The Mystery of Being in Time

Our whole lives have been spent in time and are measured by time. We mark the day of each birth and celebrate it annually. We engrave the dates of birth and death on gravestones. We organize each day and week for the proper use of our time.

We read the daily news and study the history of events through time. We might be bored by the slowness of time at one moment and dismayed by the swiftness of its passing in the next.

We ought to be fully familiar with and understand time, and its peculiar characteristics; yet we are often mystified by the movement of time. “Where did it go?” we ask. “When will we get there? How soon until we know the results of the test? Has it really been that long? It seems such a long time ago. It seems like only yesterday. I can’t believe it’s been so long. He’s always late! She’s always early.”

I have long worked as a psychotherapist in nursing homes. I have worked with a great number of very elderly persons. It has been quite common for an elderly person to comment on how they feel surprised by their apparent aging, when they still feel young on the inside.

“I can’t believe that old person in the mirror is me! On the inside I feel just like I did when I was a kid,” they comment.

A petite 94-year-old lady who sat in a tiny wheelchair once started our therapy conversation by saying, Tom, I did a bad thing today. She could not stand or walk, and her daily care, even toileting care, was conducted in her bed. She had not used the bathroom independently since before she fell at home and got injured and came to the nursing home. Consequently, she had not seen herself in a mirror for a few years. She said “I wheeled up to the sink in my bathroom, and I locked the wheels, and I held on to the edge of the sink and with all my strength I pulled myself up, then I dropped down suddenly when I saw how old I looked. How come it’s so hard for me to see how I am now, and it’s so hard for them to see how I was before?”

Many persons ask, “Why am I changing so much on the outside, but I still feel like I always have felt on the inside?”

Some clients I talk to have shared their religious beliefs, and are interested in discussing spiritual questions, views, and doubts in therapy, especially as they approach the end of their life. A fewer number of persons have voiced a lack of faith or interest in such matters. My role is to assist each person with their specific viewpoints, questions, goals, and needs, and to avoid imposing my values or beliefs into the process.

For many of the clients I work with in nursing homes, the passage of time can be a sad and nostalgic reminder of loss. But for me, as a Catholic, the Mystery of Time is resolved when taken up into the Mystery of Faith.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines the soul as: “The spiritual principle of human beings. The soul is the subject of human consciousness and freedom; soul and body together form one unique human nature. Each human soul is individual and immortal, immediately created by God. The soul does not die with the body, from which it is separated by death, and with which it will be reunited in the final resurrection.” (CCC p.900)

So, the soul is the ‘subject of human consciousness’ – the ‘me’ in my awareness of consciously existing. The soul separates from the body at death. The body comes from dust and returns to dust, but the soul comes from God and returns to God.

The body, as mortal, exists solely in time, yet the soul already exists partly outside of time in eternity. Time is therefore a peculiar mystery for the human person because we experience it in two ways, as we have two aspects to our human nature.

Our mortal bodies age and experience effects of time, but the soul is not affected by the passing of time. Our inner self, our soul, is of course, the same as it always has been, because we have always existed both in time, and partly outside of time.

Naturally, the “I” feels inwardly the same as always since we became conscious of our self. It is not the “I”, the soul, that is changed by the movements of time – only the body.

Now, the actions and sensations of the body do not create feelings of timelessness. Those fleeting and sublime moments when we experience a sense of timelessness arise from the soul in the encounter of prayer, or when exposed to beauty, or uplifted in love.

Body and soul were separated from Spirit (eternity) by the catastrophe in Eden. Subsequently, the passing of time marks our path towards death. Our experience of time is burdened as we “sit in darkness and death’s shadow.” Luke 1:79

But Spirit came into matter and was born in Bethlehem of Mary and carried us across death to new life. “The daybreak from on high,” (Luke 1:78) did visit us on Easter morning, and we now look beyond death to a fullness of life with body, soul, and spirit united in timelessness.

copyright 2024 Tom Medlar