Many Christians who live in the State of Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Syria, and whoever remains in Iraq, have difficulty listening to readings like the first reading of today. It is from the Hebrew Bible, the book of the Prophet Hosea. He lived some 750 years before Christ. He compares the relationship between what was then the Northern Kingdom of Israel and God to a marriage. God, says the prophet, loves Israel. Christians of the Middle East do not share God’s love with the present-day State of Israel. On the contrary, especially in Gaza and in Palestine, Israel is an oppressive, hated occupier.

This is not a new issue. It goes back to the early church when some Christians wanted to omit the Old Testament altogether. That was some 2,000 years ago. But, like all things in that part of the world, it might have been yesterday.

Semitic peoples, Jews, Muslims, Arab Christians, experience time differently than Western peoples. We see time as linear: a beginning, middle and an end. They see time as cyclical, even random, with yesterday, today and tomorrow more or less the same.

For example, the Islamic fundamentalists call the coalition forces, Crusaders. The Crusades happened a thousand years ago. Islam won, the Christians lost. It’s over. For us, but not for them. The Sunni and Shia hate each other over something that happened fourteen-hundred years ago. In our way of recounting time, but not theirs, that’s about time to move on.

But, this dichotomy between East and West doesn’t always hold true. One of the books I’m reading is a biography of a man, written by his daughter. She begins the book with the suicide of her father. Then she continues with the divorce of her parents, then her father’s childhood and so forth. It is a collage, not a chronology.

The American-born English poet T.S. Elliot often wrote about the nature of time. Elliot won the Nobel Prize in 1948. (I might add parenthetically that he was a high-school Latin teacher).

One of his most intriguing poems is called “Burnt Norton,” the name of a manor house in England. It’s a lengthy poem and reflects that the past and the future are always apprehended in present experience, as is speculation about what might have been. Or, put colloquially, should’ve, could’ve, would’ve.

This is only partly the first stanza:

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.”

We are now exactly halfway through Lent. It’s a 40 day preparation for an event we already know: the death and resurrection of Jesus.

(In point of fact, the gospels were written in what we would call backwards. The first part of the gospels were accounts of the death of Jesus. Later, the sayings and parables were added, then the resurrection accounts and finally the birth narratives).

Like the Jews repeat Passover every year as if it happened yesterday, we do the same with the Mass, There’s only one Mass. But it is repeated every day, thousands of times a day.

One of the critiques of the Mass is that it is boring. Young people especially have problems—or at least complaints—about being bored. It is boring if it isn’t understood. Not to mention, being bored needs to be appreciated. Much too much trouble comes from not being able to stay quietly in one’s room and know how to do nothing. (A paraphrase of Blaise Pascal)

To quote T.S. Elliot once more, he wrote: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”

Years ago—if I may use that phrase, the Bishop of Boise required the following note to be posted in every sacristy in the diocese:

“Priest of God

Say this Mass

As if it were your First Mass,

As if it were your last Mass,

As if it were your only Mass.”

We often think of Eternity or Eternal Life as if it is something that is going to happen. Yet, by definition eternity must be happening now.

There are no clocks in heaven.

Finally, a reflection for today. Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was elected Pope two years ago today. Personally it seems longer ago than that, maybe longer even than the years previous. As Einstein pointed out through mathematics, we intuitively understand, time is a contrast relative to the observer.

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