Complemented Chris Cammarata

My answer to this question might be a little more metaphysical than strictly scientific, but it’s a question that has fascinated me for a long time!

Time, as Edin described, is a series of events moving in a single direction. Events that have already happened are called the “past,” and events that have not yet taken are the “future.” Philosophy has asked many interesting questions about time. Does the present cease to exist once it becomes the past? Does the future exist if it hasn’t happened yet? We’ll save those questions for another time!

One interesting thing to note, though, is that human beings are the only creatures who not only experience time, but measure it. Think about it: birds migrate when the seasons change, but they only do it based on instinctual responses to changes in weather. Only humans call that change in weather a “season.” Only humans divide days into hours and minutes and seconds, and only humans arrange days into weeks and months and years.

St. Augustine was also really interested in time and actually wrote about it. He wondered how God experienced time, or what time was like for God. Or did God experience time at all?

If everything that exists is created by God, then that means that time is also a creature of God. This actually makes perfect sense: God is eternal–he is outside of time. Note that “eternal” is not the same thing as “unending.” The soul is unending; when it dies, it doesn’t “end,” but lives on in heaven. God, however, is eternal. He is not bound by time; he even exists beyond time. What does that even feel like? Can we possibly even understand that?

An analogy might help here. Think about the last time you spent time with people you really cared about–let’s say your closest friends. You spent the whole day together, having fun and enjoying each other’s company long into the night. Eventually you look at the clock and exclaim, “whoa, where did the time even go?” In that moment, you realize that hours and hours seemed to pass by in just a few minutes. Well, according to St. Augustine… that’s kind of like what time is like for God. God experiences time as an “eternal moment,” an “eternal present,” an “eternal now.” Heaven is a place so great, so wonderful, that centuries and centuries pass and you don’t even feel the time passing–as the Psalm says, “a thousand years are a single day in your sight” (90:4)! St. Therese even described heaven as one “eternal day.” God sees the past, present, and future all at once–and yet he is totally present in each moment as well. Crazy to think about, right?

Funnily enough, this also gives us an idea of time in hell using the same analogy. Remember the last time you were bored out of your mind? Remember how you felt stuck forever and your mind wandered all over the place? Then after what seemed like hours, you look at the clock and exclaim “it’s only been five minutes?” Well, that’s sort of what hell is like, except far worse–it’s a place so horrible and excruciatingly painful that every second seems to take hours to pass.

This idea of “God’s time” is also interesting when you think about the Mass. In the Mass, we are entering into the heavenly liturgy–heaven and earth meet. That means that we are stepping into eternity, into God’s time. All the people who ever were at Mass, all the people currently at Mass, and all the people who ever will be at Mass are spiritually gathered together into a single point: Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross. All of human history is being gathered into God’s one eternal day at each Mass.

How’s that for time travel?