Fullness of time

INVITATIONS the past weeks to anniversaries and fiestas led me to visit the Christian concept of time. I thought that precisely on these occasions, this doctrine should be highlighted in the hope of rousing the people to the tremendous significance of those events.

There’s in the Letter of St. Paul to the Galatians a beautiful relevant expression worth considering. “When the fullness of time was come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons…” (4,4-5)

Now, I wonder how many of us realize there’s such a thing as “fullness of time.” This, just like any human element, has a definitely religious basis. But are we aware of it, let alone, of the practical implications and consequences it has?

For many of us, time is simply a kind of measure or record. Hardly anything else. We fail to go to the essence of time, its origin and purpose, its meaning and proper usage. Thus we neglect our duties towards it.

Especially in the celebration of time-related events such as birthdays, anniversaries, jubilees and fiestas, we get stuck with the icing—the partying, eating and feasting—while failing to go to the real cake. We miss the boat. And we do get into some boat, we arrive at the wrong port.

Time is a most precious treasure given to us. It has its distinctively tricky character, since objectively it cannot be stopped or redirected. But subjectively, of course, that is, in our mind and in our personal life, it can be multiplied or divided, saved or wasted, put in good use or bad.

As such, it first has to be acknowledged as a gift from God. It just did not come to exist spontaneously, out of the blue. It has a beginning, and it also has an end. For sure, it is imbued with great purpose.

That’s our problem now. We have taken this fundamental truth for granted and have pursued our plans and our life itself unmindful of time’s natural, not to mention, supernatural dimensions.

As a result, our every instant of our life seems unrelated to God. With such predicament, it looks like we are breathing in heavily polluted and dangerous air everyday, making us prone to fall sick of any spiritual and moral disease anytime.

In worse cases, we already have in some place a well-developed system that detaches time from any religious foundation and sets it completely at the mercy of man’s designs.

It is the awareness of the proper properties of time that we should exert an effort to develop, infusing it in our mind, attitudes and habits. It’s about time that we take this concern out of the world of abstract theories, and bring it to bear on the real world of our day-to-day activities.

It will not be an easy task. But neither will it be impossible. We just need to be patient and determined in carrying it out, knowing how to present the doctrine with gift of tongue, so people can easily understand and appreciate it.

We need to be pro-active in this business. We are losing the battle of the minds and the hearts of the people, as all sorts of isms and ideologies in their unrelenting and endless campaigns to sell their doctrines are all over the mainstream media nowadays.

Time can only be made full when we allow God to enter into it. This is when our time gets reunited with the eternity of God and goes in step with the will and designs of God.

Otherwise, it will just be spinning in its erratic, unreliable course and orbit, purely relying on our cleverness that is at its best finite and limited. That’s what we are having now, and thus the endless troubles we are having.

A sense of the sacredness of time has to be cultivated, showing us how to use it and how to sanctify it. With this proper sense of time, you can just imagine what tremendous good it will produce, and what evil it can avoid.

All of this, of course, should be done following our natural state of life, without making strange behavior. This is precisely the responsibility of the virtue of naturalness, a most dynamic concern since we have to know how to ply our spiritual and supernatural business within our natural setting, and a wounded one at that.