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| Tuesday, September 01, 2009
Eternity Writer : Dawn Fung eightstick by Chris Tan3:11Our theme, Eternity, was presented through three writers' group sessions based on Time, The Present World/ Earth and Heaven. This is how I imagine it to be told : The significance of time is its function to our present world to recognise heaven. Think of time as a congealed force or a pressure well. Within this well is our history (dinosaurs to cartography to warfare to socio-economics), which necessities an order of history : chronology. Chronology then, unfolds through time for events, minute and momentous, to affect change that alters our development and understanding of life (E.H Gombrich's A Little History of the World is an excellent first book for adults and children to get into the past.). Therefore, if chronology is a state of order that we can review history/time, then it also points to a kind of disorder that is important for the present world to identify, meaning a kind of order that is apparently beyond chronological norms. This is because chronology thrives within time's pressure well; time should keep out anti-natural/empirical laws from physics to psychology for order to exist. Therefore, I think of it congealed because its nature slows down the decay of fallen man vis-a-vis the chronological condition, but also keeps the present world attuned to a potential foretelling of its future. I attend therefore to things that chronology identifies as disorder : miracles (see book of the same title by C.S Lewis) , true prophecy, catastrophe - bombastic natural proportions, not man-made. These are disorders in chronology because they are difficult to ascertain and predict. Moreover, the kind of effect that they have on civilisation changes its course dramatically : unforeseen transformation in individuals, obliteration of certain belief systems which may have been nurtured from young, and geographical nihilism leading to immense loss and disappearance (through migration or destruction). As I relate time to a pressure well that creates an image of a hollow with a barrier, disorders in chronology points to an identification of a function of time that is beyond the use of history; such disorders actually presents the function of time as an enigmatic net of sorts - its barrier is powerful enough to keep order (see the sunrise without fail since time began) and to attract the disorder that is mysterious to man. As followers of Christ, we accept the fact that Jesus is king of the universe, who existed before and in time. Therefore, he is also its master, one of who is attuned to how it works, for example, healing events that suggest accelerations of time - think of the length of time for medical discoveries to heal a man born blind, or unshrivel a hand of an geriatric, and more important, why it works. The reason behind time is privy only to the person who created time. As beings who are born into time, we eat of its fruit daily with wonder. It must take someone who is not born of time to explain its function and chronology's disorders. As it is said in the bible, the inspired Word that is realised in the flesh and divinity of Jesus Christ, time is created to let man discover God, and choose Him out of his free will within his given time. In Genesis, Adam's time begins in a garden where he was expelled for choosing wrongly. Today, our bodies wilt in the fallen present world because of Adam's wrong choice during his time. From the rest of Adam to today, chronology shows us repeated that man suffer from bad choices made from the previous generations during their time. It is as if we understand the rule of "reaping what you sow" but unable to continue to make good choices into the future. Chronology also reflects failure of man's efforts to maintain good choices through cycles of history, say, warfare as continuation of policy making. Therefore, it should be the disorders, rather than the orders, that may prove a better key to understand how we function in time. However that is an incomplete statement if we are not attuned to the owner of time, someone who does live outside of it, and sees it as a whole with complete understanding. Time as a pressure well, contains the chronology of existence in human and world history, but it also exists within eternity. As a part of eternity, rather than a detached joint of eternity, it is to be understood with eternal significance to be biblically accurate. Firstly, Jesus speaks of time; he uses specific vocabulary : "one hour" (see meaning of tarry), "seasons", "day", "time". These refer to events that take place either from heaven to earth (apocalypse), on earth itself (rapture) or earth to heaven (prayer). When time is understood within its framework, in relation to eternity, as how Jesus says it, we see two lines interacting, as if time is a force that draws communication between heaven and earth. In a culminating example, Jesus is fully man and God who walks in time even as he is its master, who is outside of it, encompassing eternity. This is where the disorders begin to make sense. The disorders of chronology are in fact, spiritual in origin. Geological upheaval is imminent in the apocalypse. Miracles disturbs rational prediction because resurrections from the dead are medical mysteries. True prophecy in Revelations is a "witness for Jesus Christ" and this of itself is unnerving of chronology because Jesus Christ has no need of it. Therefore, we begin to look at time, the present world and heaven as an interlocked formation, to teach us how to begin to make sense of something as whole as eternity. Because eternity is outside of time, it will never conform to chronological rules. As we are believers who already have Jesus, the master and creator of eternity and then, time, we cannot conform to chronological limitations. Through His divine exchange on the cross for our sins and to those who believe in His name to save, heaven is here; I mean heaven in its sense of wonder, comfort, healing, providence, shelter, beauty, and reunion. The paradox is time. We are here, and we are there. In spirit and in truth, we recognise heaven through the implications of our new creation in the present world. That is why it takes a definite hour, one hour according to Jesus, to break through an earthly stupor that distracts our spiritual eyes to see heaven. 4:11
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