A moment in time, though you could not say how long, where you are eternally, completely, and (to quote Pride & Prejudice) incandescently happy?
I have a had a few such moments.
My heart feeling like it could explode and my soul wishing to capture through a mental photograph this moment where all with the world is quite completely, right.
I have been thinking about such moments this evening upon concluding my second reading of Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy. The story is one I shall not even attempt to recreate for you, because you must experience it yourself. But it is a grand story and involves pagan love and holy love and every kind in between. Throughout this story the couple, Davy and Van, constantly relish and seek out a timelessness within the world. The moments of shared peace, and utter joy at the stillness of the world are those to which they cling most dearly.
Now this comes from a sort of high paganism, an extreme love of beauty and the love of love itself, and yet at the end of this journey Vanauken contemplates the question that this begs: If we so love timelessness, how is it that we are in an environment that is time? It must mean that we were not meant to be in time, right?
"Never were people more harried by time: by watches, by buzzers, by time clocks, by precise schedules, by the beginning of the programme. There is, in fact, some truth in 'the good old days' : no other civilisation of the past was ever so harried by time."
It feels downright unnatural.
I myself tend to lean towards high paganism in finding more beauty in the love of love itself and the world around me than in the Divine being of the Lord and yet this idea, this concept that the timelessness that I have so often felt my heart yearn towards is indeed God's will for us...well it makes my heart so happy I believe it just might break.
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