Saint Augustine felt a considerable amount of anguish at being “in time.” So much so that he considered it to be a part of salvation itself that we are saved from time into timelessness.
But that raises an interesting question. How can finite beings be timeless? Our very finitude, by definition, seems to consign us to the temporal. Try to imagine experiencing reality in any other way than “past-now-future” (or, as Augustine said, “memory-observation-expectation”) and you’ll be scratching your head for a long time (see, there’s that word again).
Augustine was not setting out to give a philosophical account of time, but merely reflections on his own experience of time. In a similar fashion, there might be a way to reconcile Augustine’s desire to be freed from the moment-by-moment passage of time and humanity’s “bondage” to the temporal.
As the old saying goes, time flies when you’re having fun. Thinking back on all of those moments in my life where I found this sentiment to be true, I can remember what seemed to be “timeless” experiences. If you’ve ever had a moment where you suddenly looked at a clock and said, “Wow, is it that late already?” then you know basically what I’m talking about.
As it turns out, there are only two kinds of situations that I can think of where the passage of time is actually self-evident: (1) When one is bored or otherwise miserable and can’t wait for a certain amount of time to be over, or (2) when one is having the best time of his life and doesn’t want the time to come to an end (and so is constantly looking at his watch and dreading the impending end of his happiness). With regard to (1) you could almost say that there is an inverse relationship between a person’s happiness and their awareness of the passage of time. With a few exceptions, a general rule could be that the happier you are the less likely you are to notice time passing. Since we can safely assume that times of boredom and misery will be scarce in Heaven, we can get rid of (1).
What about (2)? I think there are two ways to look at it. You can deny that the person is actually happy whenever he checks his watch, because at the moment he does so he is actually feeling anxiety and not happiness. But that could be debated. A much simpler answer would be that, in Heaven, the very fact of eternity will mean that our happiness will literally never end. And thus the dread of our happiness ending will never be a possibility.
In one sense, then, it is not time itself that we are delivered from in salvation, but rather those conditions that make the passage of time so painful to us here on fallen, sinful Earth. Just think back to what it felt like when you were experiencing one of those "timeless" moments, and then imagine feeling that way for all eternity, and I think you may just have a very dim idea of what Heaven will feel like.
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