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In Search of Lost Time Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 6, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 8:11-20 I Corinthians 11:23-26
How could it be Labor Day weekend already? Where did the time go? This is not a question of youth but of age. Our children likely think that the summer was interminable and found the hours increasingly hard to fill. At least that is my memory of time as a child. It dragged as I waited for school to begin, Christmas to come, the trip to grandmother’s house to be over in order to arrive in her arms. “Are we almost there?” I asked plaintively as children ask at the beginning, the destination being all that mattered. With the accumulation of years, however, we become creatures who long to hold on to the journey. For most of us in this sanctuary, the summer sped by. Was it not just June when rain was the order of the day? Then came July—July? What did I do in July? I cannot remember. Then I swear that the velocity of time literally increased in August. Now it is Labor Day weekend and we are aghast that another season of our precious lives has come and gone so quickly. “Time” writes physicist Brian Greene “is among the most familiar yet least understood concepts that humanity has ever encountered. We say it flies, we say that it’s money, we try to save it, we get annoyed when we waste it. But what is time?” For the next few minutes, minutes already racing into the remembered past, I want us to think first about time itself, then about our experience of time and finally about the way we were created to inhabit time as creatures destined for the eternity that is God. In the history of Western thought, two basic understandings of time have prevailed up until the 20th century. Augustine held that time is the inner horizon of human experience. In sum he says, “The presence of past things is memory, the presence of present things is immediate apprehension, the presence of future things is expectation.” Time is a sort of stretching out of the soul, he said, to accommodate past and future. For Aristotle, the external movement of stars and planets established a standard measurement of time. Time is ticked off by the rising and setting of the sun, the seasonal location of constellations, the length of a shadow on a sun dial. No doubt our internal experience of time is constrained by the external measurement of time. We say as a birthday rolls around, “But I don’t feel sixty.” Nevertheless, actuarially and “Aristotle-y” speaking, time ushers us inexorably toward its limit which is the grave. Enter Albert Einstein to expose the illusion of our division of time into past, present and future. If we were to talk together about what is happening now, according to Einstein, nothing we see or experience now is really now because it takes time for light to reach our eyes. “Anything you see right now has already happened,” says Greene. If you look across the sanctuary, Bill Cobb is seeing Harris Carr as he was some ten to twenty billionth of a second ago. Look at the sun and you are seeing it as it was eight minutes ago. Stars are seen as they were anywhere from a few years to 10,000 years ago. What we experience as present is already past. Moreover, depending on our position in space relative to one another, what you think exists at one moment in time is different from what I think exists. Our concepts of reality do not coincide because our movement in space relative to one another determines our reality. Just talk to a sibling about growing up together in the same house with the same parents! Or imagine being on a far distant planet viewing what is happening now on the earth. At this moment in time through a telescope more powerful than we can imagine, you might notice John Wilkes Booth entering the State Box at Ford’s Theatre. Then, says Greene, if you were to walk toward the earth at 6.4 miles per hour, what you might see now may include the selection of the first president of the 22nd century. The point is this: if you agree that your experience of the now is reality and if you accept that another person’s now in outer space is equally valid, then “reality encompasses all the events in [what physicists call] spacetime.” “For we convinced physicists,” said Einstein, “the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” Hold that thought! Where? In your memory! Our experience of time, in the second place, is as “an ever flowing stream” that soon bears us all away. Time marches on, we say, because it does just that in our minds. Therefore the only place of refuge for the narrative that is our lives and constitutes our identity is our memory, the ravages of Alzheimer’s and dementia notwithstanding. Even in his thirties, Marcel Proust “felt the hours flowing over him like cold water.” He was sickly, writes Jonah Lehrer, “and had done nothing with his life so far except accumulate symptoms.” Confined to his bedroom, he “made art out of the only thing he had: his memory.” But what was his memory in relation to time? In a never finished tome of over 4000 pages whose title I have borrowed for this sermon, Proust’s literary search for lost time in memory mirrors not the physics of his day but the neuroscience of our own. Not the sight but the taste of a madeleine with a cup of tea triggered the memory of Proust’s childhood in Combray. Each of us likely could offer our own moment when the past was summoned by a whiff of something in the air. It turns out that our sense of smell and taste are the only senses that head directly for the hippocampus which is the center of the brain’s long-term memory. There, scientists once thought, our “long-term memory exist[ed] independently of its recall, filed away in one of the brain’s protected file cabinets.” But recent experiments have caused scientists to re-imagine their theories of remembering and so rethink the human experience of past, present and future. Memories, they have discovered, are mutated by time. The past that was thought to be stored just as it happened in the synaptic clefts of the brain turns out to be only as real as the last time we remembered it--like the last copy of a document you have saved on the computer. Memory is therefore a ceaseless process rather than “a repository of inert information.” For Proust, memory was like a sentence that never stopped changing. The pages of his original manuscript were cluttered with marginalia. On the night before he died, he dictated to his maid a revision of the part of his novel describing the slow death of a character “since he now knew a bit more about what dying was like.” In this sense, then, memory is also inextricably bound to the future and acts in such a way that the metaphors of quantum physics come into play. Speaking of the behavior of photons, Greene notes that future measurements or observations do not change what happened today but do influence the details we notice in later describing what happened today—in remembering. Put more simply, “the future helps shape the story you tell of the past.” “As long as we have memories to recall,” says Lehrer, “the margins of those memories are being modified to fit what we know now. Synapses are crossed out, dendrites are tweaked, and the memorized moment that feels so honest is thoroughly revised.” The corollary is that if we attempt to keep our remembered past from changing, it ceases to exist. “This is Proust’s guilty secret: we have to misremember something in order to remember it.” The journey, the process is all! What, then, can we say of the sense of past and future that God has put into our minds, even though we cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end? How are we to inhabit time as creatures destined for the eternity that is God, as creatures who believe that life is more than one damn thing after another? The taste we have that triggers our memory in this community is not a madeleine but a morsel of bread and a sip of wine. “Do this in remembrance of me,” said Jesus. Or at least Paul thought he remembered Jesus saying this and was changed by the memory. In the first place, the sense of past God has put in our minds is a story, a narrative, a memory set down by tribes who had remembered again and again the long way that the Lord God had led them in the wilderness. This was a people changed by their memory and we are a people changed by their memory remembered and handed down. Written in exile hundreds of years later, the community tells the story of life with the Lord God in the wilderness as though it were now. God only knows what actually took place in the immediate apprehension of God’s people. God has kept from us the sense of what God was doing in the beginning. Yet the community of faith became who they were because they had then--as we now have in their words--the presence of past things. We inhabit time as a community in conversation with the presence of things past. As though we were on some far distant planet looking through a telescope, we see hundreds of nomads poised on the border of the Promised Land. “To be a creature,” says Robert Jenson, “is to be harmonized, to fit in an endlessly complicated web of mutually appropriate relations—which is of course increasingly the vision of the sciences, insofar as their practitioners allow themselves to see it.” In the second place, the present God has put in our mind, contrary to both biological and theological determinists, is a present that exists in freedom and spontaneity. To update an old spiritual, it is to say that God has the whole spacetime in his hand. The eternity-that-is-God holds the world from beginning to end in being, knowing the outcome of the presidential election in 2100 but watching it unfold in all freedom and spontaneity. What this means personally is that we may pray in time because “the process of the world is enveloped in and determined by a freedom, a freedom that can be addressed,” says Jenson. “What is around us is not iron impersonal fate but an omnipotent conversation that is open to us. We can meaningfully and sensibly say, ‘Please let it rain’ [or more to the point this summer, ‘Please make it stop raining’] because rain will or will not happen in a spontaneity with whom we can and may discuss or even argue the matter.” Then finally, we were made to inhabit time as creatures whose memory of the past is shaped by the future we know in the God who did not keep his distance but came to dwell with us in time. “Do this in remembrance of me,” he said on the night before he was murdered. Each time we remember him around this table, each time the taste of bread and wine ignites our synapses and calls forth our memory of his love, we are changed. But more, for as his resurrection is the future that helps shape the story we tell of our past, we cease for a moment believing that time will call a halt to the journey; cease for a moment believing that the place we were born to arrive is a grave. For a moment it will not bother us that it is already Labor Day weekend because through him our past has been redeemed, our present has been given a purpose and our future is held in the promise that we were made for the One who remembers us, even now, in paradise. Thanks be to God. |