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A Speculation on Incarnation

23/12/2012

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What would it be like for a person who has lived in Eternity to step into Time?

The Christmas story is about exactly that.  The Incarnation – God becoming Man. Or, to be precise, God becoming Baby!  And perhaps that’s the only way it could happen.  Maybe the only way in which Jesus could really be amongst us was by starting from scratch, and abandoning everything but the very faintest scrap of personhood, and experiencing birth and growth and change within Time.

Of course, this is all ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’.  We who live in time can have no true concept of eternity.  But we can speculate, and wonder. 

Since I am at heart a story maker, my speculations naturally tend towards that form.  As with the following short piece, an extract from a story not yet written, in which I wonder what it might be like for an Eternal being to come into Time.



THE VISITOR FROM BEYOND


He looked around him with a sort of bemused curiosity.  A seemingly ordinary man, but with a sense of remoteness about him.  He touched things, hesitantly, as if not quite sure what touching was.  The clock in particularly fascinated him.  He stared at it for a while, tracking the second hand’s rotation, before turning to me.

“Is that what time is to you?” he asked.

I shrugged.  “It’s how we measure time, that’s all.  I don’t suppose you have clocks where you come from?”

He smiled.  “We don’t have time.  There’s no progression of moment to moment.  A clock would be pointless – it would have nothing to measure.”

“It must be difficult for you to understand, then.”

“Oh, I can understand time.  The theory of it, at any rate.  The problem is in relating to it.  Living in it!  That’s not easy at all.  In fact, it’s only been successfully done once before, and he came into it by a different route.  He had to be born into the world to be part of it – and even then it was difficult.”

“But you’ve chosen a more direct route, I see!”   

“Of necessity, I’m afraid.  And only briefly.”  He paused, frowning.  “That is the right word, I think.  But it’s such a strange thing to say…  the fact is,  I shouldn’t really be here at all.”

“Why not?  Is it forbidden?”

“No.  There isn’t any ‘forbidden’ there.  It’s not like that.  It’s just that there are consequences.  My being here has effects that can’t be controlled.”  He shook his head.  “No, that’s not quite right.  It’s so hard to squeeze meaning into your concepts.” He shrugged.  “Let’s just say that it could cause problems.  And don’t ask me what, because I can’t explain.”

“But you understand these things?”

“Everyone understands, outside.  When you go there – it’s like you expand.  Everything about you expands.  And you understand.  No – it’s more like you see.” 

“You see things more clearly?”

“Not more clearly.  Not even see, really.  You are just in touch with reality.  You don’t have to question or discuss or speculate or experiment or debate or guess.  When the essential ‘you’ slips free of time and space, then ‘what is’ – well, its just there.”

“Is that heaven, then?  When you expand into everything?”

He considered the question for a moment, then smiled.  “Yes, I suppose it is.  At least, the word ‘Heaven’ points towards something like it.  But the best picture you can have of heaven is so far from the reality that it distorts as much as it shows.  The problem is, it simply can’t be explained.  Oh, it’s so limiting, being restricted to time!  So frustrating!  I don’t know how he stood it for thirty years!”

“Just a minute though… if Heaven is expanding your self infinitely, is there a Hell?  Is it a failure to expand?”

He gave me a very sober look.  “Not really.”

“What then?”

“Well…  For your self to be expanded, there has to be an infinity / eternity to expand in.  And that – medium, if you like – that is God.  Outside of this little bubble of time-space you call the Universe, there is only God.”

“So...?”

“For those personhoods who have rejected God, who refuse to reconcile to Him – there is nowhere to expand into.  There is nowhere to become themselves.”

He stopped abruptly, held up his hands.  “Sorry.  I shouldn’t be going down that route.  I – it’s difficult to remember how to think linearly, how to prioritise – but I must confine myself.  Stick to the point.  The disruptions caused by my entry into time must be minimized, must be limited by interacting with the smallest possible time-frame.”

I raised an eyebrow.  “So you don’t have long, then?”

He smiled.  “I have eternity.  I just don’t have it here!”

“OK.  So – why are you here?  What’s worth all the disruption?”

“A problem has arisen.  In Time.  Or perhaps I should say, with Time.”

“What sort of problem?”

“It’s not a ‘what’.”  He stepped closer, and looked at me very intently.  “It’s a who.  You.  I’m afraid that you are the problem.”

To be continued – sometime.

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And a very happy Incarnation Celebration Period to you all!

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Time the Tyrant.

19/12/2012

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One of the harshest and most inescapable aspects of reality is time.

Last time I was back in the family home, where Mum and Dad still live, I wandered into to study, browsing through Dad’s extensive book collection.

I took a bit of time to look at their wedding photographs.  I’ve seen them before, of course.  My favourite is the one that has been set into an old clock face.

They both look very young.  He’s tall, thin faced – a bit skinny overall, perhaps.  His smile looks a bit self conscious, but very genuine.  Proud of the moment, of his new wife, but perhaps a touch embarrassed, perhaps a little nervous.

She is quite lovely, with thick dark hair striking against the white of her wedding dress.  Her smile seems to me to show gentleness and strength.  Or am I just reading that into the picture – based on what I know of her, rather than what’s actually there?

The problem is, of course, that I can’t be sure what either of them were like then. 

Yet I would like to have known them.  As I looked at the photograph, I thought that I would have liked to have known them, that bright young couple, just starting out on their married life together.  I wish I could have met them that day, talked to them, wished them well and perhaps arranged to meet sometime.  I would have talked trains to him, asked her about her nursing.  Asked after their families.  Talked about church, and preaching and worship. 

I would have liked to talk to them about the things that they taught me.  The values and attitudes and way of life that they instilled in me.

But of course, I can’t.  I can never meet those people.  They were already gone when I was born.  In fact, my being born probably did a lot to change who they were! 

It’s surprising, in retrospect, how little I actually thought about them, focused on them, as a child.  To me, Mum and Dad were simply there.  Such a solid, permanent part of my life that I perhaps treated them as part of the furniture!  Not in a bad way.  It was because of the security I had in home and parents that I could give my young minds thought and attention over to other things, assured on a deeper level than thought of my parents’ presence and of their love.

But I wish I could have seen them with adult eyes – seen and met that young family, shared more closely with them in their lives. 

I still have my parents.  But they are different people.  Old, and grey and frail.  Still the same people, with a continuity of memory and experience (and I do thank God for that) but different as well.  Different because of that memory and experience.  What they know now, they were still learning back then. 

I thought of my own boys, and remembered the little babies that I got off to sleep with considerable effort but much love.  I remembered the giggling toddlers I played with in the bath, the young lads in smart new school uniform off on their first day of education!

They are gone as well, slipped inexorably into the past.  The boys I have now are different people.  Still my lads, still Tom and Matt and Andy – but they are the Tom and Matt and Andy of today.  I love the boys I have now – but I sometimes miss the ones they were then.

Time is inexorable.  A juggernaught that rumbles on, unstoppable, uncaring, tearing us away from the past and dragging us into the future, without allowing us to stay and savour the moment.

Of course, that may not always be a bad thing.  The old saying that ‘Time is a healer’ has some truth.  Time can carry us away from the bad things as well as the good.  It can put some distance between ourselves-now and ourselves-then, grant us a different perspective.  Time allows us to learn from the past, and to hope for the future.  If time did not move us always onwards those things would not be possible.  Without time, there could be no growth.

But the point is, we have no choice in the matter.  No matter if it is for good or bad,  no matter if it heals or hurts – time moves on, inexorable.

The strangest thing though, is that we should ever imagine it otherwise, or complain of it or bless it.  None of us – not one person alive now, not one person in the past – no one has ever been outside of time.  From conception through birth and growth and old age to death, we are immersed in time, controlled by time.  No matter if Time is a harsh tyrant or a benevolent master – we are utterly under its sway.  We know nothing else, have never experienced anything else.

We think constantly in terms of time.  We measure everything by it.  We plan for the future, we recall the past.  If there was no time, we would be in chaos.

Yet we are able to think outside of time.  There is a whole sub-genre of Science Fiction devoted to time-travel, time-paradox stories.  Stories about humans controlling Time, or at least challenging its rule.  And even outside of fiction, in day to day life, we sometimes wish to be in the past or to stay in the present – or even wish to move on into the future, at a faster rate than the minute-per-minute speed we are confined to.

(Leaving aside, for the moment at least, the question of our perception of how time passes, which is not at all how the clock measures it.  An hour of Maths always seemed longer to me than an hour of English, for example!)

Is that perhaps something in us time-bound creatures that yet yearns for an existence outside of time, beyond time, unfettered by time? 

I said that no one has ever been outside of time.  But there was one exception.  Jesus Christ came from Eternity, and confined himself, not merely to the physical form of a man, but to the temporal restraints of humanity.  In becoming one with us, he gave up both infinity and eternity.  And so was able to grow, to share in our uni-directional journey from birth to death.

And then he came back again.  Not just from beyond death, but from outside of Time.  And thereby showed us that there are realms beyond the rule of Time, that existence outside of time, however difficult to conceive of, is possible.

Perhaps our longing for a wider experience than that which Time allows stems from this.  Or perhaps it has always been there, something inherent in our souls, and the Resurrection confirmed and reinforced what part of us has always known – that the fourth dimension is neither the final one, nor the ultimate one.  Perhaps humanity has always had eternity in its heart.

And the promise is that we will one day return to eternity.  What form that will take we cannot know, time-bound as we are.  But it may be that what we know see as the absolute rule of a Tyrant will then (and notice that we cannot even talk about it without using time laden concepts!) be seen as just one small facet of a much vaster existence.

We are not ready for that immensity as yet.  We may need to grow more.  And perhaps that is the true function of Time – not a healer, nor a tyrant, but a teacher - giving us opportunity to prepare for the immensity of reality beyond its borders.  Perhaps, also Time is a guardian, protecting us from the sheer hugeness of what lies beyond.

The Bible doesn’t say much about Time.  It hardly needs to, we live in it!  Nor does it speak a great deal about the nature of Eternity – we perhaps could not comprehend it if it did.  But it does tell us that there is an eternity, that lies beyond this life, and that someday we shall be there, whatever it’s like.

Perhaps I’ll get to meet that young couple there, after all.

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Time past...  me, my Mum and my brothers on a beach, somewhere, somewhen.


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Why 'The Reality Escape Committee'?

13/12/2012

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It is not a title that has met with universal approval - at least not within the family!  Of all the possibly blog titles that I considered, this was judged to be the worst!  So why did I choose it?

Well for one reason, escaping from Reality is something I’ve spent most of my life trying to do!  I had a huge appetite for stories even before I could read - thanks, perhaps, to my Dad, who spent hours reading to me.  Once I did learn to read (which to me was the main reason for going to school – I didn’t really see the need to stay on once I’d mastered that skill!) I pretty much disappeared from the real world for most of my childhood and adolescence.

With the reading, came daydreaming, and from the daydreaming came story-making.  Story writing followed on naturally, and in one way or another I’ve ended up spending a considerable portion of my life escaping from reality.

I don’t regret it at all.

In fact, I’m quite convinced that escaping from reality is something most of us need to do on a regular basis.  If it wasn’t so, then there would be no novels, plays, films or TV dramas!  The fact is that the attempt to escape from reality, if only for a short time, is deeply woven into human nature and (consequently) into the fabric of society.  I’m no expert, but is there any human culture that does not have its myths and legend and its story-telling traditions?

Of course, some forms of reality escape are intrinsically harmful.  Drugs and excessive use of alcohol, for example, do not actually remove a person from reality.  They just inhibit a person’s ability to deal with it.  The most dedicated escaper must recognise that all escape is temporary.  Reality is harder and stronger than any fantasy.  That has to be recognised and allowed for: if we cling too tightly to our daydreams, Reality will eventually smash them.

Yet it is also true that those daydreams, however fragile, can still have an influence on the real world.  They can give us things to aspire to, things to hope for.  People who make changes in the world do so because they have a dream, or a vision, of something bigger, greater, better, brighter, and they work towards that end.

Reality should not be overrated.  If we cannot escape it entirely, we can at least work to change it.  It is not immutable.

Indeed, as a Christian, I believe that what we human beings perceive and label as ‘Reality’ is no more than shadow of something much greater, vaster, and more wonderful.  To me, the concept of an infinite Creator God implies that, however far my imagination (or someone else’s) might take me, I will never do more than dip a finger in the ocean of the truly real.

Someday that greater reality will open up, and I will finally make my escape from the shallow, narrow, restricted little reality that we now inhabit.  In the meantime, I continue to make small and limited escapes as often as possible.  And I try and share my escape routes as widely as possible through my writing and story telling.  And in this way, we may get just a glimpse of what wonder awaits us – just a moment of ‘Ahh’ or ‘Wow!’ that hints at an immensity of glory just round the next corner of reality.


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    Paul Trembling

    Husband, father, dog owner, Christian, writer, and incurable daydreamer.  In no particular order of importance - they are all me.

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Photos used under Creative Commons from h.koppdelaney, BitterScripts, psicologiaclinica, x-ray delta one, Erik Daniel Drost, jonny goldstein, guzzphoto, inkknife_2000 (5 million views), Coletivo Mambembe, Doctor_Q, tmib_seattle, Howdy, I'm H. Michael Karshis, h.koppdelaney, Menage a Moi, Click*64, Su Bee Buzz!, Susan WD, World Around Richa, h.koppdelaney, gavin.lauchlan, garrettc, polandeze, Alan Cleaver