The Absolute Zero Of Time Within the Soul

Life could be simple.

Yet the convolution of my thoughts has so often created a cloud of despair that consumed my soul for years, reducing any hope to nothing. It made the concept of life feel absurd. Alone, toiling, praying, asking Him why He permitted such evil. I contemplated life by staring at the disorder within, rarely at the beauty around me. And yet all is within Providence.

Life is governed by Providence, which Father Lagrange defines as ”the conception in the divine intellect on the order of all things to their end.”. If that is true, what within my being is not governed by God? As the incense from the thurible burn, the Holy Ghost knows my prayer before I have prayed as I kneel at pew before the altar.

The events He has permitted in my life have a greater purpose but are charred into my memory. Between the events of life are quite intervals of conversations, and thoughts within me. Are these too governed by God? A thought that arises from Him to set a series of events into motion? An idea that will only fully be realized in Heaven?

The origins of the universe become, then, a guiding image for the birth of a single thought. As the galaxies formed from the fundamental elements of the universe, particles interacting with their surroundings and with one another through the smallest increments of time, so too my life has been formed. The tiniest movements led to the immense, and all was governed by Him.

If the slightest aspects of the universe led to the vastness we see, and all were under His Providence, then the smallest aspects of my humanity are also within His hand. A single thought within. A single good thought within, derived from Him, opens into an understanding of the universe, and above all, of Him.

As in the origins of the universe, my life also has an absolute zero of time, a point before which I cannot trace my interior to a chain of cause and effect. Yet, within that first movement toward good, and in each sequential thought, He graced me with the opportunity to engage and act upon what is from Him. As Jean Pierre de Caussade writes, “He never impels anyone beyond his strength, nor in any way beyond his aptitude.”

He graced me with moments and with thoughts within those moments. Thoughts in which I may grow in union with Him.