By LEONARDO BOFF*
The meaning of life in time is to live, simply to live, even in the most humble condition. Living is a kind of celebration of existence and of having escaped from nothingness.
At the turn of each year, we talk about the time that has passed and the new that is beginning. But what is time? No one knows. Not even Saint Augustine knew how to give an answer in his Confessions in which he made one of the most profound reflections. Not even Martin Heidegger, the most eminent philosopher of the 20th century. He wrote his famous book Being and Time. He dedicated a large book to Being. Until the end of his life we waited for a treatise on time. And it never came, because he didn't know what time was either. Furthermore, it is curious: time is the prerequisite for us to talk about time. We need time to reflect on time. It is a vicious circle.
I believe that the most appropriate approach is to connect time to human life. We consider life as the supreme value above which there is only the Being that makes all beings exist.
The meaning of life in time is to live, simply to live, even in the most humble condition. Living is a kind of celebration of existing and of having escaped from nothingness. We could not exist. And yet, here we are. Living is a gift. No one asked to exist.
Life is always a with and a for. Life with other lives in nature, with human lives and lives with other lives that happen to exist in the universe. And life is to expand and to give itself to other lives, without which life cannot perpetuate itself.
Life, however, is inhabited by an inner drive that cannot be stopped. Life wants to meet other lives because for this there is the with and the for. Without this, life would cease to exist.
The unstoppable pulse of life makes it not only want this and that. It wants everything. It wants to perpetuate itself as much as it can, deep down, it never wants to end, it wants to be eternal.
She carries within herself an infinite project. This infinite project makes her happy and unhappy. Happy because she finds, loves and celebrates the encounter with other lives and with everything that has to do with life around her. But she is unhappy because everything she finds and loves is finite, slowly wears out and falls under the power of entropy, in short, under the empire of death.
Despite this finitude, it in no way weakens the drive for the Infinite. When you find this Infinite, you rest. You experience a fullness that no one can give or take away from you. Only you can build it, enjoy it and celebrate it.
Life is whole, but incomplete. It is whole because within it the real and the potential are together. But it is incomplete because the potential has not yet become real. Since potential knows no limits, life feels an emptiness that can never be completely filled. That is why it is never complete forever. It remains in the antechamber of its own fulfillment.
It is in this context that time emerges. Time is the delay of the potential that wants to burst forth from within and cease to be potential and become real. We could call this delay time. It would be our hopeful opening, capable of welcoming what may come. The realized potential allows us to move from incomplete to whole without, however, making us fully whole. The void remains. It is our condition as finites inhabited by an Infinite. Who will fill it?
It cannot be the past because it no longer exists and has passed. It cannot be the future because it does not yet exist, for it has not yet come. Only the present remains. But the present cannot be seized, imprisoned and appropriated. In whatever we try to imprison it, it has already become the past.
But it can be lived. When it is intense we do not even realize that it has passed. It seems that time did not exist. It is the dense and intense time of two people who are passionately in love. It is the time called kairos, different from kronos, always the same as the time on the clock.
Is it possible to represent the present? Yes, it is with eternity, because only it is an is. Every present has something of the eternal, because only it is. One day it was and one day it will be. But only it is an is. That is why the “is” of time represents the possible presence of eternity. It is up to us to live it with the greatest intensity possible, because it soon fades into the past.
In any case, we find that we are immersed in the eternity of the is. It is not a frozen quantity of time. It is a new quality that never stops, always comes and goes: it comes from the future and then passes through us towards the past. It is the pure, ungraspable presence of the is.
For us who are in time, it is up to us to live this “is” as if it were the first and the last. In this way, we participate, fleetingly, in the eternity of the is. And by becoming eternal, we participate in He who always is without past or future.
This is what comes under a thousand names: Tao, Shiva, Allah, Olorum, Yahweh. This, Yahweh, revealed himself as “I am He who I am”, better said: “I am what is that always is”.
Who knows if one of the meanings, among others, of our existence in time is not to participate in this time? And in the words of the mystic Saint John of the Cross, for a moment, “to be God, by participation”. And here the noble silence is worth it because there is no room for any more words.
Leonardo Boff He is a philosopher, theologian and writer. Author, among other books, of Experiencing God Today: The Transparency of All Things (Voices).
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