One of the many things that bewildered me as a kid was the concept of God’s omnipotence. How could God be everywhere at once? How could such simultaneity be possible? For instance, I couldn’t be playing baseball and sitting quietly in church at the same time.
Eventually a Jesuit priest attempted to explain it to me. God did not obey time; time obeyed him. God existed outside of time. “He created time,” the priest said. Time was a quantity, just like everything else in the universe. “God is eternal,” said the priest, and is everywhere at that same time. Which is why we humans may be slaves of time but time is God’s slave.
I thought of that conversation today when a friend sent me Arianna Huffington’s blog from the homepage of the Huffington Post wherein she claims that the real deficit that our country faces is not a financial deficit or a jobs deficit. Those things are actually getting a little better. Our real problem is a time deficit.
Researchers call this a “time famine,” she explains. The less time we have the more we become obsessed with it and the less fulfilling our lives seem. The way a starving person becomes obsessed by a morsel of food, we become obsessed by every minute of our day.
I doubt very many Americans would disagree. We live in an age when we are always out of breath. What greater resource is there but time? And yet we never seem to have enough of it…for our work, for our loved ones, for ourselves.
Or for our souls. If our souls are an aspect of God then they too are timeless. So when we meditate or pray, or when we dream or when we love, we are actually stepping outside time. We are with God.
