Father Time is a weekly column dedicated to the concept of time in a parent’s life, particularly a father’s life. The point of view comes from a father of two young sons, both under three-years-old, and how time really is just that: a concept.
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Growing up in Santa Fe, New Mexico was a bit like growing up in a living museum: there was always a stream of visitors curious to see what treasure the “City Different” held. As the second oldest city in the United States (St. Augustine, FL had us beat by about 45 years), Santa Fe was, and is, a time capsule in and of itself.
The tourist attractions, however, weren’t limited to Santa Fe. Go 25 miles in any direction and you were either at a Native American pueblo, a Spanish colonial village, or a Civil War battleground. One such place is a small town north of the city called Chimayó. In terms of size, Chimayó is no bigger than a postage stamp, but its attraction for Roman Catholic visitors is on the scale of the Vatican.
The iconography, needless to say, scared the bejesus out of me, and it was in those images that I discovered the idea of eternity, which really made me lose it.
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Inside the village’s main church is a chapel which houses a small hole in the ground. The dirt inside that hole is said to have healing powers, and the shrine itself is a final resting place for crutches, canes, and other apparatuses of the infirm, left by visitors who claim to have been cured of their ailments after applying the holy earth to themselves. Each year, thousands of pilgrims flock to the church to touch and collect the earth, and to pray facing the plentiful carvings, statues, and images of Jesus and the saints.
As a child, I too was one of those pilgrims, along for the ride on day trips from Santa Fe with my family, almost always taking relatives and friends on tour. When not in one of the churches, we would be in one of the many gift shops, perusing the art and booklets, filled with crucified Jesus, saints meeting their martyrdom, and souls in between worlds, on their way to spend eternity with the Father. The iconography, needless to say, scared the bejesus out of me, and it was in those images that I discovered the idea of eternity, which really made me lose it.
Living forever wasn’t like death, which I was beginning to understand. It was more like a punishment, that you would go on and on in one place without end.
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It was in those small chapels, hot and stuffy from the burning candles, the air thick with wax, the eyes of sorrowful Jesus with thorns on his head looking down at me, that I figured out that forever was a real thing. That once you die, if you were so lucky, you would go on to live with God…for infinity. While it may have sounded like a nice thing, it truly frightened me. What would you do forever? Who would you be with? How could that be rewarding?
The idea that living forever warped my head so badly, that even the line from the opening credits of the TV show “Fame” (I’m going to live forever) even scared me. What terrified me was the finality of it. Living forever wasn’t like death, which I was beginning to understand. It was more like a punishment, that you would go on and on in one place without end.
Forever is bound to be something better than just sitting around in the clouds all day.
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I suppose that’s what might be frightening about any particular time in life: that it might go on forever and never change.
I eventually got over my phobia of forever. Now I can ponder a limitless universe without shivering. I know now that What nothing lasts forever. It will always change. It will always pass. Even when you die and go to heaven and live with God, if that’s what you believe will happen, forever is bound to be something better than just sitting around in the clouds all day. It’s something we could never imagine, and it’s likely not scary at all.
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Photo credit: Robert Couse-Baker.