“Eternal beings living in time”

Wendell  Berry is a wonderful writer and a person of deep insight.

He wrote these words in his book

   Jayber Crow:

   And so there we all were on a wave of time lifting up to eternity and none of us ever in time would know what to make of it.
   How could we? It is a mystery, for we are eternal beings living in time.

Perhaps he meant this:
We are not separated  by eternity — some in, some out, by our own definitions and  prejudices. Rather, God claims us all in this eternal realm.
This “eternal realm” includes time, divided by night and day, minutes and hours, months and years. Eternity is larger than our conceptualization of it.

I am wading out into deep waters here.

Let’s just say, there are times when we just don’t know what to make of life and death, matters of the heart, the movement of the soul.

Sometimes we feel this “eternity” at funerals, sometimes when folks do the sorts of things which cause us to scratch our heads confused. Sometimes we feel this eternity  while contemplating breathtaking beauty — glittering stars, a sky on fire at sunset, the stillness of a farm pond as the mist rises.

The God within us is the great mystery we seek. In him “we are eternal beings living in time.”

I came to read this book because my good old, great friend Jim Hazelrigg read it first. I read this excerpt back to him a few weeks before he died.

Moving to the deeper places,
Jeff