“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” I love these words from William Faulkner, whose work grapples with the nature of time – how the past and present wrestle with one another in our mind’s eye. His characters are haunted by their pasts, comforted by their memories, tortured by the yearning to step outside of time itself. In other words, his characters are so recognizable to us.
All of us wrestle with time. We want to imagine that time turns onward simply, one moment following the next, like a string of pearls. In the Church, we call this time Chronos. Most simply, it is chronological time. It is the time we can watch on a clock or check off on a calendar. Christians mark Chronos with the Daily Office, beginning and ending each day with prayer.
But you know that time is more complex. The Church often steps into Kairos, which is God’s time. God’s time is not linear. It is complex. In Kairos, the past, present and future converge. God’s redemptive acts in history are made present to us today; our eschatological hopes are fulfilled, even now. In his Letter to the Galatians, Paul calls Kairos “the fullness of time.” We step into the fullness of time every Sunday when we celebrate the Eucharist. As a piece of our discussion on the building blocks of a Eucharistic prayer, we’ll talk more about this mystical reality on Sunday in the Adult Forum. I hope you can join us.
I’ve been thinking about the mysteries of time a lot lately. Every time I approach the Altar, I think of the priests who have prayed in that place before me, who have genuflected on those steps, who have sung the Sursum Corda. When we process into the sanctuary, I think of the souls who have been ordained or married or buried at the crossing. I think of the countless faithful who spent their lives building up and loving and passionately disagreeing about this special parish. Most of their names we will never know, their stories we will never hear. Nevertheless, we are recipients of that which they have passed down to us.
And of course, their presence is not only a matter of history. Our beloved departed are alive, here with us, especially when we celebrate the Eucharist. As we pray every Sunday: “Therefore, with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify [God’s] glorious Name.” We worship the Lord with them every Sunday. The past surely is not dead. It is not even past.
Good Shepherd is ours, but only for a little a while. It has been entrusted to us by those who came before. And, in God’s good time, we will pass it on to those who will come after us. How do we want them to remember us? What gifts do we hope to give them? When our names and our stories have been forgotten, what do we pray will remain?
Here’s my dream: I pray that 100 years from now, folks will walk through the Parish House and gaze fondly at old photographs from the 2020’s. They will see your faces, preserved by technology which will seem terribly antiquated. They will see fingerprints of your labors - in a beautifully cared for Nave, in wonderful classrooms for children, in a well-loved and maintained organ, in a long tradition of vibrant and exciting programming, in a reputation for heartfelt and generous service, in a parish full of life - and think, “Thank God for the saints who came before me in this place. Without their work, all this” – whatever it may be! – “would not be possible today.”