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Parish Magazine |
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Parish Magazine is published monthly with news and articles about our Parish life
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Here is Father Michael's article from the July edition of the magazine |
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Musings on Time ! |
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One of the most interesting things I get asked to do from time to time is to visit our schools to talk about being a priest. I usually give a brief outline of what I do and then leave plenty of time for questions. Even with the youngest children in Key Stage one I can guarantee that someone will always ask the question, ‘Who made God?’ My response to this is to retell the story of Moses and the Burning Bush (Exodus chapter 3). When God, speaking out of the burning bush, gives guidance and instructions to his chosen people through Moses, Moses, not unreasonably, asks what God’s name is. God’s response is to say to Moses, ‘I am who I am …. tell my people ‘I am’ sent you.’ So God’s name is ‘I am’. The bible tells us that God just is and always has been. Another way of explaining this which is also not easy is to say that God exists outside time. We always think in terms of time; past, present and future. With God there is no past, present and future there is just one giant NOW. I am not sure if this helps much, but it’s the best I can do. Though time may be irrelevant or unimportant to God, for us it is something very precious because we only have a limited amount of it. At the moment my favourite CD is a live album by Muse. The first track is called Knights of Cydonia and this is a line from that song, ‘Don’t waste your time or time will waste you’ Not very jolly I know, but it makes you think doesn’t it? I hate it when people talk glibly about ‘killing time’ or start talking on Monday about how they can’t wait until the weekend – wishing time away. Time is very precious. We don’t have to be busy achieving things constantly to make our use of time worthwhile, rest, relaxation and recreation are excellent uses of time and vital if we are to make the best use of the limited time we have. But, surely we should take notice of the words of that song, we should never wilfully waste time, or worse still, kill time, we don’t have an endless supply. |
I can almost hear someone saying, ‘Ah but, don’t you keep going on in your church services and your sermons about eternal life? Don’t you Christians believe in that and if you do then what’s the problem? You are supposed to believe that you have an endless supply of time.’ In actual fact I don’t talk a lot about eternal life because I find it almost incomprehensible. I am much happier talking about the giant NOW. Rather than thinking about eternal life as living with an endless supply of time I am happier thinking of eternal life as being drawn into the giant NOW of God. Ironically, in order to be drawn into the giant NOW of God I think we have to use our time wisely, we have to take time, like the children at school, to ask and to consider the really big questions of life. We have to take time to get our priorities in good order. We have to take time to stop, to be still and imagine stepping off the conveyor belt of time into the giant NOW of God. It maybe that we can only do this occasionally and that we will only ever catch a glimpse of God, or sense for a few moments the timeless NOW of God. But it is worth trying. As R S Thomas says in his fantastic poem, The Bright Field, which I often quote: ……. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after Fr Michael 523969
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