“How strange that we cannot love time.
It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours?”
— Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy
My life, like most parents, is defined by Time. I look at our bursting wall calendar with slight apprehension. My daughter is only three years old, but her life is filling up with time consuming activities - ballet, swim classes, nature school, riding. I know, I know, live the unscheduled life! It’s a charming mantra among the crunchy crowd (of which I consider myself an occasional member, or at least voyeur).
And we do live much of our life ambling down country lanes, picking wildflowers, watching the fog roll by. The other day my husband spent some thirty minutes with our 19-month old while she studiously studied rocks in the gravel drive, placing them one by one in his hand, while my older daughter and I stood by the pond, waiting for birds to fly overhead. So slow living — I understand, I sympathize, I strive for it.
But the fact that slow living has even become a #hashtag, an admirable Instagram trend, is because of this uncomfortable relationship we have with Time. We just never seem to have enough of it. Strange reality in our modern world, as Martin Luther King Jr. (ages before the smartphone) noted so well:
“You call your thousand material devices labor saving machinery, yet you are forever busy. With the multiplying of your machinery you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have you want more and where ever you are you want to go somewhere else. Your devices are neither time saving nor soul saving machinery.”
— The Three Evils of Society
So all the things meant to save us from drudgery, from time wasting, have instead squeezed our lives ever increasingly into margins. Who has time for watching a sunrise when you could be simultaneously sending an email, checking a text, talking to your kid, walking the dog? There’s so much to do, we need to Get More Time.
And of course, Time is defined by that most uncomfortable and inconvenient realities: That it Ends.
Our lives, and all of Time, Our Universe (by the scientists’ guess), has a stopping point. Death is the greatest and most awful reminder of our temporal reality. And we don’t know what to do with this fact. Unlike my horse, who, when deep in pain and age, sought the gentle hand of our veterinarians needle with shocking clarity and gentle ease, we “rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
It doesn’t feel right. This whole leaving, dying, ending, feels wrong.
A few weeks ago I went to the dentist for a cleaning and some pain in the back of my mouth, pain that was, in reality, very extreme, attacking the nerves in my jaw and my ear and my neck. The misinterpretation of an x-ray led me to the Endodontist for a root canal, but a nerve test and a close look told him the root canal wasn’t necessary at all, the tooth was fine. But there was something wrong. Poking and prying revealed a very inflamed, hidden flap of gum, white and angry and the furrowed brows and gentle hand on my shoulder told me something didn’t look right.
Some quiet backroom phone calls and some photos to my usual dentist were completed and I got out of the chair and sought reassurance. No root canal! (no $2,000 bill - don’t get me on a healthcare rant) - great news! But the crinkle-eyed, kind doctor took a beat — “you may need a biopsy, we’ll see, that shouldn’t be so painful for so long.”
Well the word biopsy will you send you down some scary Google rabbit holes. Mouth cancer is real and can happen even if you don’t smoke, and definitely if you drink (hello, my college lifestyle of yore coming back to haunt me), and also, improbably, awfully, completely randomly, at all ages. So you can be left to mull over that.
I spent a tense car ride thinking about worst case scenarios and I really got to thinking about Time. Of course this would be considered very sad and awful - I’m young! I need more Time! But mostly I thought of my kids and how they can’t, or shouldn’t, be left without a mother. I’m a motherless kid myself, but at least I had one on Earth for twenty-two formative years. That Time was important. It was necessary.
But I realized something in all that thinking which is that I had been freed from the former regrets that would have accompanied such awful news. I suppose before my children I would be frightened for any suffering I would endure, frightened for death itself (which I still would be), but I also would think of the places I hadn’t been, the things I hadn’t seen. My regrets would circle around what-could-have-been and any potential I hadn’t realized.
But truly, in my memento mori thoughts that morning, absolutely none of that occurred to me. What I did think about was the love for my family and the ache of absence. It that way, I had been freed from Time. Because in a deep way, in a real way, I believe that Love roots us in something Eternal — away from the limited can-haves and can-dos of this temporal life.
After all,
“In the end, love wins. It does win. We know it wins. When a person dies, love isn’t turned off like a faucet. It is an amazingly resilient part of us.”
— J.K. Rowling
I’ll spare you the mental back-and-forth saga, but the follow-up dentist appointment was a positive one. The angry mouth ulcer had healed, a full set of x rays was clean and clear, and I was sent home with nothing but a ‘come back in 6 months for a cleaning’ - no biopsy needed.
But of course, all brushes, real, imagined, close or not, with the end of things, is nothing but a reprieve. Lazarus was raised for a Time, but met a different death in some distant (or not distant) future. He was not spared the March. I won’t be either, and neither will you.
It is the one unifier among us all, and yet it divides more than it unites. Because we get a bit frantic about this End. We have mid-life crises and early life-crises and existential holes deep inside. What is this all for? Is Time going too fast, or too Slow? Is that a grey hair, a new wrinkle? Am I really this old? Am I really this young?
I’ve just finished reading the beautiful book A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken. It is simultaneously a love story and a conversion story — Van and Davy are two soul-lovers, instant Platonic halves making a whole, and they seek a way to keep their love in Eternal Spring. It is a Springtime flourishing that surrounds a love of Beauty, Art, and Deep Thinking. It leads them to a dream of a schooner out on the water, free from any concept of Time - no workaday jobs, no children even, to impede on their freedom.
But is not a selfish freedom they seek, but a unifying one, one that will allow them the chance to gaze at moonlight, to stare into sunrises and sunsets, to sit by the pond and think on eternity. And it is this “pagan love” that he calls it, an Apollo worship of Art, that leads them to Oxford, the city of Dreaming Spires, and ultimately to C.S. Lewis (who would become a dear friend), and Christianity.
It is no spoiler to tell you this (you know it from the first page) that Davy dies young and it is this grief, and the longing, loving, and knowing her in death, that brings forth this book. Van’s accompaniment through her final months will bring tears to even the greatest cynic’s eyes. This is truly a love story for the ages. But deep inside this human love is a greater Love, and it is this love of the Eternal that is at the heart of it all. And it was a passage from a letter C.S. Lewis wrote to Van that led me to these early morning musings on Time. Lewis writes:
“Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or wd. not always be, purely aquatic creatures?”
Van goes on to muse —
“Then, if we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? It suggests that we have not always been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity.”
I have always been with Lewis and Tolkien when they surmised that humanity was made most ‘in the image and likeness of God’ in their ability to be ‘sub-creators’ — in our novel writing and our paintings, in our house building and our design, we imitate the Creative impulse of God. Art, Beauty, and Love for what We Make, is what unites us to God. But now I think there is something else (and surely of course, there must be many things unknown). It is perhaps in this Timelessness, this Eternity, that we are most like God.
Thomas Aquinas described God as outside time or eternal: things which are future for us are all immediately present in the simultaneity which is eternity. Eternity includes all of time but is not measured by it; for God there is no future, nor past, but eternal present.
Eternal Present! Isn’t this the Secret Longing of all the #liveinthemoment posts, the desire for Slow Living, a freedom from the hustle, the grind, the grid? Don’t we all want to pause and live in an Eternal Present? Impossible. Our bodies age and the sun rises and sets. But for moments, we perhaps get small glimpses.
Here are some of mine:
A snowy, wild coyote chase on a grey pony named Mystic. I duck my head — the snowballs are flying fast out of the horse’s hooves as we gallop headlong across a field. My nose is running and my cheeks are red and my pony’s ears are pricked. I hardly see the fence through the sheet of snow, but we clear it and I laugh so much and so wildly I can’t see or know where I am, but only that I am.
I am in bed with the windows open — a warm day for early April — and my firstborn daughter is asleep on my chest. I could not tell you the Time. We all know newborns live outside it. My body is tired and aching and milk is everywhere, staining the bed, but this baby is sleeping so soundly against my skin. I watch a mother bird for what seems ages. She is building a nest outside our window. She is building a home here. I wrap my arms around my daughter and think yes, this is a good place for a baby, this is a good place for a family.
It is a full moon - the Pink Moon - and it rises steadily over the fields. I am drawn outside like a moth to a steady flame, and my husband trails behind me. The kids are asleep and we go down the driveway, across the lane, to look over the hills and the pond in the distance. In the quiet, we watch one, two foxes, make their way in the moonlight. We crouch under the pines. A herd of deer arrives, gentle, cautious. I don’t know how long we sit this way, but it seems like we are in a trance when the baby monitor begins to beep and needs a charge and Time is back. But for a moment — it was gone.
I am standing on the dock at St. Marys College of Maryland. The floating dock it is called. You can walk out onto the water and dive right off in the River. I have done this many times — early in the morning, late at night, together, alone. I cannot now remember why I was there, or when, but I know I walked to the edge of the dock and thought that this somehow was a glimpse of Eternity, when the dock ends and pools out into dark water, unknown and beautiful and someday, I will just keep walking off the dock, and it will be totally natural to skim the surface with my toes and seek past what I can see.
I could go on. What gifts. If we have eyes to see them.
“He has put the timeless in their hearts.”
But for now, temporal life resumes. The toddler is babbling, my husband is pulling in from his early run at the trail, dogs need to be fed, barn needs to be done, and a very excited would-be princess needs us to get ready for the Renaissance Festival (somehow to be timed around toddler’s nap, always, always a timing challenge).
I will be grateful for months or years or minutes, because living in Time isn’t all bad — it is the rush of wind and the disappearing of fog in the morning. It is growing children and the Time it takes to learn something new. It is the beginning of the book and the End of it. It is all that happens in between.
Seeking, and knowing, Eternity in the glimpses, the moments, may be our life’s work. Let’s stay awake to them.
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I love this so much. A Severe Mercy was a very meaningful book to me many years ago, and I still treasure it. You brought it back to life for me and raised so many things to ponder. Thank you.
Katie that was truly beautiful & heartfelt! I’m lookin out at my hives-I’ve been enchanted by their coming & goin-how they’ve noticed every flower -felt the warmth of the sun-receiving energy-that eternal wave- a mystery -embracing that gift fully from the flowing field beyond…now there is honey. Like you my heart is full & in awe. Blessings for your encouragement ✨🫶🏻✨