Swiftly Tilting

I have some writing assignments due soon, so I've been procrastinating as much as possible by reading lots of juvenile literature. I just finished A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the third in Madeleine L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time series, which (like her other books) was, for me, like a long, cool, delicious drink of some marvelous beverage on the most wiltingly hot summer day. The book concerns time travel undertaken to save the planet from nuclear conflagration, which, contrary to the outcome you would expect if you'd read a lot of comic books or watched a lot of the original Star Trek, in this case actually works.

This blog and its comboxes have featured some previous discussions of time travel, and sometmes I think in fact that time travel is the main theme of my writing here -- the notion of a continual traveling back and forth between the past and the present, and the implications of such journeying. As Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." This is a tricky conundrum for the convert: without the suffering and sin of the past, there would have been no conversion (as the "Exsultet" sung at the Easter Vigil says, "O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer"), but in embarking upon a new life we would like to travel as lightly as possible, leaving much of the past behind. I think perhaps the main themes of this blog are 1) the fact that such leaving-behind is not possible, and 2) my struggles to weave the past into my present and future in a way that will not degrade or undermine any of these three states -- states which, if you accept the proposition that time is non-linear, can sometimes seem arbitrarily defined. In Matthew 9:16, Christ noted the folly of patching an old garment with new, unshrunk cloth, and Saint Paul explained to the Corinthians that "whoever is in Christ is a new creation; the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come." So, in turning to Christ, we are made new; but, as I've often asked in this blog, what do we do with the past?

As the historian of conversion Karl F. Morrison has written (I've quoted him here before):

Conversion is often portrayed as a positive event, a turning toward. It also has a negative aspect, a turning away. The event of formal adhesion [to the new faith] may consist of this flight toward the future and from the past. But . . . . the old life overshadows the understanding of the new. The event may produce a transformation; but something resistant to change informs understanding it, and retention of the old may indeed have been a condition without which there could have been no change.

This came to my mind the other morning, when I turned on the radio and heard the opening strains of Ravel's String Quartet, which I've also written about here before. I wondered if I would be able to hear it without breaking down or resorting to the destructive dodge of replacing the present with the tantalizing memories of the past for which that evocative music was the soundtrack. While I never in my wildest dreams imagined I'd hear the quartet while clipping coupons at my kitchen table in Appalachia, I managed to get through it all right somehow.

Toward a Theology of Time Travel and Forgiveness

A while back, I wrote about praying for the dead as if they were still alive. I recently heard a priest mention this practice as one that Saint Padre Pio undertook for a beloved uncle of his; he prayed, for many years after the man's death, that his uncle would receive every grace he needed at the hour of his death.

Because God exists in eternity as well as in time, and because therefore, insofar as we are made in His image and have immortal souls, we do too, I wonder if it's wise to pray not only for the dead in this fashion, but also for the living. Can we pray for those who are still alive and have suffered difficulties, that they might receive the help they need in their difficulties, even if the difficulties are long since passed and over? Can we go so far as to pray for different outcomes from the ones that apparently were reached as a result of these difficulties? Or is this the stuff of the original Star Trek series and a Batman comic I once read, in which the possibility of going back in time to kill Hitler before he can unleash his destruction upon the world is treated seriously? (In the end, for various reaons, it never works.)

It may be at worst delusional, and at best a waste of time, to pray that the things that happened, happened differently. But perhaps it's effective in ways that we can't see or understand. A prayer is not the same thing as a wish, and to wish that things had gone otherwise is not the same as praying that those who suffered were blessed in the midst of, or were given unseen graces to withstand, the suffering. I suppose that my prayer for those who suffered is not that it was different (though my wish is that it was), but that it was salutary. I pray for the assurance that their suffering was part of God's will, and that it will bring them holiness, even if that holiness is an unknown, unfelt motion in their souls.

Sometimes I'm tormented by the suffering I caused others through my selfishness, hunger, and need. Some of those others, I'm sure, would be happy to forget me completely. I know that God has forgiven me for my sins, but I do not know that the people whom I've hurt have, and it is a sad thing to recognize that I will probably go to my grave not knowing, and without ever being able to attempt to put right what I have made wrong. The psalmist says "Against you only have I sinned," but really it's not against God only; all of our sins have social consequences.

God's forgiveness is a mystery. David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" killer, had a notorious prison conversion, so we are encouraged to assume that God has forgiven him for his heinous crimes; after all, nothing is impossible with God. But does that mean that Berkowitz will make it to heaven, while his victims, who may not have repented of their own sins before their unjust deaths, may not? This is a continuum that I cannot understand, and I wonder if some conversions are better left between the convert and God.

On a far less dramatic scale, though, I wonder about those I've hurt. I pray that they have everything good in their lives, and especially that they know and love God. I am conscious that I have many good things that I don't deserve, and that this might appear unjust to them. In fact, I deserve nothing that I have, but I pray that I will be a sign to others, especially those I've wronged, not of injustice, but of God's unfathomable mercy.