Virgin Time

In my science fiction class, I have used time travel as a theme.  It's lots of fun.  We watch movies like Back to the Future with Michael Fox, or Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure with George Carlin, and we read Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman.  Lightman's book is a series of reveries on the possible worlds enabled by different kinds of relationships between space and time possibly imagined by Einstein while writing his theory of relativity in Berne.  At the beginning of the course, I have my students do an exercise in class in which they fill in the blank of the sentence, "Time is ________."  Then we collect all the words and sort them into categories like philosophical, literary, scientific/mathematical and so forth.  Some of the words are easy, like time is linear-an obvious mathematical term.  Others are a little more ambiguous, like time is fleeting.  Probably literary, certainly metaphorical.  So we use Lakoff and Johnson's book, "Metaphors We Live By" to guide us in our understanding of how our world perceptions and our values are shaped by the metaphors we attribute to certain ideas.  Time turns out to be a rather essential element of how we understand our selves as creatures.  We define in certain ways our own humanity by our relationship to time.  For example, it turns out if we value time as a kind of commodity that is scarce, then we tend to act as consumers of time, exchanging it in the most useful way we can.  However, if we imagine time to be unlimited, then we behave quite differently! 

Merton's reflection on this date describes a goal of the contemplative life as a creating a new sense of time, a virgin time that is a place of "potentiality and hopes," a "center" where one can find oneself "at long last on the brink of the great divide where all familiar human landmarks have disappeared."  "A compassionate time," he says, allowing one to be aware of our illusions but also critical of them. 

I do like the notion of a virginal time, an unblemished space that needs no improvement, a simple pure potentiality for being.  A friend of mine told me that there is an old Irish saying that "when God made Time, he made plenty of it."  This is a wonderful image of an unending source of time that seems full of generosity and fecundity.  I wonder if we would think differently about our lives if we considered that our own lifespans have little to do with time at all, perhaps nothing in the grand scheme of things.  I think we tend to think of the time that we have as a kind of gift with limitations, as if we could somehow possess it!  Of course, we experience our lives as somehow riding along a continuum of time, a history of the universe.  We can look at a picture ofourselves as children and remember that we were much younger than we are now.  However, I think the space that Merton is describing is a place where we can rest assured in the center of a kind of existence (God's being, if you like) that is always being created, without beginning or end-a space which defies our imagination, like the fourteenth dimension!