A year is ended; another begun. The gods have not spared us from living in an interesting era. We could laugh at the craziness we are witnessing in these times, did it not present so great a threat to the peace and wellbeing of a world full of life, did it not so tragically threaten the magnificent human possibilities that can yet be realized in our time.

And sometimes we'd better be able to laugh anyway, a majestic laughter that understands the powers of creation available in such a moment of time, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

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We are joined here for the sake of our lives and for the sake of the world. Our work here is much like that of an artist, so I read Albert Camus' remarks on art, spoken 55 years ago in Sweden, but pretty much to the point here, this morning. Where he speaks of art, we may just as fittingly think of religion.

In that lecture, he carries on about art for art's sake — removed from reality, frivolous, which time will not remember. And he speaks of art as propaganda, which banishes truth and reality. He wants to know what real and authentic art is.

A new year is a good time to ask the same question of our religion.

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We know a fairly big segment of the religious world as either bad art or propaganda. The truth has to be subverted to the honour of The Church, capital T, capital C, no mere institution of men and women but divine, it insists, so we may not admit the truth about it. Its answers as well as its choice of questions must stand despite all evidence, despite science, despite the realities of the soul. Its authority must be maintained, at any cost. I grew up and spent my youth in churches, various ones, all of these Protestant, where propaganda and irrelevance also reigned. It saw what it wanted to: it was bad art.

Or there's religion for religion's sake. It's hard to explain what they're doing or why they're doing it to anybody who doesn't share their arcane churchly world, and they never have to explain it to themselves, but it keeps them busy. We, on the other hand, never do anything like that.

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Camus' answer to this unworthy art is not for the fainthearted. And religion, like art, that is worth the ground it takes up, must stand both in this culture and against it. It must find creative ways to speak to that culture and to act to redeem it. And we are joined, for the sake of our lives and for the sake of the world, in a work much like that of an artist.

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But it said I was going to speak about Time, about time itself, the mystery of time, and I am.
The mystery of time: it is very mysterious.

The physicist Julian Barbour is one of many now arguing that time is an illusion; that time is just a cosmic convenience that keeps everything from happening all at once.[1] He writes — get this —

In any instant, we are aware of many things at once. Through memories we are, as it were present simultaneously in many different Nows . . . Our memories are pictures of other Nows within this Now, rather like snapshots in an album.[2] . . . Quantum cosmology — and hence our universe — is timeless.[3]

So let us think about time. It's a spooky subject. Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, pointed out that the fabric of reality is not only stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

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We experience this Mystery of Time in at least three distinct ways.

Like a circle, there is the natural movement of time, like the clock that always returns to where it began, endlessly, or like the south face of the tower clock in the old Bangor church, that was right twice a day because time moves inexorably round whether the hands do or not. The Greeks were preoccupied with this kind of time, oriented toward the seasons and shortening and lengthening days, around and around and around and around, repeating cycles. Nothing really new—we've seen it all before and we will again when it comes round again.

Or like a line, there's historical time, the linear course of cultures and civilizations. The Judaeo-Christian Bible is oriented toward this kind of time, a line with past and present and future. Religion oriented toward this kind of time frequently has a funny way of looking the wrong way — backward, really seems fixated on some kind of perfect past before sin messed everything up, and it wants to return to the original golden age. That's primitivism and it won't help us now. And if it does look forward, it's as if it's looking out of a dread of a future of fire or ice, the cataclysm to come.

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So there's this other kind of time, and that's what I'm interested in today. I don't know what to call it. It's not a line and not a circle, I haven't got an image for it. Meister Eckhart, in the 13th century, called it the "eternal now." Kierkegaard called it "the pregnant moment." The New Testament calls it "kairos," as contrasted with clock-time, or "chronos." Kairos.

It's not subject to mathematical or chronological measurement, because, like the infinitely small, infinitely dense particle from which the universe came, it holds the wealth of all time. The theologian Tillich described eternity in these terms. By eternity, he didn't mean a forever that he didn't believe in. He meant the infinite depth dimension of time, right here, right now.

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Maybe you can remember when you have experienced eternity in a moment and your life changed.
The day Dr King was shot was one of those for me. Or a moment years ago at Great Pond in Connecticut, with its profusion of life, noble and great and glorious, even though I could never find the place again. And when our deeply corrupted political leaders sell out the interests of the earth itself for some short-sighted commercial and political interest, and I begin to rage in a way some friends will never understand, it's got something to do with that day at Great Pond.

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You cannot ever understand a human being without reference to these moments of time in their lives. To explain why people have chosen the lifeworks that they have, have the passions and drives they do, you have to go back to those moments. The World in a grain of sand, Heaven in a wildflower, Eternity in an hour.
Which is what Emerson meant when he wrote,

There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.

There is another feature of this "kairos"-kind of time. It is full of powers and energies. Maybe that's what it is in us that resonates with fantastic stories of Tolkein's Ring trilogy. Even the trees seem to rise up to defend the earth and its people. Maybe you've known those days — when great stores of energy seemed to open up within you, and you achieved things you still cannot quite account for, with a preternatural energy.

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I am going to insert here a rather odd-sounding passage from the great Sri Aurobindo, from his book, The Hour of God. But listen: it is strange, and magnificent.

In the hour of God, cleanse thy soul of all self-deceit and hypocrisy . . . that thou mayst look straight into thy spirit and hear that which summons it. Cast aside all fear, for the hour is often terrible, a fire and a whirlwind and a tempest . . . but he who can stand up in it to the truth of his purpose is he who shall stand. . . . Nor let worldly prudence whisper too closely in thy ear; for it is the hour of the unexpected.

It's in the thick of the battle, says Camus, who knew about the thick of battles; — it's in the unbearable heat. The only door is in the wall against which you are living. Nor, says Aurobindo, nor let worldly prudence whisper too closely in your ear, for it is the hour of the unexpected. It is an hour that calls for the cleansing of souls from self-deceit and hypocrisy, a time to look directly into our spirits to hear what it is that summons us. I believe that's the kind of religion we need now.

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There is a quality of infinity to these moments: it's as if you get there and find a rabbit-hole into infinity. But not just because of some transcendent experience you have in a moment like that. These moments are fulcrum-moments that can sway and turn the future. These are moments when you might sense the magnitude of possibility, when you understand yourself to be connected absolutely to the Source—that is, to the creative energy and the inherent intelligence in this roaring engine of creativity which is life itself. Things can be different. Through and beyond all despair, you see that.

Those times are openings to infinity and, more than that, they're openings, rabbit-holes, into a wider sweep of time. This is what the Nobel physicist Brian Josephson said about that:

So far, the evidence seems compelling. What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future. A spectacular body of converging evidence [is] indicating that our understanding of time is seriously incomplete. These studies mean that some aspect of our mind can perceive the future. Not infer the future, or anticipate the future, or figure out the futuure. But actually perceive it. [4]

In his wise and inspiring book Source, just hot off the press, Jospeh Jaworski sums up the wisdom he's derived from a lifework of profound dialogue with physicists, meditators, spiritual teachers, organizational whizzes, philosophers, and other luminaries.

He talks about those places—those moments—when you come to a rabbit-hole to infinity, and he says: [5]

There exists an eternally creative Source of infinite potential that lies beyond the orders of time, constantly giving birth to the universe at every moment. It's the wellspring of the universe itself.
And there, in this realm of emergence, each moment contains the present and the seeds of the future. It's all enfolded in it.

In that creative moment, mind and matter are linked indissolubly. The creative energy that is let loose at this moment is kind of like a nuclear reaction because it rearranges completely the internal structure of the present reality, so energy is directed to new possibilities. And now the future is open to creative change, endless possibilities.

But the realization of these high possibilities isn't guaranteed because if the human subject [you or I] doesn't possess the necessary honesty of mind, doesn't possess the intent to see things interconnected and full of meaning as they really are, then the creative moment is blocked and stuff remains stuck in its present state.

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I believe there is an art of "knowing" the significance of a particular moment of time, the seed from which future possibilities will flow. How do you "know"? Not intellectually, not analytically, but from somewhere behind the mind, from some tacit or primary kind of knowing, we can take right action in the moment.

There seems to be something about human intent, and something about hearts and minds that are seized and driven by a vision, that serves as what quantum theory calls an "attractor" that influences and shapes what happens and seems, at the right moment, to draw those with similar intention and vision to you, so that it seems as though doors open where you had only seen a wall in front of you.

I would be glad for more of that kind of time. And I think—given the urgency of these times where we are living—we know we need them. It's this very kind of precarious moment of such overwhelming possibility and overwhelming peril—when such moments have manifested themselves in human experience. May we be open, and humbly available, to those moments.

These are moments when you know what you must do, and you can act decisively and with consequence.

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The Mystery of Time is grander than our imagining. Our weary feet will seem to tread circular paths round and round and round again, but then something shifts and you are treading in new territory.
But to the attentive eye, there is far, far more: openings to the Source, openings to something new and magnificent,—

And those who see and sense these openings from beyond and enter those thresholds and set out toward new lands and new vistas and new dimensions of the possible — it is they who shift the very movement of time and make new tracks for the journey of life.

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Let our religion be about that work of creation right here, in the face of a very challenging time. Here we start, in the very midst of the sound and the fury of our history, as Camus has said. And he cries: "Let us rejoice." Let us rejoice, indeed, at having witnessed the death of a lying and comfort-loving culture and at being faced with cruel truths. Let us rejoice, he cries, because a prolonged hoax has collapsed and we see clearly what threatens us. And let us rejoice, torn from our sleep and deafness.

And, he says, if we manage not to forget the humilated and the left out, then our lives and our spiritual movement will discover their strength.

And if facing the meaning of this time and making ourselves available to what it asks of us feels a bit overwhelming, then, Camus says, the ordeal of these times and our accepting the challenge — and facing it with our pores open to Spirit — will contribute to our chances of being authentic bearers of the possible future.
We may long for a gentler flame, a respite, a pause for musing. But perhaps there is no other peace for us than what we find in the heat of combat. Let us seek the respite where it is — in the very thick of the battle. It is there. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope.

Copyright 2012 by F. Jay Deacon.

[1] London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, and Phoenix/Orion paperback, 1999. Subsequently published in the USA.
[2] 55f.
[3] 59.
[4] Quote from "Is This REALLY Proof that Man Can See into the Future?" London: Daily Mail, May 4, 2007. Cited in Jaworski, 123f.
[5] Here I'm paraphrasing from Joseph Jaworski, Source: The Inner Path of Knowledge Creation (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2012), 121f.]