About God

"Let me provoke you a bit," he said, as we walked along a stretch of quiet railroad track. "Just follow along with me here." And as we walked he laid out his thoughts like the track we were walking.

It was late summer, and late afternoon. It was quiet, and dry, and fulfilled. I have often thought, and I thought as I watched this old man walking next to me, that when we compare old age to winter we are mistaking the seasons. Winter is far more like stormy, turbulent youth: cold, and wet, and changeable. But these fine, warm days of September, with their weathered colors, and leaves too weary to stand, and dust trailing your footsteps as you walk down a road, these days seem so much more like this old man. Quiet, and mellow, and dry.

"So here is my thought. Time is God. No, better put, God is Time. Nothing but Time."

Ok, I was provoked.

"Well, I suppose so. If God is all things, then God is Time, too."

"No, I mean to say, God is just that. Time."

I waited for more. I wondered uncharitably, if this was merely a way to say that as an old man he was closer to God, as he had more time on his account than I.

"What do we know about God?

"Are you asking me?

"Yes, yes. What do you know about God?

"Well, not much, I suppose. I mean, we guess a lot. People think they have answers, but I don't know if you can say we know God."

"Scientifically, you mean."

"Yeah, scientifically."

"So, you might say we describe God, but we don't know God."

"I guess."

"Now, tell me what you know about Time."

"It's a duration of..." I stopped. I had started confidently, like a swimmer heading into surf, and suddenly realizing I was in over my head. "...time." I finished lamely.

"We measure it, will you agree?" I nodded. "We describe it, that is. We live through it. But do we know what it is?"

I'm sure I looked blank.

"Here is a rock." He picked one up, dusty, rounded, palm-sized. "I suppose when you reduce it to the most basic questions, I don't know nor do I care to speculate why this rock is. I mean, if it is here to do rock things, then perhaps some other creation could serve the same purpose, but we have been given a rock to do rock things. But the fact remains that it is a rock. Here it is. And should anyone wonder what is a rock, it can be demonstrated. But," he paused and looked around. "Where is time?"

"Now. Past, present."

"But what exactly is now?

"It's...it's not yesterday or tomorrow."

"You're describing again."

"So, what's the point?"

"Well, the point is, when we start to discuss it, to wonder about it, we must come to the inescapable conclusion that Time simply is. It has no form or substance, but without it, we could not exist."

"So?"

"So, isn't that the essence of what we call God?

Again, I'm sure I looked blank.

"Let's begin again. Tell me, what are the qualities of God? And let's leave dogma out of this. What concepts of God are universal?"

I pulled a long leaf of grass up, separating it from its mother plant at the base. Sucking the end of the grass, it was sweet and juicy, even this late in the season.

"Ok." Deep breath. "God is eternal. God knows everything. God can do anything."

"Alright. God is eternal. Always was and always will be. What else is Time? What we measure as time - it's two o'clock, say - is just a small way of expressing a portion of eternity. Eternity supposed Time. Without Time, what would 'always' mean?"

"Um hmm."

"All-knowing. This is harder because we are thinking of knowing in a human, sentient way. But we can say that nothing happens outside the scope of Time, and in that way, Time knows everything."

"Ok, but tell me about powerful. Time just is, it doesn't act. It has no force."

"Oh? Time heals all wounds.  It has both the grace and the horror of power. It will pass, and its passage will bring change. And change is both horrible, because we can hold on to nothing, and full of grace, because we must never endure something forever. Unless you believe in Hell, but that is for another day."

"I guess."

"Can you dispute it? Can you control time? Even for a second? Can you make it slow down, or speed up? It is the great leveler, the ultimate judge. No one, no matter how rich or powerful, no matter how strong and fit, no matter how beautiful and charming, on one has ever defeated Time. It thumbs its nose at our petty attempts. You wear a watch, you watch your time. And you haven't slowed it at all, or urged it forward even the tiniest bit faster, for all that you count it and break it down, and watch it ticking away. And what is religious ecstasy really but relief from the passage of time, or perhaps unity with it? To stand outside oneself. Just for a moment, to be relieved of the counting of minutes."

We walked a bit more, and the sun was low on our backs, and warm with the intensity true only of late summer sun, or sitting by a fire: you're not surrounded by warmpth, but seared where you face it.

"But we believe that God created all things."

He nodded.

"Once," he mused, "I asked a physicist about Time and space, about the Universe. He tried to answer me. I told him I could more or less accept no end, just keep putting layers onto the Universe as it moves away from me. But no beginning? I can't fathom no beginning. How does something not begin?

"He told me that it wasn't so much that the Universe doesn't have a beginning. It was just that before the beginning of the Universe, before there was matter, there was no need for Time. And before there was Time, there was nothing for matter to exist in. So Time and Space are, to physicists, one continuous thing, and you can't really think of them as separate. So we can't exist without Time or God, and that's comfortable for many people. But God doesn't exist without us, either. If we are not, is God? Does it matter? So Time, or God, created the Universe, and the Universe created God. Do you see?"

"So what does this all mean? What am I supposed to do about it? Put up a shrine to my Rolex?"

"I once knew a man, he wrote me letters from time to time. He lived in New York City. Once, he wrote me about a little lady, a bag lady he called her, whom he said he saw day after day begging near his apartment building. And after a while, he began to look for her as a part of his routine, so reliable was her panhandling. One day, she was not there in her customary gutter. Nor the next, nor the day after that. After about a week, this man realized that perhaps the bag lady wasn't coming there any more, and he began to worry. He made a few inquiries, and discovered she had become terribly ill, and had been taken to the hospital. He went to visit her there, and realized that she was going to die. He knew, from his brief conversations with her, that she had dreamed of going to Hawaii, where she wouldn't be cold. So he rushed around and arranged to bring her some Hawaiian music, and brought her some pineapple from the store. And, he says, she died happily."

I was beginning to wonder when the rice paper would unroll - I was feeling perilously close to being called Grasshopper and being told to look in my empty hand for the meaning of Life.

"The irony of life is that the only way we value this God Time is in how little of Him we have left. But we can't know that before we run short, because it itself blocks our view."

I was impatient. As we had walked the later afternoon sun had slanted into evening, and slid down the spectrum from yellow to red and now blue. It is the scents that intensify as the light of day wanes; the tangy smell of grass, the gritty odor of earth; or does our sense of smell simply wake up and take over for our eyes as the light fails? Through the afternoon, the flies and buzzing creatures had set up a background to our steady, working thoughts. Now, as the evening approached, the crickets and singing insects began their rhythmic serenade.

"What should I make of all this, though? Am I supposed to do something different? Should your friend have done something different? If what you say is true, there's still nothing I can do to change things. And I can't even ask God to change things. What are you trying to tell me?"

He laughed at that, finding great good humor in my frustration, and I was a bit hurt and put out, since I hadn't intended to be funny.

"I think," he said, when his laughter had subsided, "that I was just telling you to have a nice day."