent.)

I’m 72 this September 25 on our human calendar. Why has God allowed me to live this long? I must have done a lot in my past that I need to atone for today, for we know that the good die young. We old people know it is his mercy, granting us yet another day, another hour, to get it right, because heaven knows, we’ve certainly messed up so far. I know I’ll try again today, mess up again today, and ask his mercy again tonight, and his forbearance for tomorrow, for that is how we in chronos must speak to kairos, locked as we are into the verb tenses of our own making. What makes this bearable is the knowledge that he too once lived here, where we are, in time. He knows our helplessness, and he knows in the only way we recognize anything as really “known”—via experience. Thus are we able to rely on his mercy, a grace self-denied to the gnostics and others. A non-believing friend once asked, “How can you endure all that Catholic guilt?” to which I replied, “It’s a gift,” an answer I’m sure she misunderstood.

Here is a link To Msgr. Pope’s post on kairos and chronos: http://blog.adw.org/2014/09/god-has-put-the-timeless-in-our-hearts-a-meditation-on-a-saying-from-ecclesiastes/