Marriage, Family and the Nature of Spacetime

As the calendar year draws to a close, we celebrate the feast of the Holy Family: Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and take note of the passage of time.  The year ends with a feast that celebrates the importance of families.  In Sunday’s scripture, the prophet Sirach reminds us to honor our father and mother, while Paul’s letter to the Colossians encourages us to “put on heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience,” virtues that are necessary in every family if love is to be put into action.   In the final two days of the year, scripture reminds us that the world is passing away, but Christ has conquered the world, “And whoever does the will of God will live forever.”  (1 John 2: 17)   Scripture for the last day of the year warns, “Children, it is the last hour… the antichrist is coming,” and the gospel reminds us, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  (John 1:1)  What are we to make of this warning and promise as we end one year and begin another?

Contemplating the beginning and the end of time makes me think about the nature of time itself.  After all, our lives are essentially a passage through time.   Scientists have only recently agreed that time did not exist before the “big bang,” a notion St. Augustine wrote about 1600 years ago.  In his theory of relativity, Einstein explains that time is influenced by velocity and gravity.  This effect, referred to as time dilation, has been tested on fast moving space shuttles where clocks run slightly slower than on earth.  This is the nature of spacetime as physicists now understand it, and since all of nature seems to be a metaphor for the unseen realities in life, I wonder if this is why the years seem to go by faster as we age, and our lives slow down.   The older we get, the faster the years seem to pass, and maybe that’s because we’re moving slower than we did in our youth, and because each succeeding year is a smaller and smaller percentage of our entire lifetime.  In our youth, we raced through life, always wishing time would go faster.  School and work often seemed to drag on forever as we hustled through our busy lives.   But now that I’m retired and moving slower, it’s amazing how quickly the time seems to pass.  Maybe this is nature’s way of preparing us for the end of our lives, when we will no longer be limited by the boundaries of spacetime.

In death, our faith tells us, we will live in the eternal present, hopefully in the embrace of our loving God (heaven), and not in the eternal pain of being separated from Him (hell).  We have this lifetime (Life-Time) to make choices that determine who we are in the process of becoming.   Each decision we make has consequences on our character, defines our personality, and determines the state of our soul and spirit.  Choosing a life of faith, means choosing love and growing in our ability to become an instrument of God’s love.  After all, it is Divine Love that created the universe and all that is in it, including us.  Waiting in a doctor’s office last week, I picked up a copy of Discover magazine and read an article that described serious on-going research into whether or not the universe is a physical reality, or is nothing but a matrix, an ultra-sophisticated program in which each one of us is merely an artificial intelligence.  At first, I thought the article was just a spoof on the movie, The Matrix, but it described millions of dollars of multi-year research that is focused on trying to determine if there is a single source of all the background radiation in the universe.  Seriously!   The concept is based on the belief that all matter is really just tiny packets of energy, following specific laws of nature.  Although the article doesn’t acknowledge it, isn’t this is just another argument for “intelligent design,” or divine creation, if you like.

So, even if the atoms and sub-atomic particles that make up our bodies and minds are made up of energy, energy which may be described as “the Love of God,” the bottom line is that we are here, now, living in this universe for a finite time.  During this time we are alive, we have been given an intellect and free will to make choices about our lives.  If we are granted the gift of faith, we know that God, who is Love, created us in His image, capable of knowing Him, and capable of loving Him and one another.  Faith compels us to choose love, and to put the good of others ahead of ourselves, in imitation of Jesus who sacrificed Himself for us, despite our unworthiness.  By creating us male and female, God gave us the opportunity to participate in the inner life of the Holy Trinity, as instruments of His love in co-creating new life.  This privilege comes about because God meant for man and woman to become one flesh and bond with one another in love.  As spouses and parents, we are privileged to transmit the Love of God to one another and to our children, who are conceived in love and raised by a father and mother in the family. 

Family is so important that God commanded us to honor our fathers and mothers, and Jesus Himself upheld the sanctity and permanence of marriage.   Marriage is the source of new life and the means by which humanity continues.  Sadly, marriage is in decline, in part because people have a mistaken notion of love, putting themselves and their personal happiness ahead of their spouse and children.  And in part because our society has diminished the importance of marriage, treating it as nothing more than a legal contrivance which can be severed without cause, as if there were no consequences.  No one seems to notice that declining marriage rates, combined with contraception and abortion, have resulted in birth rates so low that many countries are no longer producing enough children to replace themselves.  Over the course of the next century, entire ethnicities will disappear, especially in Western Europe where secularism has had the worst effect on marriage and family.

As we celebrate the end of 2013 and the beginning of a new year, let’s give thanks for our marriages and families.   And let’s pray for the gift of faith which informs the decisions we make with regard to loving one another, so that at the end of our lives, when time ceases, we will have few regrets about the person we’ve become, and how we loved one another.  Happy New Year!