DEEP TIME AND STAR DUST

Deep Space Nebula, Hubble Telescope

Scientists have coined the term “deep time” to better help us human beings get our minds around the concept of the fourteen billion years or so that have possibly transpired since our Creator God spoke the heavens and earth into existence. Deep time is analogous to “deep space”, the vast expanse of our universe and beyond. We humans first began to comprehend relative time to position a sequence of events such as the sunrise and then the sunset. The concept of absolute time followed as we began to methodically track the duration of events in numerical terms such as the twelve hour passage of time from midnight to high noon, as it relates to our perspective with the sun from our planet earth. The concept of time is one devised by mankind so that we’re not late for time consuming meetings. Our creator is timeful and isn’t bound by time. The concept of eternity is also hard for us mere mortals to get our mind around. Time for us is very real and very temporal.

Richard Rohr writes in his book Falling Upward that “Once a person moves to deep time, he or she is utterly one with the whole communion of saints and sinners, past and future. In deep time, everybody matters and has his or her influence, and is even somehow ‘present’ and not just past.” Our creator experiences His creation through every life force in deep space and time. We have the privilege of living now on the leading edge of that deep time and we’ve been created in His image out of the Big Bang’s star dust to collaborate in how this creation continues to evolve. We’ve been endowed with the free will to participate in the process of creation’s expansion or destruction. We can simply join the legions of apatheists and do nothing either way or we can actively choose to leave a legacy of growth and goodness. And at the end of our journey, our physical being reverts to the star dust of creation as our spiritual being becomes one with all consciousness in deep time.