The wrinkle in time

The curious thing is that no sooner had my mother died than my dominant mental image of her reverted to the visage of a woman decades younger and in her prime, not to the more recent versions of her 82-year-old face that I have seen day in and day out. As long as she was alive and I was with her daily, I pictured her as her current, up-to-date self, not some young person I had known in my childhood, or the spry Paulette of high school or nursing school age.

Already I have a strong hunch that in years to come (if the Lord tarries), I will be remembering my mother not as the way she looked in her final and debilitated form, but as the woman of a vibrant mind and body.

As I try to understand this strange phenomenon—this erasure of decades of accretions of puffiness and wrinkles, this mysterious noetic pealing away of years of loss of vigor and physical appeal—I wonder if perchance the soul knows something the reason is not aware of. That is to say, what if there is embedded in man some innate inkling that in the new heavens and new earth, there will be no decrepitude but only vital bodies (1 Corinthians 15) to go along with perfected souls?

Mischievous time and gravity conspires to reduce man to a quivering mass of detritus, but whatever success they attain is temporary, unstable, and unsustainable. There is something in the mind and heart of man that wants to revert to the default form in the mind of God of the perfect and permanent form of things.

How does God see my mother? As the way she looked at 20, or the way she looked at 82? Who can say? God stands outside of time. All times are present to the Lord. While you and I live in successive and ever-passing single moments, from which perch the moments that went before appear less real as we reflect on them, our eternal God experiences what we did on a given day at age 5 as clearly as He experiences what we are doing at the moment that we read this page.

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