The Greek philosophers were constantly trying to find that which was eternal in the universe. They intuited, rightly I believe, that only that which is truly eternal can be truly meaningful. Meaning was equated with eternity in the Greek mind, even if they did not conceptualize their quest for the eternal in this way. I'm reading Stephen King's THE DARK TOWER series right now, and it is quite good. In it there is this monologue about 'the tyranny of scale'. The human mind can conceptualize the eternal, and the infinite, and once conceived it crushes down every attempt at finding meaning within the temporal flow of things. Buddhism is founded on just such a realization.
So the Greek sought to find some eternity above and beyond the flow of time. Plato exemplified this quest, and believed he had discovered the end of it in the realm of forms. Ideas, mathematics, concepts...these for Plato were the very presence of the eternal. 2+2=4 no matter what happens in the world. Nothingness does not degrade this fact, death cannot steal it away. Ideas for Plato were more real than the things of this world, than physical objects and the things of direct experience.
But other Greeks sought other ways in which eternity could be touched, contacted and shared in. Heraclitus thought that change itself was the only thing that was truly eternal. Democritus thought of eternally existing physical atoms. For Epicurus, the quest for the eternal was abandoned altogether. Enjoy the moment, said Epicurus, for all that is and stop worrying about the grand nothingness that surrounds all we do. It seems to me that modern atheism is Epicurian to the core. But I for one have never been convinced by their arguments that Charybdis is not something to be feared.
Of course the Greeks were not the only ones to seek what truly lasts. The Hebrews, too, sought the eternal. But they saw eternity as belonging to God alone, and His law. Morality, the truly right, was the only thing that really lasted forever. What is immutable, and what will ultimately outlast all, is the Will of God. Certainly, Christians took up this idea. For them, too, God and the eternal are one.
But the eternal-as-good is not found in some abstract law, nor some immutable will, for the Christian. Christians believe that eternity is discovered in and through a particular person. Goodness incarnates in our relationships with other people because God became a person. God entered into the ever-changing, and often unreliable web of human relationships that define this world. And so where we see our brother, there we see our God. Jesus is revelatory of God's nature, and God's presence. That wonderful something, that changeless ground that Plato sought in ideas God gave us in the form of a human being, and in all of those who share that human being's likeness.
Most people I meet, and God forgive me it is not every one, but only most...flawed and imperfect as they are... comes to me as a confrontation with the divine, as an opportunity to participate in what will truly last. In so many people who are involved in my life, I see in them an opportunity to truly know God, to feel His presence. I am astounded and amazed by what I see in the face of the other. It is an opportunity to make my life in this moment truly last forever. The present moment, when it involves relationship constructively entered into, becomes a globule, a droplet, that suspends forever in a realm beyond my seeing. The beauty and wonder of the world, and the human soul, is experienced by me as something eternal. Jesus was God's way of telling us that we can truly trust those moments, and believe. As I've said before, the main thing Jesus saved us from was an inability to reasonably trust God and the world, Jesus saves us from unbelief.
I have a hard time in this world, sometimes, because I let the wonder I am feeling spill over too much into the content of my relationships. I want to tell everyone I meet, "you are so wonderful that to see you now is to see the Face of God." Is every relationship always like that? Is every moment retained and experienced as the eternal? No, not at all. But more often than not, I stand in wonder of the world I live in and the people I share it in and in that wonder is a covenant, a promise that I hear loud and clear: "there is something that lasts forever, that means something, and you have found it."
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