crystallized in their present form

By definition of faith in eternal life, Christians are called to live in the future. St. Augustine asserted that there really is no “now.” Psalm 90 reveals that God views creation without a lens of time. In Hebraic and Christian sacred texts, time is often associated with the unchanging of the godhead. The Mayans were obsessed with time, and believed that the past was a clue to the future often as a means of anticipating things like war and drought. Ancient Babylonians thought similarly. In the 19th century physicist James Maxwell said time was a continuous running line with an ordered series of events. Eliade debunked this and said that time is a means for us to order things. He said that in all non-Western cultures, time is viewed as cyclical. In the case of Buddhist tradition- time is many layers of cycles and repetition. Newton thought that time was outside of us; whereas Einstein believed time was in relation to things.

Now we live in a scientific world with scientific examinations of time, but individuals still have the intimate experience and understandings of time as we sift through and sort out our own lived lives. While writing a paper last year surrounding Niebuhrian ethics and the notions of self, I came across this quote and it has continued to stir my imagination.

My past is with me now; it is in my present as conscious and unconscious memory; it is here now as habits of behavior, of speech and thought, as ways of cutting up and dividing into shapes and forms the great mass of impressions made on my senses by the energies assailing them from without. My interpersonal past also is with me in all my present meetings with other selves. It is there in all my love and guilt. The self does not leave its past behind as the moving hand of a clock does; its past is inscribed into it more deeply than the past of geologic formations is crystallized in their present form. As for the future, the not-yet, it is present in my now in expectations and anxieties, in anticipations and commitments, in hopes and fears. To be a self is to live toward the future. – H.R. Niebuhr