After saying the prayer I pretty regularly direct to you, God-in-love, I was struck anew by the list of three conditions that are to characterize the world to come: Let the consummation of your creation quickly approach, soon arrive, that new and lively cosmos of infinite hospitality, friendship and exploration, of change without transience, time without the past, life without death, your dwelling in the midst.
Can I really imagine change w/o transience? Can I conceive of time w/o the past? What about life w/o death? No less than Steve Jobs at Stanford called death 'very likely the the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.' So how could any world work where these conditions obtain? Indeed, it's hard to understand what they mean, so paradoxical are they.
And then there's the question: would we want such a world. Transience is the heart of the poignancy of Japanese cherry-blossom watching. Nostalgia is at the heart of our fond memories of childhood. Urgency is at the heart of our eager response to deadlines. Do we want to forego these very special parts of our human experience?
And yet our devotion to what is past can constrain what is now, and to what is passing can resist what is to come, and to what won't last can devalue what will. It's a devotion that can at times be tyrannical, leading to paralysis, sadness and terror.
And yet you and your Beloved, in whom we participate, are even now laying the foundations of a world using 'bricks' which are our individual dared deeds of hospitality, friendship and exploration, each of which suffused with the time-sensitivities and identities of the moment of encounter, each encounter a world with its own potentialities to explore, and altogether, worlds in worlds. The new principles of significance for these units in the world to come may be other than just succession or accumulation. Indeed there may be new ways to honor the former, the ephemeral and the mortal.
The prayer envisions a world where change does occur, time does flow and life persists, but open, untrammeled by the reservations we have now.
A three dimensional sphere passing through a plane would seem to the Flatlanders inhabiting the surface like a sudden appearance, expansion, contraction and disappearance, change over time, when to 3D observers off the plane, the sphere seems to be in motion, change in location, a notion suggesting that, to observers in higher dimensions, the past, transience, and death may be artifacts of a different kind of change than we suspect, one that someday we will know.
Can I really imagine change w/o transience? Can I conceive of time w/o the past? What about life w/o death? No less than Steve Jobs at Stanford called death 'very likely the the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.' So how could any world work where these conditions obtain? Indeed, it's hard to understand what they mean, so paradoxical are they.
And then there's the question: would we want such a world. Transience is the heart of the poignancy of Japanese cherry-blossom watching. Nostalgia is at the heart of our fond memories of childhood. Urgency is at the heart of our eager response to deadlines. Do we want to forego these very special parts of our human experience?
And yet our devotion to what is past can constrain what is now, and to what is passing can resist what is to come, and to what won't last can devalue what will. It's a devotion that can at times be tyrannical, leading to paralysis, sadness and terror.
And yet you and your Beloved, in whom we participate, are even now laying the foundations of a world using 'bricks' which are our individual dared deeds of hospitality, friendship and exploration, each of which suffused with the time-sensitivities and identities of the moment of encounter, each encounter a world with its own potentialities to explore, and altogether, worlds in worlds. The new principles of significance for these units in the world to come may be other than just succession or accumulation. Indeed there may be new ways to honor the former, the ephemeral and the mortal.
The prayer envisions a world where change does occur, time does flow and life persists, but open, untrammeled by the reservations we have now.
A three dimensional sphere passing through a plane would seem to the Flatlanders inhabiting the surface like a sudden appearance, expansion, contraction and disappearance, change over time, when to 3D observers off the plane, the sphere seems to be in motion, change in location, a notion suggesting that, to observers in higher dimensions, the past, transience, and death may be artifacts of a different kind of change than we suspect, one that someday we will know.
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