Eternity

          Just what is eternity? We tend to think of eternity as the accumulation of all the forgotten years of eons past, but it's not.  Eternity stands beyond our years, before them and after them. It's everything outside my season of days in this body.  Every once in a great while you might touch eternity, become aware of it. In rare moments, eternity breaks into your span of time—when the cello hits a certain note that reminds you of something you spend most of your busy  life forgetting, a thing that cannot be put into words; when for a split second, something as mundane as a child's laughter, or a scene of great beauty, brings you an instant of clarity that is gone as quickly as it came; when in moments of deepest passion, or conviction, or love you feel yourself better and wiser than you are—on those rare occasions, you hear an echo of eternity, your distant home, which exists outside of time.  

          In this world, we, all of us, rush from the darkness of not-yet toward the darkness of no-more. We sense our own transience in the changing of the seasons, in sad goodbyes, in the aging of our own reflections in the mirror. And yet, every now and again we know within ourselves that we will not always be enslaved to the tyrant, time. Eternity is reminding us that in her calm and endless embrace, we remain her children before and after time. I do not say that there is an afterlife, as such.  But perhaps, as physicists are beginning to say, all time exists simultaneously, and to have lived once is to live forever.  Perhaps, beyond our season of numbered days, with their troubles and joys, with their woes and their satisfactions, perhaps eternity goes quietly about her business of remembering who we are.