I got an email from a new friend today who had some of the same questions about eternity that I posed in my previous post. I took the opportunity of her email to write down some thoughts I’ve been having. Perhaps others have some ideas…

About the whole eternity thing…I’m with you…it’s confusing. In pre-theology I remember our teacher saying to think of time as a line with one event succeeding after another. God is not merely the first thing on the line or the last thing. It’s like he’s “above” the line looking down on it. He sees the whole line at once…he made it.

With respect to those who have died, the whole eternity thing seems to be even more confusing. God is of course eternal and always has been. He doesn’t live in time (with the exception of Jesus’ life on earth). Lot’s of questions come up when you start to talk about we humans who live in time, but then enter into eternity. How does that work? I was thinking at Jared’s funeral when we were at the cemetery that the liturgy said something to the effect that “here we lay our brother to rest in the earth, there to sleep awaiting the call of the Lord on the last day.” First, we don’t really believe that the dead are asleep. They’re alive in heaven (or purgatory or even hell). Archbishop Keleher talked a lot about the soul in his homily and that seems to represent what we believe. When we die, we receive our own particular judgment immediately and are “sentenced” either to heaven or hell. Despite the above understanding, what does that mean then to speak of the dead as sleeping, or even awaiting the “last day”? How can there be a “last day” in eternity? It would seem that any event in time, past or future, would have to be immediately present to those in eternity, just like it is for God, everything seeming to be one day, the eternal present.

This is just my personal theological speculation, but I have an idea on the subject (Peter Kreeft and Fr. De Gaal can probably tell me why I’m wrong). What if the dead are in fact in eternity and thus view time kind of “looking down on the line” like God? You could look at the last day, the return of Christ in glory, as the last event in time, the last event on the line, the end of the line where time ceases and there is only eternity. If this is the case, then it’s possible to think that, for us who live in time, the return of Christ and the resurrection of the bodies of the dead are in fact future events. The succession of events on the line of time hasn’t reached the event of the “last day” yet for those on the line. However, perhaps for the dead, they look at the complete line from outside of time and thus the resurrection and the last day has already happened for them. Perhaps they see and experience all of time as complete and thus have already experienced the resurrection.

Again, the above is just my own theological speculation. It does help me to answer another question I have about death though. How can we speak of a soul without a body? JPII and Aquinas and I’m sure many others insist that we are not souls in bodies, we are body and soul composite together. That’s why we believe in the resurrection of the body. We are not “us” without our bodies. To be human is to be body/soul. So, if the resurrection of the body is an event in time, at the end of time, then those who are outside of time could have already received their glorified bodies. If they haven’t, what does it mean to talk about “some point in the future” when they would since there is no future in heaven?

I guess then following this line of thinking death would happen in time. We are then judged immediately at our death. Then, as a necessary condition for being eternal everything potential, including the resurrection of our bodies, becomes actual. It would seem to make sense that to experience eternity would require a different kind of body, a glorified body. Thus we would always be body and soul together in eternity.

Well, I probably bored you to tears by now. I’ve been meaning to write down some of the things I’ve been thinking and your email just happened to give me a chance to do so. I think that what I said above squares with Church teaching, but some things may be a little shaky. Someone else can help me. After you get all this eternity stuff figured out, then you can start thinking about how it is that eternal beings are able to intercede for us and enter back into time to answer our prayers. But, that’s for another time.