Where does the time go?

It's more than some obscure psychological law of association. It's more like some kind of mystical connection, some sorcerer's logic, almost a type of Zen koan.

It began last week when a honeymooning couple from Chicago was in Lima, Peru, while on a tourist junket to exotic places like Iguazu Falls and Machu Picchu. The bride tried to explain her view of time and the man said, "Aw, you have such crazy ideas!" But it wasn't a crazy idea to me, and it set me off on a series of what I call "mystical associations."

For one thing, I began recalling winters at the major seminary in rural Ohio, where our third-floor rooms looked out upon empty farm land and (before aluminum storm windows were invented) the west wind fairly roared through the loosely fitted glass window panes. The cold entered our rooms unhindered. And once inside, the warm air escaped through the keyhole of the inside door, but the cold itself remained there, piling up like drifts of snow or clouds of cold steam. It's not only that we felt the cold in our bones, but more, we could almost see the cold filling up the room with a great density and intensity. Cold itself does not occupy space as such and, therefore, with the air escaping through the keyhole, the cold just stayed there, increasing and multiplying like some glob from outer space.

Then I thought about that theory of sound which says that sounds are physical waves and that they go out into space indefinitely and that all sound is still traveling through space. By this theory, if one could go faster than sound, one can overtake, say, the sounds of the battle of Gettysburg and out there in space somewhere one can hear all the sounds as they actually occurred on July 3, 1863.

Anyway, what Judy actually said, sitting there in a small fishing village south of Lima as breakers came crashing through a cave in the rocks, was this: "Everyone asks: Where does time go? I have this idea that there is a space somewhere and all time goes there and it accumulates there and somehow we will all get there and at our leisure we can re-examine and re-live all 'the times' we've had."

We were snacking on a mixed seafood platter called Jalea. John thought Judy's idea was crazy. Even on his honeymoon, he thought it was a crazy idea.

But I liked it. I think it's a good postscript to the tenth chapter of Saint Augustine's Confessions where he says: "If no one asks me, I know what time is. But if you ask me, then I don't know what time is."

But why not? Time is all piled up somewhere, like all that cold in my seminary room. And eternity is having the simultaneous and unending opportunity to put all the times together in any combinations we like.

It's what the prophets have always done with their loss of perspective on time. So Mary puts the time of the Resurrection before the time of Christ's birth and, as one legend has it, one of the Three Kings arrives at the time of the Crucifixion. With my parents, I can enjoy their wedding day. There is no end to the possibilities. Imagine the time that John and Judy had on their honeymoon.

We simply must get out there faster than time, to get ahead of it, to get to that place where time goes.

Ernest W. Ranly, C. P P. S., is a missionary priest in Peru. His last piece for Commonweal (July 17, 1992) was "A Spirituality for the End-time," a theological reflection on living amidst the terror of the Shining Path guerrillas.