Psalm 77 v 11

I will remember the works of the Lord

and call to mind your wonders of old time

It probably reflects my characteristic impatience that two phrases ring out from my childhood. ‘All in God’s good time’ and ‘When God made time, He made plenty of it’. I remembered this when I was thinking about the oddity of leap year with its magical extra day. Now, God may have divided the light from the darkness and called the light day and the darkness night, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t decide a year would be 365 and a quarter days long, thus requiring an extra day every fourth year to avoid another ‘give us back our eleven days’ scenario.  So while clocks and calendars are humankind’s way of measuring our lives, they don’t encompass our experience of time. We know that time is elusive, obeys its own reality, not ours. People talk about the endless summers of their childhood and of time speeding up as we grow older.  Think of the elongation of time from the point at which you know you can’t avoid an accident and its actual occurrence.  Think of the occasions when you are suddenly ambushed by the sense of something having happened to you before your current experience. There are so many occasions when time drags, or flies, or stands still.

Time and space are basic concepts in use in physics, but my understanding is that science doesn’t claim to explain them, so for now at least, there is room for other interpretations of the mystery. I love the notion of time being bendy, elusive, beyond our understanding. I suppose I’m trying to make sense of the fact that someone with whom I shared my life for almost fifty years is now not here, but clearly not ‘gone’.  So Philip no longer exists  in calendar time, but in what the church would call ‘eternal life’, although that notion is too easily elided with our earthly experience of time and, in consequence, becomes almost unbearable. All those souls! Floating about vaguely for ever and ever! That childish image of mine has given way to an acceptance of the mystery of God’s good time, where we all exist in the divine, in the time that has no past, present or future, but is here, now and always.