Devotional by Angela Smith
July 27, 1997
A few weeks ago Charles and I took my father to the beach for his 85th birthday. As I gazed out on the broad expanse of sky and sea, smelled the salt air, heard the waves crashing on shore, and felt the gentle Gulf breeze brushing my cheek, I was 12 years old again. Frankie Avalon was singing Venus on my hot pink transistor radio, and my cousins and I were spread out on our Elvis beach towels giggling about boys and reading Archie comic books and movie magazines.
Even though time was moving forward in a cosmic and physical sense, time was moving backward for me in a psychic sense. Isn't it intriguing how time is so intimately bound to place? It's almost as though memories were ghosts chained to their haunts.
The English astronomer Stephen Hawking has suggested that time in this century has become a more personal concept. He means that how time moves depends on where you are and where you are going. It is also a fact that on earth time does not waver, no matter how relative. It moves relentlessly forward. Time flies when you're having fun and when you're not.
This sense of forwardness of time is due to what Hawking calls the thermodynamic arrow. Strange as it may sound, we live in a universe that prefers less rather than more order. There is a constant changing from order to chaos and it is this process that gives time a sense of direction. But there is an exception. We human beings are able to fold time back on itself. We remember and that means the past adheres to the present. To remember, to bring the past into intimate contact with the present, seems to me to be one of the essential powers of human intelligence.
A sense of time, it's push and pull, is part of life. Indeed, to live is to live in time and to act in time. Nothing can be done that does not arise from past experiences and affect further experiences. Everything is woven into the thread of fate. Everything counts.
For that reason, being human is in itself a religious experience. All aspects of human life have the power to sanctify and be sanctified. If we fail to embrace the pains and losses along with the joys and gains we are less human.
The reality of time and history, both the limits and the liberties, must be embraced if we are to make any difference. Only those who dare to remember the past have the power to change the present. Only those who can embrace the past will be able to greet the future
All of us want to find meaning, purpose, direction and substance and we also know these things can be found anywhere. They are like Whitman's letters from God. Every place is littered with holiness. It's up to us to free ourselves from within to receive it.
Sight or sound or smell can open the door to the past. Such moments are precious for the relentless course of time. Returning allows us to gain perspective. When we reflect on where we've been and where we're going, we return to fundamental understandings. We are reconnected to the center which holds us together.
In our brains the past twinkles on, imagined worlds become real. The new does happen. And it came to pass, says the Bible. And from Isaiah: Behold I create new heavens and a new earth. Have you ever wondered how minds made of so much pointless tissue think of such things? We cannot escape time, but time is not our master. Maybe, if we help, time can move toward new heavens and a new earth. Faith and love move us forward. And the other side of memory is hope.