Time Will Run Back

It has been far too long since I have written in this space. Rather than pleading some reason (of which I find none to be exculpatory) let me just say that I am a better thinker, reader, teacher, and writer when I am utilizing this space. So, in short, this is for me. But you're welcome to read along as well. Every now and then I stumble on to a good point. 

I changed the quote at the header of this page. Previously it was a line from a Donne poem--a very good line from a very good poem. When I started this I was taking a class on Donne and was busy memorizing a number of his Holy Sonnets. (I think I could still recite a couple, gun to my head.) I stand by the excellence of Dr. Donne and mean this change in no way as a slight to his poetic prowess and lyrical beauty. The new line, however, from Milton's poem "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," is one that I have been thinking about a lot lately. It seems that the idea of time has been encroaching itself upon my consciousness over and over again. Books, movies, conversations. Everywhere I keep coming back to it.

I've thought a lot about time over the years. It is a remarkable thing. When I had a sales job in El Paso that I did not enjoy, I was so attuned to time that I could tell you what time it was within five minutes at any time of day. That may be the only skill one acquires from watching a clock tick along all day. I felt every moment of every day. That is one way to think about time; waiting it out, so to speak.

Time is also invented, as Augustine pointed out a long time (this word) ago. God is outside of space and time, living in the eternal present, seeing all things before his omniscient vision*. Therefore, time is false, or maybe not false, but temporal. When Christ comes back he will wipe out death and sadness and war and disease and crime and pettiness and sorrow and time. Amen and amen. 

I don't know that I feel the weight of time as intensely as I did when I was younger. The Lord be praised. But I don't think this slackening is due to the weight of time being less profound, just my own consciousness becoming slowly more inured to the effects of time. I am less likely to feel everything as intensely as I did when I was younger. Sometimes we are tempted to call this wisdom. Sometimes it may very well be. Sometimes I am tempted to side with the old man in A Farewell to Arms who tells the young Hemingway stand-in: "No, that is the great fallacy: the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise. They grow careful." Not that I am an old man, exactly, but I am infinitely more careful when it comes to opening myself to hurt than I was as a young(er) man. Maybe that is wisdom; maybe I am just afraid.

Anyway, back to the line from Milton. This little punk wrote this poem for Christmas Day when he was 20 years old and it is better than anything I will ever write**. The poem first reinforces and then subverts the standard Christmas tropes so that by the end we have the infant Christ banishing the gods of the ancient world to the abyss. I'll add Blake's drawing to give you the idea. 

The incarnation is the great moment of the already/not yet dialectic in Christianity. The kingdom arrives but not in full. The king comes but must return and claim his kingdom. As he welcomes the infant Christ within the poem, Milton wishes for a complete and dramatic fulfillment of the promises of the kingdom, for the songs of the cherubim before the shepherds to ring out as "when of old the sons of morning sung" while God spoke the earth into existence. He imagines, and here is where my line comes in:

For if such holy Song
Enwrap our fancy long
Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold,
And speckl'd vanity
Will sicken soon and die,
And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould.
And hell itself will pass away,
And leave her dolorous mansions to the peering day.

The mere singing of the angels is enough to restore the world, to fetch the age of gold, to melt away sin, to empty hell. And Milton wishes for this song to be sung, to enwrap our fancy long, to keep going and going until all is restored. 

I want to pause here for a minute. A couple of months ago my wife and I watched the movie Interstellar. That movie, like so much of Christopher Nolan's oeuvre, is centered on the idea of time. I thought it a brilliant film, but while I was watching it I couldn't get this line of Milton out of my mind. Time will run back. We also recently watched The Theory of Everything, the biopic on Stephen Hawking. The climactic scene of that movie is Hawking's life winding back to the moment he first saw the women he fell in love with and was married to for two decades.*** Again, this line leapt to my mind and I cried as I watched. How badly I want time to run back. How badly I want to step outside its boundaries. How badly I want its pernicious sway to end. 

But, like Milton, I love this world and I love the providence of God. After imagining the restoration of all things and the defeat of sin, Milton comes to a realization:

But wisest Fate says no,
This must not yet be so,
The Babe lies yet in smiling infancy,
That on the bitter cross 
Must redeem our loss;
So both himself and us to glorifie.

And so that is where we are to day. In the process of redemption. In the midst of our Lord's work to glorify both himself and us. In the frustration of seeing through a glass, darkly. In the midst, for now, of time. 

* However any of that works, of course, I have no idea.
** Milton actually wrote about time quite a bit, as certain flashes of his poetry come through my mind. I am actually thinking it would be fun--my version of fun--to study the concept in his writings a little more widely.
*** As a sidenote on this movie, I really love how this is the moment of the rewind. Not to some moment of grand accomplishment or the time he realized how much he loved physics, but to a simple, profound, beautiful, and fleeting moment of eye contact at a party.