Thirty Five Years and Thirty Five Minutes?

The other evening I checked out Tom Brokaw’s television special on the baby boomers. I am a boomer so I have an inherent interest. He went back more than thirty five years to the late sixties and early seventies to review what boomers had experienced in their adolescence and early adulthood and to consider how those experiences had affected them.

He highlighted the impact that the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy and MLK had on my generation. He spent a significant chunk of time on the message boomers sent with that massive love-in, drug-fest, rock and roll concert called Woodstock. Of course he covered the effects of the Vietnam War and the anti war protests as well as the Kent State shootings. As I sat watching a chronicle of the defining moments of my early life I had this strange sense that while 35 years had passed I was still twenty and really no time had elapsed at all. It was a sort of time warp.

I’ve had these experiences before. I think most people have. There is the sense that we are watching life more than living it. Actually the television show, Cold Case, uses make-up and photographic techniques to create this illusion of the passing of time. It must be fairly common for there to be a popular TV series such as this.

Then this past weekend I was driving down a familiar highway listening to Coldplay. I considered pulling off on an exit but, for a few seconds, I had no idea where I was. Last thing I remember I was passing Grissom Air Force base. Next thing I know I’m more than a half hour up the road with no memory of anything in between and no conscious awareness of how I got there. This experience I know has happened to most of us. It’s thought to be a type of hypnoid experience.

Why is it we have such a strange relationship with time? We say, “Where did the time go?” or “It seems like just yesterday that I was graduating” or “Don’t worry middle-age will be here before you know it.” The Apostle Paul said, “Life is as a vapor.” We obviously don’t have a good grasp on time.

We live in the sensory determined perceptual world. Most of the time we live by and are surrounded with reminders of time: schedules, calendars, clocks and watches. And then once in a while we encounter a “thin place.” This is a moment when the vale between our human experience and the spiritual reality is translucent may be even transparent. That’s when our spiritual nature is briefly free from our humanness and time does not mark events. We’ve glimpsed the timeless, the eternal.

And this is our soul. Only our soul is eternal. All else, all that is perceived, is temporal. So only when living from the soul can we experience, even fleetingly, the timeless. This is only one but perhaps the most common manifestation of the soul’s nature. These experiences are evidence of the soul.

It is here, in living from the soul, that we are one with the Divine. We share this characteristic, timelessness, with All-in-allness. Now, we are not the Divine nor are we even divine but, in the soul, we are at one with the Divine. As Jesus said, “I and the Father are one.” He was clear that he was not the Father yet one with the Father. He wasn’t talking of just himself. He never talked about how life was for him to the exclusion of how it was to be experienced by us.

These experiences are common enough that they are regarded as curious but perhaps devalued because they don’t really fit with the rest of our life experience. And that is exactly the point! Because they don’t fit, because they are not sensory based, because they do briefly transport us beyond the temporal plane they are more, not less, significant.

We must pay attention to them. Not that there is a message in the content of the event. There isn’t. The fact that I was listening to Coldplay and exiting at a certain junction on the highway means nothing. Too many people try to figure out what is being communicated to them.

But the message is simple. Because we are freed from the oppressiveness of the relentless march of time these experiences are confirming of our true nature. Too easily dismissed, we must remember to remember them. After all, this is evidence of our soul. It is a hint that we are already in eternity. And it is a fore-telling of where we are headed. This is a soul experience.