I spent several months thinking about the illusory nature of space and time and meditating on “God’s moment,” as Chris had explained it to me. My musing was shattered one cold day in January, when Peter Cymanow was suddenly killed by a speeding taxicab. One moment he was alive—buoyant, optimistic, and full of energy. The next he was gone, instantly eliminated on a Saturday night as he stepped off the curb at Broadway and 106th Street on his way to buy the Sunday Times. His wife and sons were in shock. Standing at the brink of an abyss that rent their lives, they drew on the strength of denial. Monday morning Margaret was at work and Shimon and Paavo were at school, trying to go on as if life were a war and loss was to be expected. That was the family ethic: work hard and never look back. Looking back only brought back pain.
Peter Cymanow had grown up in the poverty of Cold War Poland, losing his mother to a mysterious illness at the age of 14 and shortly afterward losing his father to a second wife who resented her stepson. He had lived on a small stipend from the state, virtually homeless, riding the trains around Kraków throughout each night, as the safest and warmest place to study and to sleep. He was fortunately befriended by Margaret, who encouraged him to pursue his music and his education. He majored in theater at the University of Kraków and sang in a student choir. After graduation, he managed a chamber-music ensemble for the Kraków Philharmonic. Margaret studied physics, and later taught it at a girls’ high school while singing with a church choir that toured Europe by invitation. Because they had married, they were never allowed to travel together, lest they defect. Helped by friends outside the country, they eventually arranged passage to the U.S., bringing their two young children. Life in New York had been financially difficult but personally triumphant. Three hundred friends attended the funeral Mass at Peter’s parish church. Everyone recalled his warmth, generosity, and spontaneity, his resourcefulness and talent. He seemed to us like a born survivor, a man who could always glimpse the cab bearing down on him and deftly step out of its path, under any conditions. He had not seemed destined for an early death.
In the weeks after Peter’s death, I began to realize that I was angry. Angry at the cabdriver whose selfish and careless desire to make time had robbed Peter’s sons of their father. Angry at myself for all the times I hadn’t seen him in the past year. He had worked just two blocks from my office, and we often spoke about meeting after work, but, as usual, I was just too busy and so was he. I was angry at the havoc that constantly trashed the peace I hoped to find. And I was angry at my need for peace.
Peter’s death made space and time seem very relevant. It was the tragic concordance of space and time that left him dying in the street. I took my distress and confusion to Christopher. In the previous four months, since our encounter on the beach, I’d had no direct communication with him. One evening in late January, as I cleaned up the kitchen after dinner, I remembered the graciousness of Peter’s words when he had offered to sing at Chris’s funeral. I remembered the anguish in Jordan’s face when I told him of Peter’s death. “I feel so badly for Shimon and Paavo,” Jordan had said. “Paavo’s dad was teaching him to play the guitar. Paavo was so happy about it.”
“Chris,” I thought, “you helped me to understand your own death, but I don’t understand Peter’s. Was this the freak accident it seemed to be, or was it part of a divine plan?”
“You still don’t understand the illusion of time,” came Chris’s reply. “I guess that’s not surprising, since you’re immersed in it. The concept of planning, you see, implies a progression, a before and after. As long as you’re trapped by the everyday notion of before and after, you can never understand the real nature of things. Time as you know it is at best an approximation that partially explains a limited number of events in a narrow segment of reality. Let go of it.”
“I’ve tried to approach time in the Christopher fashion,” I said to him. “It’s wonderful, while it lasts, but there is a reality to time, and it rules all living things. If I didn’t keep track of time, I couldn’t do most of what I have to do, or most of what I like to do. Don’t you recall how you used to keep track of meals? You would never accept less than three a day, no matter what was happening.”
“Time has meaning,” Chris acceded, “but only within a very small realm. If you want to understand death, you have to abandon time. In fact, if you want to understand the whole of the physical universe, you have to abandon the notions of time that allow you to manage time on Earth.”
I couldn’t argue with Chris. Modern physics has reached the same conclusion for its own reasons. The universe cannot be explained using sensible concepts of time and space. The material world seems to exist in four dimensions, three spatial and one temporal. But the observed phenomena of the physical universe cannot be described using mathematical models confined to 4 dimensions. At least 10 dimensions appear to be needed, 6 of them pure mathematical abstractions, completely inaccessible to the senses. These models transform time into something quite different from the clocks by which we live and the universe into something quite different from the material world that greets our senses every day.
“My real concern about the nature of time,” I said, “is not a pragmatic one. If there is no time, from God’s point of view, no before and after, then there is no progress. How do we learn and grow without time? How do we overcome past mistakes?”
“You don’t,” replied Chris.
“Now I’m really confused,” I protested. “Three weeks after your death, you showed me that life is a process of education, of learning to encounter anger and hate and transform it into love. Doesn’t the whole idea of transformation imply change, and doesn’t change imply time?”
“You didn’t fully understand me,” he said gently. “There is no spiritual self-improvement. You don’t perfect yourself. You already are perfect, in your own unique way. Everyone is. Your task is to find your perfect self and embrace it, or, more exactly, to stop running away and allow it to embrace you. There is no way that human beings, with all the natural fearfulness and selfishness that is their biological birthright, can by their own efforts achieve the alchemy that consistently transforms hate into love. The very attempt to do it will undo it. The harder you try, the more elusive the goal. Stop trying. Let go of time and enter into God’s moment. Your perfect self lives there.”
The idea of “God’s moment” had troubled me since Chris first presented it to me on the beach at Amagansett. It seemed too easy and uncritical; its only requirement, to be fully present in one’s own life. I knew of people who had committed acts of violence while in a state of rapture, believing they were “fully present” and filled with divine spirit. Their bliss was demonic, not holy.
“The solution to your problem is quite simple,” said Christopher. “It can be found in your own perception that God has values, that all ecstasy is not holy and the human brain can be fooled by the molecules it makes. The way you know God’s eternal moment is by what you receive from it. God is love. God’s joy is suffused with loving. If you accept those words and follow them to their logical conclusion, you will understand the true nature of the universe more clearly than you ever imagined possible.
“Notice,” he continued, “that I did not say, God loves. I said, God is love. It would be more precise to say, God is loving. Loving requires a kind of separation. It demands other-ness, because loving expresses a relationship between one being and another. There never was and never will be a time when God exists alone, because God is loving and loving requires others. The universe is the fountainhead of other-ness. That is its reason for being, and ours as well. The material world is not just a testing ground for souls on the road to eternity. The material world is essential to its creator. Matter is ideally suited to the creation of other-ness. Matter has a heaviness and a physicality that makes separation possible. In the material world, God creates an infinite number of separate beings, each unique, with its own qualities and attributes, divinely treasured for its uniqueness. That’s why there is a physical world. Heaven is not a homogeneous, unconscious, unseparated oneness with God. Heaven reaps the harvest of Earth. In Heaven, the infinite complexity of individual beingness is celebrated with a love of such shattering intensity that matter could never support its energy. That is the reason for Heaven.”
Chris’s words entered my brain all at once, in what seemed like a few seconds. There was no repetition, no pause. This was the quickest interchange we had shared yet. I spent a long time afterward sorting through his words, barely breathing, amazed and confused by what I had just heard. Had Chris just revealed a simple, logical truth or led me into a labyrinth of never-ending complexity? To answer that question and really grasp Christopher’s message, I knew I’d have to deepen my understanding of the messenger.