The World of Grandpa Don

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In his book, "Mere Christianity", C. S. Lewis does a great job explaining the concept of the way God can know what we will do in the future without controlling our actions. In other words, God knows what will happen without interfering with our free will.

We see time in a single dimension as a straight line which starts in the past and ends in the future. We travel along that line and the present is a point someplace on that line. We can not go back and can not see the future until we get there. 

God on the other hand lives in the dimension that constitutes the paper on which the line is drawn. That dimension displays the entire line. Time does not exist for Him. And so, God sees every part of our time line as right now. Whatever we do and whatever choices we make are visible to God eternally and without any time limitation. He sees past, present and future at a glance.

I have "known" for some time about the concept of a "timeless" eternity but this is by far the best way, I think, to visualize it.

For a long time one of the practices of Christians, and Catholics in particular, did not make sense to me. Praying for the dead! I had a problem with the "time line". We are told that there is a judgment that occurs immediately after death. And then there is a "Final" judgment. People go to Purgatory to be cleansed prior to entering Heaven. The entire concept baffled me because I was hung up on the time line and the idea of a place to wait for the passport to Heaven.

I was confusing the temporal world with the spiritual world. Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory are spiritual states of being, not material places. That doesn't make them unreal. The spiritual states are  more real than the temporal state of existence. A clue lies in the term "temporal" or temporary. In addition we have the removal of time constraints in the spiritual state.

Without time to confuse the issue, I now see that when a person is born to Eternal Life in the spiritual realm of God, time ceases to be a factor. Therefore, when I pray for that person a day, a month, a year or a century, after they have left this material existence, my prayer is heard by God exactly when it is needed. 

My prayer arrives at the instant of the person's death regardless of the place along the temporal time line at which it was said. God and the person for whom it is intended knows that someone cared enough for that person to pray for them ten, twenty, or twenty thousand times. 

The "purgatory" concept is still somewhat of a mystery even when acknowledged as a spiritual state of being as opposed to being a "place". It may even be more so when we strip away the effects of "time" because we are so accustomed to thinking of the time we must spend there. It seems logical that in dying, a person can not become instantly purged of defects of his spirit and a period of adjustment and cleansing is needed.  And it may be that our prayers, do not change God's judgment but are a plea to the Holy Spirit to aid the individual for whom we pray in cleansing his own spirit. 

If so, it could well be that the effect would be instantaneous in eternity but some undetermined amount of time by our reckoning.

We may be tempted to say, 'He or she was a good person and probably doesn't need my continued prayers.' Maybe that is true but the prayers will not go to waste. For God, seeing that the praying person cares and gives his precious time for the benefit of others will apply his grace to that person either now or at his death. In addition, the person who is the subject of the prayer will appreciate the effort and the thought and intercede with God for the benefit of the person who is remembering them. Besides all that, the very act of praying, for whatever reason, brings us closer to God since it is an act of recognizing His Lordship and an act of submission to Him. It is an admission of our dependence on Him.

So, what happened to "Final" judgment? I think that a person's initial and final judgments may be the same. I take that theory from Jesus' words to the 'Good' thief, "This day you will be with me in paradise."  There will be a Final judgment at the time of the end of the world but that, I think, is another subject entirely. 

I will continue to pray for the deceased every day. I hope someone does the same for me. 

Don Plefka
03/03/03

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