While calmly seated in the living room, I was once startled by a crash. Fifteen pounds of weights had dropped to the floor inside the grandfather clock. For the grandfather clock, time had been lost by the dropping of weights. The clock's weights had kept it going. But many of us have mental weights and burdens that slow us down. The incident with the clock got me thinking about the importance of dropping these burdens.
First, there is the belief that time is a powerful entity of itself—that human life is "time's fool," as Shakespeare called it. The Master, Christ Jesus, proved by his healing work, his resurrection, and his ascension that the supposed power of matter to limit life is false. Following him, Christian Science makes it clear that time and matter are wrapped in the same bundle of limitation and that this limitation is mental and insubstantial. Mrs. Eddy sets forth boldly in the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health, her proposition that neither time nor mortal life is part of God's creation. She writes, "Eternity, not time, expresses the thought of Life, and time is no part of eternity."Science and Health, p. 468;
Albert Einstein is said to have half-jokingly explained his theory to a layman: "It was formerly believed that if all material things disappeared out of the universe, time and space would be left. According to the relativity theory, however, time and space disappear together with the things."The National Observer, August 2, 1971, p. 17;
To the Christian Scientist reasoning from one God, good, limitation is not an entity. Completeness is an entity. Divine Love's tender care, the intelligent expression of God's purpose—these are entities. But not limitation or any opposite of good. In Mrs. Eddy's definition of "day" we find: "The objects of time and sense disappear in the illumination of spiritual understanding, and Mind measures time according to the good that is unfolded."Science and Health, p. 584;
Mortal mind, or the belief in a life of temporal and physical limitation, would have us constantly carrying around the heavy measuring stick of age and applying it to everyone we meet. Jesus commanded, "Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment."John 7:24; His understanding of timeless life enabled him to heal one who had been weighted down with disease for thirty-eight years, and to gain victory over death.
Mrs. Eddy says, "Jesus required neither cycles of time nor thought in order to mature fitness for perfection and its possibilities."Unity of Good, p. 11; It is the very presence of Christ, Truth, learned through Christian Science, that will enable us to recognize the ageless man of God's creating.
As we patiently begin to unhook any weights of time attached to ourselves and our fellowman, we, as well as they, will rise to a clearer consciousness of God's timeless kingdom within. A clear understanding of God reveals that time cannot diminish or add to anything good.
Time, of itself, cannot produce discord or wrong effects of any sort. For example, experiments show that human thought, not time, is responsible for certain tensions brought on by delay. Picture a group of frustrated office workers at the end of a long day, eager to get home, waiting for an elevator that seems terribly slow in coming. In just such a situation as this the problem is said to have been solved by the installation of mirrors beside the elevators. People become so absorbed in watching themselves in the mirrors that the wait is forgotten. And most of us can remember when an interesting hobby or project made us lose all sense of time.
Christian Science sets up the mirrors of man's true spiritual selfhood. One becomes interested in what God and His reflection, man, are doing. No matter the level of his understanding, he finds he is free to become conscious now of the kingdom of heaven and of God's loving purpose for him. God's purpose realized unhooks the weights of frustration, futility, delay, or whatever holds down our expression of vitality and purpose.
Perhaps the weight that hangs heaviest in human thought is the conviction that good can come to an end. But it is Love's purpose that we should drop the belief in time's dead-end street. Then we may rejoice with Paul in "the end everlasting life."Rom. 6:22;
Paul's declaration of freedom from the weights of time is gloriously expressed for all in these words: "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."8:38, 39.
