Time is a Sign of Grace. Once I heard someone say that.
So if Time is a sign of Grace, what does that mean? Age brings with it an increased awareness of Time. The longer one lives, the less time one has, guaranteed, to live. Like Tarot cards, ink blots, or mirrors, words are symbols, open to interpretation. The phrase under question here might say--to me, today--that the longer you live, the more you can: Deal With; Understand; Let Go Of; Wonder About; Come to Terms With; Find Peace With; Find Passion For. Or, that you can Hate, Fear, Avoid. Or maybe it means that Time is a gift. If Time is a gift of Life, of Longevity, what do we do with our gift? If we live longer does it neccesarily mean "better"? Is it better to have Some Time? A Lot of Time? Just Enough Time to figure out that we know something or nothing? Is maybe the sum of all knowing simply: not knowing? What fills Time?
Wandering down the winding path of Home Philosophy seems to yield a lot more questions than answers. Mostly, cultivating those questions just yields more crops of words. Us people like to think that answers and explanations always exist, to all questions. It makes life so much simpler if there are answers. Our favored color of answers is "black-and-white, no gray area." Thrown in with our belief in Almighty Answers is the belief that we exist for some special reason, other than propagating the species.
"Believing in answers" is actually, perhaps, one thing which truly sets us apart from other animals on the planet (another thing that us people-types like to believe in is that we are unique animals, beyond our propensity to bite the [ecological] hand that feeds us [Earth]). I'm not sure that my cats, for instance, have an answer as to why I lie abed in the morning when they are waiting for their ritual, morning teaspoonful of alternate food. Conversely, they don't show the least interest in some answers I might feed them as to why I'm not moving in that direction. They simply keep asking the question: "Meow?" Astrophysicist Carl Sagan might even have agreed with this "answer" differentiation between Us and Them (C.S. made convincing arguments that people are not at all set apart from/ above other animals, in his book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors). Despite this, Answers have become a habit, if not an addiction, for humans. So we persist.
One fit-all answer to "What does it mean to say that Time is a sign of Grace" which comes to mind is another group of words, from the King James’ Old Testament: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:13). Ah, abideth means dwelling over a period of Time. This group of words ties some things together, then. We have faith. We hope. We love. And we have time--some more than others. Maybe an advisable way to fill our alloted time in this life is to believe and hope and love. That way, we would not simply all sit down by the side of the road on any given day when things were pilling up on us, and wait for Time to cease to exist. Instead of waiting for Godot, so to speak, we can keep the chin up by believing, hoping, and being kind. We can make a Leap of Faith (another Biblical phrase which is a good Answer) that Time is important, and that using it well gives us Grace, and generally makes us feel good.
I think that my cats--and all cats, and generally other animals besides people--hope for future events, and love companionship or food or each other or even people. I don't have any idea to gauge what they believe in. Apparently they believe, every morning, that I will rise up and tender little mercies to them. Maybe they believe, like us people-animals, simply that they will keep on living til they die. It's true that wanting to die can make it so; it's true that believing in living helps it to happen. So all of us life forms on this little world could say, together, that hoping and believing and granting charity to each other is probably the best we can do with the time that we have.
When you spin all the words and the symbols around, does it spew out black-and-white answers? Does it explain Who and What and Why?
Today one of my artist friends threw a word out, on the table of our conversation. The word was "ineffable." Ineffable means: "Too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words." An antonym for "ineffable" is "definable." I think Ineffable is a truly great word. All the signs, symbols, words, answers in the world are attempts at black-and-white, right-and-wrong, knowing-and-not-knowing. We find, and seek, and ask, and wonder, and fear, and have billions and billions of possible answers, to comfort and aid us. Many of them are very good answers, and bring great comfort and purpose. I like to think, though, that they are, after all, only words. Only symbols, signs, maybes, shots-in-the-dark, nursery rhymes and religions.
I like to think that all the answers to all the questions are poor attempts to understand the Mind of God, as it were, which has been described as beyond all knowing. For example, I don't really understand my cats. I witness their actions and reactions. I don't think they understand my words or why I feed them. For them, for me, their are no clear answers. They believe and hope that every day I will feed them and make them comfortable. I hope and believe that they will sit on my lap and allow me to pet them. We love our time-share arrangement, and are generally kind to each other.
Beyond those three things, time seems mostly Ineffable. Mostly, we can not know what Time is. Or anything really. We just have to have faith and hope and, in the meantime, be kind.
Maybe thats all that Time is.
So if Time is a sign of Grace, what does that mean? Age brings with it an increased awareness of Time. The longer one lives, the less time one has, guaranteed, to live. Like Tarot cards, ink blots, or mirrors, words are symbols, open to interpretation. The phrase under question here might say--to me, today--that the longer you live, the more you can: Deal With; Understand; Let Go Of; Wonder About; Come to Terms With; Find Peace With; Find Passion For. Or, that you can Hate, Fear, Avoid. Or maybe it means that Time is a gift. If Time is a gift of Life, of Longevity, what do we do with our gift? If we live longer does it neccesarily mean "better"? Is it better to have Some Time? A Lot of Time? Just Enough Time to figure out that we know something or nothing? Is maybe the sum of all knowing simply: not knowing? What fills Time?
Wandering down the winding path of Home Philosophy seems to yield a lot more questions than answers. Mostly, cultivating those questions just yields more crops of words. Us people like to think that answers and explanations always exist, to all questions. It makes life so much simpler if there are answers. Our favored color of answers is "black-and-white, no gray area." Thrown in with our belief in Almighty Answers is the belief that we exist for some special reason, other than propagating the species.
"Believing in answers" is actually, perhaps, one thing which truly sets us apart from other animals on the planet (another thing that us people-types like to believe in is that we are unique animals, beyond our propensity to bite the [ecological] hand that feeds us [Earth]). I'm not sure that my cats, for instance, have an answer as to why I lie abed in the morning when they are waiting for their ritual, morning teaspoonful of alternate food. Conversely, they don't show the least interest in some answers I might feed them as to why I'm not moving in that direction. They simply keep asking the question: "Meow?" Astrophysicist Carl Sagan might even have agreed with this "answer" differentiation between Us and Them (C.S. made convincing arguments that people are not at all set apart from/ above other animals, in his book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors). Despite this, Answers have become a habit, if not an addiction, for humans. So we persist.
One fit-all answer to "What does it mean to say that Time is a sign of Grace" which comes to mind is another group of words, from the King James’ Old Testament: “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:13). Ah, abideth means dwelling over a period of Time. This group of words ties some things together, then. We have faith. We hope. We love. And we have time--some more than others. Maybe an advisable way to fill our alloted time in this life is to believe and hope and love. That way, we would not simply all sit down by the side of the road on any given day when things were pilling up on us, and wait for Time to cease to exist. Instead of waiting for Godot, so to speak, we can keep the chin up by believing, hoping, and being kind. We can make a Leap of Faith (another Biblical phrase which is a good Answer) that Time is important, and that using it well gives us Grace, and generally makes us feel good.
I think that my cats--and all cats, and generally other animals besides people--hope for future events, and love companionship or food or each other or even people. I don't have any idea to gauge what they believe in. Apparently they believe, every morning, that I will rise up and tender little mercies to them. Maybe they believe, like us people-animals, simply that they will keep on living til they die. It's true that wanting to die can make it so; it's true that believing in living helps it to happen. So all of us life forms on this little world could say, together, that hoping and believing and granting charity to each other is probably the best we can do with the time that we have.
When you spin all the words and the symbols around, does it spew out black-and-white answers? Does it explain Who and What and Why?
Today one of my artist friends threw a word out, on the table of our conversation. The word was "ineffable." Ineffable means: "Too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words." An antonym for "ineffable" is "definable." I think Ineffable is a truly great word. All the signs, symbols, words, answers in the world are attempts at black-and-white, right-and-wrong, knowing-and-not-knowing. We find, and seek, and ask, and wonder, and fear, and have billions and billions of possible answers, to comfort and aid us. Many of them are very good answers, and bring great comfort and purpose. I like to think, though, that they are, after all, only words. Only symbols, signs, maybes, shots-in-the-dark, nursery rhymes and religions.
I like to think that all the answers to all the questions are poor attempts to understand the Mind of God, as it were, which has been described as beyond all knowing. For example, I don't really understand my cats. I witness their actions and reactions. I don't think they understand my words or why I feed them. For them, for me, their are no clear answers. They believe and hope that every day I will feed them and make them comfortable. I hope and believe that they will sit on my lap and allow me to pet them. We love our time-share arrangement, and are generally kind to each other.
Beyond those three things, time seems mostly Ineffable. Mostly, we can not know what Time is. Or anything really. We just have to have faith and hope and, in the meantime, be kind.
Maybe thats all that Time is.
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