iMonk | November 2005

Soquel, California — Monday, November 14th

Eternity

I started thinking about eternity after my last blog referring to some of the horrors of hell, perhaps because I remembered that Christians believe that hell is a place where you suffer for all eternity — or perhaps just because of my guilty conscience.

How long is eternity?

Eternity is a concept that is too difficult for us to fully comprehend, too difficult for us to thoroughly understand, because everything in our limited experience of this physical world has a beginning and an end, but eternity postulates an existence in an infinite world that is beyond our cognitive experience, a world that is beyond the jurisdiction of time.

So how can we understand eternity?

Forty years ago, at one of the catechism classes that I used to attend at the Christ the King Catholic Church in Durban, South Africa, my old parish priest, Father Carey, gave one of the best descriptions of eternity that I have ever heard:

"Imagine a mountain made entirely of grains of sand," he began. "The biggest, highest mountain that you can imagine, made up of millions of billions of grains of sand," he said, pausing until we all had that mountain vividly fixed in our minds.

"Now imagine that every one-thousand years, a sparrow comes to this mountain and carries off one little grain of sand. Once every thousand years," he reiterates.

"That means that since the time of our Lord Jesus Christ until now, only one grain of sand would have been removed. That means that by the time that little bird has carried off one thousand grains of sand, one million years will have passed!"

This is getting to be way too much for my tiny little brain to handle!

"When that entire mountain..."

My mind races ahead—

"...has completely disappeared..."

and the enormity of eternity—

"...when every single grain of sand..."

is beginning to make my head hurt—

"...from that enormously high mountain..."

My tiny brain clicks and whirrs like I'm trying to play Doom—

"...has been carried away by the sparrow..."

on a DOS PC with 640K RAM—

But Father Carey isn't finished with his description of eternity yet:

"...that would be like the morning..."

Snap!

"...of the first day..."

Crackle!

"...of eternity..."

Pop!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Error reading drive A:

Abort, Retry, Fail? _

URL: http://www.imonk.net/05/november2.html
Layout by iMonk — November 14th, 2005.