The Slow Way Newsletter: This Moment Contains All Moments
a weekly newsletter for all the frantic strivers, serial doers & weary achievers
unhurried thoughts
Eternity is all moments
“There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.”
- CS Lewis, The Great Divorce
Last night I attended my hometown’s local high school football rivalry. This game has been played for something like 65 years, and every year the 15,000 seat stadium fills with students and parents, lifetime fans and people who just like local football. It was just the same as the last time I attended the game twenty-four years ago. Except this time I sat on the opposite side, where my nieces and nephews have all gone to school.
Brooksie and I both wore my mom’s Amarillo High Sandies tees. (She has one for every year of every sport her grandkids have been part of, which is a lot.) And we pushed my dad into the stadium in a wheelchair. We’re here because we wanted to spend time with him, as much time as possible. His illness is progressing and brain cancer, I’m continually learning, is a beast. He wore this year’s AHS tee, his faithful “Sandies" hat over the Optune device he has to wear daily, and a sweatshirt. He’s been at these games every year since his grandkids entered high school, not to mention the years he came to games on this field as a student in the sixties, and as a dad of high school kids in the nineties. In the past five years he’s cheered a football playing grandson on the field, then showed up just because his grandkids were there in the student section. And this year only one of their five local grandkids is still in high school, and she’s living my dream as a cheerleader. We all sat together, my parents, my little boy, my brothers and sisters in law, my nieces and my nephew who are in college but still local. And we cheered for the cheerleader.
Just this past Tuesday I took a mini-trip with August up from New Jersey to Massachusets. He’s fascinated with Massachusetts in general, the Salem witch trials in particular, and he had the week off from school. So we made the drive, stayed in a weird Airbnb, took tours, ate ice cream, and experienced the general touristy spookiness of Salem in October.
Years ago, when I was overwhelmed with the needs of my growing older boys, and intensity of having a baby with a disability, I sat in the office of a family therapist sharing about how difficult it was to make family memories with my kids. To go on hikes or to a museum on Saturday mornings, or all go for a weekend vacation. She told me something I’ve never forgotten about parenting: “Actually, the family stuff isn’t nearly as important as one-on-one time,” she said. “Maybe you can let go of the big family memories and make one-on-one memories instead.”
That freed us up. And, I’ve learned that if Chris and I pursue one-on-one time, the family memories automatically fall into place. That’s what I was doing with August earlier this week, walking with him down cobblestone, early American roads, listening to tour guides talk about the terrible things humans did to each other in 1692, sometimes sliding my arm into August’s (he’s just the right height!) and laughing when he wiggled his way out of my grasp, like a good thirteen year old boy.
This week I picked back up The Great Divorce by CS Lewis, a book I read back in the fall of 2000 in the CS Lewis course I took in college. (The glory days, you guys.) I remembered literally nothing from this book, and would not have known I read it before had I not seen my college scribble marginalia everywhere. It’s a book about heaven and hell and freedom and religion, and what it means for love to be whole, and what eternity could possibly mean. I read it in bed, in the weird Airbnb room I shared with August, while the stranger sharing a wall with us coughed and watched a continuous loop of “Forensic Files” All. Night. Long, two nights in a row. I read it on the plane to Amarillo, grateful to have my ten-year-old next to me. I read it after getting back from the football game last night, my head full of giant spirit people, and the possibility that choosing love grows us into a glorious reality we can never fully understand on this side of things.
But mostly I thought about time as I read it. It was CS Lewis who lit a possibility in my mind that I might wiggle out of the constraints I had unknowingly set upon my understanding of God back in my college years. And the thing he said that shaped me was not a description of theology or practice, it was an understanding of time. He said that if time is a straight line, then God must be the page on which that line is drawn.
That’s literally the idea that shook me outside of the small theological debates and cultural Christianity I had always accepted as truth up till then. Suddenly God was not only outside of my understanding of time, God was the page, the plane. God was space itself. God was already in the future and also fully in the past, and here right now, in no way bound to the rules of time that the rest of us are stuck following.
And so, last night, in the guest room of my parents’ house, where my brother’s bunk bed used to sit growing up, across the hall from my childhood room where my kids always sleep when we come here, I thought on Lewis’ words of time and eternity: That if God is the plane on which time is drawn, then it stands to reason that the eternal reality where all is made new, where hope and goodness is not only in charge but has filled our bodies into the glorious creatures the spark in our guts always told us we could be --- in that place time contains all moments, “all days are present now.”
I’m in a stage of life now where the hard and the good are so intertwined that I can barely keep up with my own grief and my own joy. Walking with my son down the cobblestone streets in Salem, forcing him to talk to me about his friends and his life dreams, pushing my dad’s wheelchair through the masses and rubbing his neck while he tried to watch the game, his headache slowly overwhelming him. Eternity is a concept we’re not really meant to understand. But what we do understand, more and more I think as we age, is what it means to feel everything at once. To know that if all we have is the straight line, we can’t possibly hold the truth and the glory and luminous light of all that life is.
It’s the page on which time is drawn that is our hope, our life-giver, our answer to the relentless forward motion of time.
And, maybe, eternity actually exists already in those moments. The ones that feel like they contain all moments: My hand on my dad’s neck in the wheelchair section of the stadium where he was once a boy-cheerleader, stunting, throwing girls into the air down in front of the student section. His adorable smile in that white and burnt orange 60’s cheerleading uniform, me thirty years later in the student section, the two of us twenty years later together watching his granddaughter in the same spot, my hands on his neck.
The moments braided together somehow, in glory. Filling us, even now, for an eternity outside of time, where the truth of the life we’d been living is suddenly clear, vibrant, glimmering.
a slow practice
Remember when we practiced box breathing back a few months ago? I want us to do that again today, letting our thoughts settle on a few big ideas.
In box (or sometimes called square breathing), you breathe deeply, giving four seconds to each inhale and exhale, holding your breath between them, and watching your breath move an invisible line down, and across to the left, up, and over to the right, every two full breaths forming an invisible box in your imagination.
I like box breathing for its simplicity, and for the options available. Sometimes I attach a phrase or a simple prayer to the inhale and the exhale, letting my words stay small and contained. This time I’ll give you a couple of options:
You can use your imagination and watch your breath build an invisible plane, the eternal page on which time is drawn. You can let each inhale and exhale stand as the unknowable edges of that eternal space. What does that even mean? I’m not sure, but I think imagining it is a good start. As you watch your breath form the edges of an ever-expanding universe, or the page on which time is drawn, let your imagination remind you of both your own smallness, and the glory of the ineffable divinity we call God.
If imagining a box is a little too abstract for you, feel free to put some words to your breath. Still try to breathe in the square format I described above, but with each inhale and exhale, give words to the prayer. Here’s an idea you could pray: INHALE: “God, you are beyond time.” EXHALE: “I am held in this moment.”
Or, INHALE: “God, you are the page where time is drawn.” EXHALE: “You love and know me, here in time.” INHALE: “You, Lord, are eternity.” EXHALE: “I belong inside your love.”
Set a timer for yourself and this exercise. At the end, thank God that, according to 1 Corinthians, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor has the mind of man imagined, the things that God has prepared for those who love [God].”