Space, Time, and How Not to Worry

Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of two novels, a poetry collection, and a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He is the editor of Joie de Vivre: A Journal of Art, Culture, and Letters for South Louisiana, a member of the Creative Assembly at the New Orleans Museum of Art, and a teacher at Jesuit High School in New Orleans, where he lives with his wife and four children. He is a member of St. Anthony of Padua Parish in New Orleans.

Of the legions of Saints with whom God has blessed the Church, pouring the pure light of His grace through the prism of humanity so that His glory can shine forth in every shade, few have touched the Western imagination so profoundly as St. Augustine of Hippo. Like all the great saints, we see in him something of what we are and something of what we could be, were we to let God’s grace be fully operative in us. He was, of course, a genius, one who could dispose of Aristotle’s Categories like a light snack, one who left us millions of words of writing spanning nearly every conceivable area of interest. He was a bishop who fiercely combated heresy and just as fiercely fought poverty and slavery. And he was also a sinner, a man who by age seventeen had fathered a child by his concubine, a man who early in his life despised the crudity of scripture, a man who would pray to become a saint, but not yet.

Perhaps it is in such turns of phrase that Augustine has most embedded himself in our imagination. In the pages of the Confessions, we hear the saint’s poetic musings on beauty, ever ancient, ever new, on the love that calls us to the things of this world, on the restlessness our hearts endure until they rest in God. Augustine gives us our very selves, expressing again and again just what it is that makes being human so strange, so heartbreaking, so lovely. It is through such passages that practically all Christians—even those who haven’t read him—know Augustine. 

The stages of the spiritual journey described in the Confessions, from the Roman baths to the pear trees to the prayers of St. Monica, draw us on in their rich, capacious narrative. Yet there are many passages in the text, especially in the later books, dealing with time and memory, which can be quite difficult. And though they seem more abstruse, these texts can offer us extraordinary guidance in how to live faithfully.

I am thinking, for instance, of Augustine’s writing on time. Not content to pass over one of the most difficult questions in the history of philosophy, one which troubled the ancient world in the form of Zeno’s paradoxes and which continues to astonish modern physicists and philosophers alike, Augustine proposes that time is nothing other than a “distension” of the mind. That is, time draws the mind apart in a kind of triple negativity. We are caught between the past that is no more, the future that is not yet, and the non-extended now that is already over as we apprehend it. 

What’s more, this experience of time is precisely the locus of so much of the human anxiety that leads to sin. Drawn into the past by memories of our failings, drawn into the future by the thought of what suffering awaits us, we find it immensely difficult to be in the present. By being  present, though, Augustine does not simply mean that vapid spirit of living in the now that leads to a kind of spiritual and moral inanity. Rather, he means being present to the God who is eternally present to us. How, he asks, can we hope to be present to God forever in Heaven when we can hardly rest in His presence for a single moment over the course of a day? How can we hope for Heaven when we can’t rest for fifteen minutes in God’s presence in the Rosary, or for an hour in the Mass?

The anxiety induced by this experience of time very often coaxes us into sin. Ashamed of what we did last week, we speak harshly to the friend with us now. Afraid of an upcoming trial, we seek solace in a bottle. Faced with the stress that comes from being embodied creatures possessed of faculties of memory and anticipation, we seek distraction in all the catalog of sin.

Augustine’s reflection on time is especially germane today. Not only have we now seemingly endless means to distract ourselves, to take us away from the concern of performing God’s will by attending to Him moment by moment. We also, through mass and social media, have become spread out in space as well as time. At the tap of a screen I can see what is afoot in New York or San Francisco or Gaza or Ukraine. I can doomscroll my way around the globe in a matter of minutes. And all the while I train myself not to look to what is present, not to seek God’s kingdom as He wills it to unfold through my becoming a saint in the circumstances of life which must in some sense be divine providence. How easily I forget—anxious as I am about the destruction over there, the corruption over here—to attend to the corruption in my own heart and to order the world within my remit for God’s glory. 

Spread out in space and time, we find our anxiety pitched to higher and higher heights as we become more and more dependent on, more devoted to, the technologies which make of us a mere source of profit, an object of advertisement, a slave. 

What, then, are we to do? How are we to quit this anxiety? By allowing our hearts to rest in God, by turning our attention to Him, we recognize that His attention is constantly upon us, and in His gaze we are made whole. If we would quit worrying, we have only to withdraw to a quiet place, as Christ did, spending the dark silence of night in God’s presence so that the business of the day may be conducted in God’s light. Through daily prayers, through the Liturgy of the Hours, through the Rosary, above all through the Mass, we learn to gather up time and offer it to God as Christ did on the Cross. In this way, we learn what it is to live in the light of eternity, praying without ceasing, so that we may begin to experience that presence for which we are made.