Time is often conceived as a problem for lovers. Think of Romeo and Juliet: they cannot live in time. They want to freeze time, to arrest its movement. In order for their love to last forever, they think they must pause the cascade of time. They think they must do this because they think that their love is “eternal” AND that to be “eternal” means “to be without time.”
Immature lovers say in the fever of early attraction: “I wish this moment could last forever.”
But that is precisely what Love works against —a single moment lasting forever. Love drives us into the passing of minutes and hours, the trials and tribulations of fidelity, the difficulties in which Love is tried and tested. It is precisely in the moments we emphatically do not want to last forever, the moments over which we pray “dear God do not let this last forever”, that Love is proven and glorified —rubbed to a polished brilliance.
Romeo and Juliet wish for their moment to last forever because they are terrified that their love will not, and that, in the end, it will prove not to be love at all.
It is this kind of love that causes Massimo Recalcati to marvel when he reads Odysseus’ refusal of Calypso’s offer to stay on her island of ageless attraction (Homer, 5.236-247):
“It is Odysseus's act, which struck me as a child and continues to do so with ever greater force: How could he prefer his Penelope to the beautiful young Calypso? But most of all, how could he have chosen a woman marked by time over the endless beauty of immortality?” (87).
Real Love suffers the passing of time and, in so doing, gets filled with eternity even as it is incorporated into it. For what is eternity but “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4).
The mystery of Love is that it remains faithful even in the moments we do not want to last forever, for “[m]ystery lies in the beauty of endurance” (Recalcati, 87). Precisely because the beloved endures in Love through the passing of time, their become even more lovely. They have borne time with me, and their person is marked by our co-passing through eternity.
Moreover, the passing of time liberates love from both the Hell of the Same and the Cult of Novelty. Time affords me to know the beloved again and again, the same beloved anew. When I journey with God through his Time, his Story, “[t]he body whose geography, curves, elevations, depths and consistency I know by heart is always made new by the unstoppable passing of time” (86).
Young lovers listen to me: do not wish your moments lasted forever. Let them flow in the river of God’s eternity. “Do not arouse or awaken love until it is time” (Songs 8:4) or force the nice moments to stay and so distend and destroy them. Stand in the flame of Yah and let “all his waves and breakers crash over you” (Ps. 42:7) and your love until, transformed by the passing of days, you see Love Himself face to face.
For God is Love (1 Jn. 4:8) and your times are in his Hand (Ps. 31:15). Selah.