Past performance, infomercials remind us at the very end, with hasty voiceover, is no guarantee of future performance. Now in this pandemic, like any other difficult time, things seem as if they are some new normal and that nothing will ever be the same.
This is true and very false. True enough that our experiences are changing us, culture, and even nature. Once the virus had not spread through the world, confined to some animal, but now things are different forever. Still, eternal things do not change: there is a good God that in His Mind sustains scientific laws, mathematical truths, and His own Will. History is inexorably heading to the reconciliation of God and humankind that was brought to pass in the history between the first Christmas and Easter.
The eternal endures. The seasons change within the eternal as they must if we are to grow ever more like God. As humans, we are a synthesis of the physical and the metaphysical. We have eternity in our hearts, but bodies controlled by the change of seasons and time. This should be good and beautiful, but the diabolical and our own sin has destroyed that perfect synthesis. Times should pass for us so the old good can give way to the new, but in the world as it is just now, no old, no new, nothing in either realm is free of taint.
There are devils and broken souls twisting the metaphysical and the physical realm is disrupted by our folly. We go where humans need not go carelessly with no thought for the rest of creation. We consume, destroy. . . tyrants over creation, not stewards. Thank God for change and the severe mercy of death lest some broken reality last too long.
God sustains and this sustaining power undergirds all that is.Without His sustaining Will all would vanish more utterly than a program for a scrubbed drive. Thank God that we are safe in His eternal goodness. The twists of our history are not compatible with His Will and so over time, as the cosmos experiences time, all is brought into proper order. But what of us? Caught between eternity and matter, God came in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Himself, fully God and fully man, knit Heaven and earth back together.
All will be well if we only cooperate with this divine work, begun in love, consistent with justice. We can be born again and over time, now and at the hour of our death, our souls can be changed and prepared for a glorified body. This process, hard to see now, will continue for us for all eternity. The moment of our death will just be the beginning of a better becoming. . .when the eternity in our hearts will be matched by a physical form freed from decay. We will continue in the City of God forever.
This time, like all times, is an admixture. We can see the good if we choose and we must acknowledge the bad, weeping with those who weep. When this time passes, there will be a new “normal” that we shall think is “eternal,” but that time too will pass as we must as well. Even a journey through Paradise ended for Dante and there his words failed him. He saw Love Himself and he lived happily ever after. This too shall pass and we too shall see the face of God living happily ever after.
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