"Time is clearly not our natural dimension."

Pardon me while I get all religious for a minute. (or an hour) I've just been thinking about this a lot and I wanted to try to write it down. Maybe even strike up a conversation about it. Feel free to comment. As always. If you can wade through the discourse.

When I picked up All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience (1979) by Neal A. Maxwell, one of several books we inherited from Matt's grandma when we were first married, I immediately knew I had a winner. I loved Elder Maxwell. When I was 17 years old, I heard him deliver the talk "The Tugs and Pulls of the World" and my world actually changed. I will never forget that talk and I've read it probably 50 times. Anyway, the more I learned about him, the more I liked him. He grew up very poor in Utah and raised pigs for 4-H. He had very bad acne and didn't make the basketball team. Why those specific details tug so firmly at my heart, I don't know--I guess because being a teenager is so hard and I just felt for him when I first learned about his youth. 

I used to work at the LDS Church Office Building in the editing department, a highlight of which was proofreading talks before general conference. An editor there told me that Elder Maxwell always agonized over his talks. He would send over new drafts up until the very last minute, hours before delivering his talk even, while most everyone else would send over one draft several days beforehand and be done with it. At Elder Maxwell's funeral, President Hinckley said, "I know of no other man who spoke in such an interesting and distinct manner. His genius was the product of diligence. He was a perfectionist determined to exact from every phrase and sentence vivid imagery that brought the gospel to life. Each talk was a masterpiece, each book was a work of art. I think we shall not see one like him again."

He died in 2004 at age 78 after an 8-year battle with leukemia. About himself and his fellow cancer patients, he said, "We have a different perspective, a sharper focus. I've been given by the Lord a delay en route." About trials in general, he said, "If we are serious about our discipleship, Jesus will eventually request each of us to do those very things which are the most difficult for us to do." A few months before he died, he gave the talk "Remember How Merciful the Lord Hath Been," a tender collection of memories which I loved as much as any of his talks and I hoped it wasn't a "farewell address." (It was.)

All of that is just to try to give you an idea of how much I love and respect a man I never met and to illustrate why I'd be interested in picking up a densely worded 30-year-old collection of this guy's thoughts on religious stuff. I have been thinking about "time" a lot lately and this (below), from chapter 2 of All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience, is one of my all-time favorite passages on the subject of "time." 

More specifically, it's a discussion on the omniscience of God and the agency [a Mormon buzzword meaning "capacity to act"] of man relative to the subject of "time." What I get from it is that "time" is a roadblock to understanding. Intellectually I had already understood there to be a difference between "time" and "eternity," but it had never been so clear to me that God might live His life--wherever He is--completely unhampered by the linear structure of earthly days. How this happens I'm not sure (although it likely doesn't involve a DeLorean). Listening to everyone's prayers all at the same...time?....well, no, just listening to everyone's prayers. Not stopping bad things from happening, because that's part of the deal and life has its biological processes and we all act the way we choose to act. Knowing, in ways that we don't, how everything will work out. ("thy days are known, and thy years shall not be numbered less" - D+C 122:9)

Most, if not all of us, have been momentarily wrenched by the sound of a train whistle spilling into the night air--and we have been inexplicably subdued by the mix of memories and feelings it evokes. Perhaps, too, we have been beckoned by a lighted cottage across a snow-covered meadow at dusk. Or we have heard the distant but drawing soft laughter of children at play. Or we have been tugged at by the strains of singing from a nearby church. In such moments we have felt a deep yearning, as if we were outside something to which we belonged and of which we so much wanted again to be a part. The impact has been brief, to be sure--but real!

There are spiritual equivalents of these moments. They seem to occur most often when time touches eternity. In these moments, we feel a longing closeness--but we are still separate. And the partition that produces this paradox is something we call the veil.

We define the veil as the border between mortality and eternity; it is also a film of forgetting that covers the memories of earlier experiences. This forgetfulness will be lifted one day, and on that day we will see forever, rather than "through a glass, darkly." (1 Corinthians 13:12.)

However, there are poignant reminders of the veil even now, adding to our sense of being close but still outside. In our deepest prayers, when the agency of man encounters the omniscience of God, we sometimes sense how provincial our petitions really are. We perceive that there are more good answers than we have good questions, and that we have been taught more than we can tell, for the language used is not that which tongue can transmit.

We experience this same close separateness when a baby is born, and also as we wait with those who are dying--for then we brush against the veil, as goodbyes and greetings are said almost within earshot of each other.

...Eventually, the veil that now encloses us will be no more. Neither will time. (D+C 84:100.) Time is clearly not our natural dimension. Thus it is that we are never really at home in time. Alternately, we find ourselves wishing to hasten the passage of time or to hold back the dawn. We can do neither, of course, but whereas the fish is at home in water, we are clearly not at home in time--because we belong to eternity. Time, as much as any one thing, whispers to us that we are strangers here.

Thus the veil stands--not forever to shut us out, but as a mark of God's tutoring love for us....Were it possible to breach it on the wrong terms, we would see and experience, before we are ready, things that would moot much of the value in this mortal experience. Remember, we are being proven as to our faith and being fitted for strenuous chores to be done elsewhere. To change the nature of this necessary experience by premature commingling would mean that we would not be suitable company for those we yearn to be with, nor would we be ready to go where they are ready to go, nor to do the things that they have painstakingly learned to do. There is no other way!

Since--unlike for us enclosed by the veil--things are, for God, one "eternal now," it is to be remembered that for God to foresee is not to cause or even to desire a particular occurrence--but it is to take that occurrence into account beforehand, so that divine reckoning folds it into the unfolding purposes of God.

...The actual determinations, however, are made by us mortals using our agency as to this or that course of action. For these determinations and decisions we are accountable. The essence of agency will have been present (and later at the judgment will be shown to have been provably present); otherwise the justice of our omniscient Father in heaven (another perfected attribute) would not have obtained. (Alma 12:15.)

Our agency is preserved, however, by the fact that as we approach a given moment we do not know what our response will be. Meanwhile, God has foreseen what we will do and has taken our decision into account (in composite with all others), so that His purposes are not frustrated.

...Traditional discussions of omniscience ignore the fact that this attribute is much more than God's simply noticing and observing everything as it happens. It is a remarkable thing for God to notice every sparrow that falls. But God could be fully noticing and aware--and yet still be surprised, along with the rest of us. Yet the living God is aware of all things before they unfold. This supernal dimension of knowledge is a part of omniscience!

...Personality patterns, habits, strengths, and weakness observed by God over a long period in the premortal world would give God a perfect understanding of what we would do under a given set of circumstances--especially when he knows the circumstances to come. Just because we cannot compute all the variables, just because we cannot extrapolate does not mean that He cannot do so. Omniscience is, of course, one of the essences of Godhood; it sets Him apart in such an awesome way from all of us even though, on a smaller scale, we manage to do a little foreseeing ourselves at times with our own children even with our rather finite and imperfect minds.

Ever to be emphasized, however, is the reality that God's "seeing" is not the same thing as His "causing" something to happen. We must not approach God as if He were somehow constrained by finite knowledge and by time.

If I would just set aside the (ahem) time, I'd scan and publish the entire chapter. I hope you found some food for thought in there somewhere! Could you imagine not being constrained by time? I can. I'm pretty sure my use of that freedom would mostly involve lots and lots of sleeping. And watching movies. Yeah--haven't really mastered that "time" thing yet. I guess I need more...well, you know.