YeKengalé

After what appeared a fiasco this past Sunday and a review of Dr. Strange, a sci-fi which explores the concepts of time and eternity and the purpose of man in both, my reflections have returned to the theme of time and how we function in it.

In Jamaica we have a special term for being out of sync with time and purpose. JMT. A zone of lateness without the finality of an RIP.

‘Better late than never’ however has its limits. Apparently for somethings, ‘never’ just might be the better option. A wedding for the groom could well be such a situation. Making the necessary preparations, including every possible contingency to avoid that kind of lateness seemed important enough that Jesus himself should use the analogy, though wisely removing himself from the equation and putting the onus on his entourage to be ever prepared for whatever time he shows up, which is always going to be the right time.

He repeated the lesson with Lazarus giving sufficient binding evidence to the concept that God, being transcendent of time is never bound by its dictates. There is no ‘late’ for the God of the living, not the dead. Although after my relative best efforts (the concept of one’s personal best is always relative to one’s appreciation of their unlimited potential) in making every contingency to be on time, last Sunday; and thinking for a moment that I had made it, the file having finished uploading just seconds before I burst through the door of the radio station with now readied flash drive in hand to deliver to the engineer just two minutes before broadcast time. It seemed I had just made it in the nick of time, until another unforeseen (by me) trial presented itself, burning up my efforts like wood, hay and stubble.

Trusting the God that sees every element in time and space is specially difficult for the time bound. It goes against the grain of our mindset. Even after being convinced that such a God exists and is eternally present in and unchangingly benevolent towards my life… and I can remember the moment the conviction formed…

Under the teaching of Pentecostalism that the Divine may choose to break the space time continuum to deliver a personal message to his space-time constituents, I remember witnessing such a moment when, as expected under the doctrine, an inspired messenger stood up, and under divine unction, delivered such a message in code to be interpreted by another.

While much easier for the rational mind to dismiss glossolalia as gibberish, what I saw with my own eyes convinced me beyond all equivocation that that moment was much more. I saw two persons speaking the same ‘gibberish’ in perfect sync as if they had practiced and prepared a performance recitation. I knew both personally (one of them was my brother, who was not even aware that he was being mimed by his spiritual supervisor who had tapped in to the unction of utterance for purposes of authentication. I watched closely. There undoubtedly was a common and unseen source of the message that was being manifested through two brains perfectly phase-locked in the utterance of spontaneous ‘gibberish’.

Having witnessed this gift that allows human consciousness to transcend space-time throughout the years, I am always in awe of the abilities it unlocks – to see at a distance and even affect at a distance the elements of space. Some of the things I have seen can only be described as astounding, astonishing or incredible to a culture still operating within the axioms of philosophical materialism. But for all of the awe and wonder, what has preoccupied my mind mostly is meaning. What do these experiences teach us about ourselves and the nature of being ?

For all of the exciting lessons learned so far, which inform the vision of a future even stranger than the wildest imaginations in science fiction, now awash with common themes heretofore communicated mainly by secluded mystics on the fringes of orthodox religious practice – visions of electromagnetic portals for physical teleportation of both objects and human subjects; technology -free telecommunication systems or telepathic community networks and the exploration of dimensions, worlds and beings hitherto impossible due to the incapacity to conquer the seemingly eternal expanses of space. Yet the final frontier is not the conscious manipulation of space and its content of things, but of time itself and its context of beings (remembering, since we oft forget – time is a relational concept).

I have written about this subject time and again in my blogs. While from our present vantage point in our understanding and experience of reality, there seems to be only one past and several futures. I wont even bother to try to blow up that mindset here but rather use it to make my point. The point at which the one conjectural past determines to select one from many possible futures is called the ‘moment of decision’ and understanding that moment, referred to in quantum physics as the point of collapse of the wave function, requires us to understand human will, (intentionality) impossible without first exploring the mystery of human being (identity). This is the rationale behind my philosophical fixation with political elections – the conjectural collective exercise of human will within human culture – the collective expression of human being)

But to leave those heady contemplations, and dwell on simpler truths, we turn our attention to the theological understanding of the Will of God and more importantly, our being in the will of God. Knowing that God’s will transcends time, (would to God that the self proclaimed ‘prophets’ understood this) the notion of syncing time with eternity is the whole premise of all practical Christianity, coded in the immortal words: “Thy kingdom come” ( the outworking of :Thy will be done’ i.e. whoever has the power to perfectly manifest intention or determine reality is the possessor of power, sovereignty and majesty):

While many ignore the teachings of Jesus that such an objective (the will/kingdom of God) is not achieved by observation, and yet remain expectant, looking towards the eastern sky for some sign of His appearance, we miss the moments of the Bridegroom’s coming in the clouds of our crises, exasperated that his arrival seems to us to be late.

I have a secret. He’s never late. He’s always ON TIME. That’s sufficient reason for us to rest in peace.