quote:

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from Kallistos (Timothy) Ware's "The Inner Kingdom", chapter: Time: Prison or Path to Freedom?

Time as the freedom to love

Let us turn now to our second point. Time from a Christian perspective is one of the means whereby God evokes and guarantees our created human freedom, our freedom to love. The notion of freedom-both divine freedom and human freedom-is fundamental to the Christian doctrine of creation. "God is truly present and operative only in freedom," claims Nicolas Berdyaev. "Freedom alone should be recognized as possessing a sacred quality."14 As Seren Kierkegaard has rightly insisted, "The most tremendous thing granted to humans is choice, freedom."15 God created the world in freedom, and He willed that the beings whom He formed in His image should likewise be free. As a Trinitarian God, a God of shared interpersonal love, He desired that we humans in our turn should be joined to Him in a relationship of mutual love. Mutual love, however, presupposes freedom, for where there is no voluntary choice there can be no love. Love cannot be constrained, but can only be tendered willingly; God is able to do anything except compel us to love him. Love comes always as an offer to which the beloved is invited to respond in freedom.

By creating in this way a world of persons capable of freely responding to Him in love, God accepted to restrict, in some measure, the exercise of His omnipotence. He "withdrew" as it were from His creation, "distancing" Himself so that His creatures might have room to love. Creation involves a divine self-limitation, what the sixteenth-century Jewish Kabbalist, Isaac Luria, termed zimzum, "contraction" or "concentration."16 In thus bringing into existence free persons with the power of rejecting him, God inevitably took a risk. But had He not taken this risk, there would have been a universe without love. As Vladimir Lossky observes, "This divine risk, inherent in the decision to create beings in the image and likeness of God, is the summit of almighty power, or rather a surpassing of that summit in a voluntarily undertaken powerlessness... He who takes no risks does not love."17

It is in this context of freedom and love that the meaning of time can best be appreciated. Time is part of the "distancing" or "contraction" on God's side which makes it possible for us humans freely to love. It is, as it were, the interspace which enables us to move towards God unconstrained and by our voluntary choice. "Behold I stand at the door and knock," says Christ; "if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him and he with Me" (Rev 3:20). God knocks, but does not break down the door; He waits for us to open. This waiting on Gods part is exactly the essence of time: in Staniloae's words, "For God, time means the duration of the expectant waiting between His knocking on the door and our act of opening it."20 God issues His appeal to human freedom: "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" After that He awaits the voluntary response from our side: "Then I said, 'Here am I! Send me'" (Is 6:8). Time is the interval between God's appeal and our answer. We humans need this interval of time so as freely to love God and one another; without the interval we cannot engage in the dialogue of love. On the level of uncreated divine freedom, the mutual love of the Trinity is an expression of the totum simul, of eternal simultaneity, and so it is without any interval of time. But on the level of created human freedom love has to be learnt; and learning takes time, as those who teach or study in a university are only too well aware. Blake has well described our human condition in his Songs of Innocence: And we are put on earth a little space, That we may learn to bear the beams of love.21

Time is thus an all-important dimension of our created personhood, the setting that makes it possible for us to choose love. It is time that allows us to respond to God by our own free consent, that enables our love to mature, that permits us to grow in love. Space is to be understood in similar terms, as an expression of God's self-distancing so that we may be free to respond to Him in love. It affords us, says Staniloae, the possibility of "free movement.. .the freedom to draw near or to move away."22 Without time and space we cannot experience the "between" that unites in love the "I" and the "Thou."

If in our daily life we commonly apprehend time very differently-not as relationship but as separation, not as freedom but as fetters upon our liberty-then that is because we are part of a fallen world in which time has become linked with mortality and death. Yet, although fallen, time is not totally so; even in our present condition we still glimpse its primal significance as a "time of gifts" and a continual miracle. And, because it is God's creation and as such is "altogether good and beautiful," time is not to be repudiated or ignored, but redeemed. Our goal is not timelessness but time transfigured. It is true that in the Apocalypse the angel proclaims, "There shall be time no longer" (Rev. 10:6)-some would render it "There shall be no more delay"-but the time that is to be abolished is the fallen time of death (cf. Rev. 21:4). For the Apocalypse also states that within the heavenly Jerusalem there will be "the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month' (Rev 22:2). This can only mean that, in the eternal Kingdom of the Age to come, the rhythms of cyclic time are not abolished but transformed.23

If the significance of time is to be found in relationship and love, it follows that true time is not simply that which is assessed mechanically by the clock or the calendar. True time is living, personal, existential, measured not by mere succession but by intention. True time is kairos rather than chronos, characterized not by the predetermined swing of the pendulum but by unpredictable yet decisive moments of opportunity, moments of disclosure filled with meaning when clock time stands still, as Joseph found in the Protevangelion, and when eternity breaks in. Time is not just a fixed, unvarying pattern imposed upon us from outside, but it can be recreated from within and used as an expression of our inner selves. We are in time, but time is also in us. We speak of "wasting time" and "killing time," but let us also give full value to the habitual phrases "make time," "give time" and "save time."

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Not intending to make you change your ideas, Greg. But just glad to share with you something that the ETS probably won't be publishing.


Al

The reality of the Godhead, so to speak, is intrinsically relational - or, as Basil of Caesarea put it, God is 'a kind of continuous and indivisible koinonia, (Letter 38, Migne, PG 32, 332a). - FERGUS KERR OP


Edited by - Al2Si2H4O9 on 12/01/2002 4:11:55 PM