BETWEEN THE TIMES
We have 18” Koi fish, Mimi and I do. In a large pond, five feet deep, in the garden behind our home. Right now, the pond is dark with ice and the Koi are out of sight, moving very slowly at three beats a minute near the chilly bottom. It’s dark for them and they – can we say - wait? But that would imply they anticipate something for which they are waiting; to eat again, most likely, or see the light of day again and each other. But no, they aren’t waiting so much as enduring, abiding, and reposing in Nature’s fishy rhythm. They’re Koi fish, in the dark about their future.
But topside, with us, it’s so very, very different even though we’re just as cold, at least some of the time. Times for us are three-dimensional – past, present and future. And we’ve got gradations for each dimension. A moment ago, two hours ago, yesterday, last month, last year, college graduation, wedding anniversary, early childhood . You see the complexity of it all. Time for us can be very personal. Secrets. They’re time locked up and only we humans have them. “From whom no secrets are hid”– that doesn’t apply to my friends in the pond!
The same applies to the future for each of us. There’s tomorrow and that list of things to do we’re preparing today, and then there’s spring/summer and happy memories from the past we project, by imagination, into the future. Going back to Nantucket (we should all be so lucky!) again next July. And that, we know, would be six months from now. Time for us humans is extraordinarily rich and complex. And everyday, almost every moment, we are switching and living back and forth among those many complex time dimensions.
State of the Union (now past), my granddaughter’s birthday (near future), Super Bowl Sunday (near future but past by the time you are reading this!) You get the point, I’m sure.
And then there’s what German theologians call Heilsgeschite or Holy Time – God’s fourth or eleventh or infinite dimension interacting with our time. God, we believe, to be beyond and outside of time and all other created dimensions. Eternity, if that’s the word for God’s time, isn’t just a very, very long time. It’s beyond time and inconceivable for humans. And yet we Christians assert, “in the fullness of time, God sent his Son to be born of a woman and to live and die as one of us”. Thus in celebration and thanksgiving for this incomprehensible miracle of the collision and interpenetration of times, we humans have established the “liturgical year”, which is a glory of human adoration for what lies beyond us and before us and beneath us. Epiphany ends. Lent begins. Easter gleams ahead. We await a Between-the-times Rector (an “Interim”) and beyond that time a “new time and a new Rector”. Alleluia!
My dear fishy friends in the pond are simply waiting it out. You are not. You are living it out. Every day. Every hour. Every minute. You and I are enveloped in a mystery that we partially comprehend. And so we celebrate our times and care for the fish and all God’s other creatures.
Fr. Ray
