The Language of the Eternal
December 10, 2024 | By Tori Cook JE ‘27
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There are moments in life when it feels as though God is writing me a letter. Now, I don’t mean to imply some exaggerated heavenly communication or that God wires the overburdened secretary inhabiting the upper middle part of my brainstem to instruct me to refrain from eating the suspicious-looking oatmeal for breakfast. I mean that there are times and places where it seems messages are opportunely placed or people strategically encountered to provide me with necessary help, direction, or reassurance in my moments of extreme need and distress. Letters written in the mouths of other people and signed with God’s signature.
Communication with God, understanding the language of the eternal, is central to the Christian life. Yet, that very phrase poses a profound quandary: language is necessarily and inseparably tied to time while the eternal, God, is necessarily a representation of timelessness. We humans are temporally bounded beings called, as the Christian life denotes, to be in communication with a sempiternal God who is beyond time (Jeremiah 33:3 – Call to me and I will answer you). Christians at least (I’d claim all humans, but it is irrelevant to this piece) also seem to have an innate longing for the eternal, something infinite and outside of the wiles of time.
Why would God make us time-bound? Does this not hinder our ability to comprehend Him and limit our ability to communicate with Him?
Let’s consider this through the lens of language.
Language evinces the human reality that is time. Starting with basic things like verb tense and aspect, human language is characterized by particular linguistic conventions meant solely to convey sequential occurrence. And these conventions are not simply helpful by-products of language acquisition. We discuss what happened yesterday, not because it’s helpful when talking to friends, but because we are incapable of doing otherwise. It is impossible for us to separate the sequential nature of events from our communication with others and even with ourselves. Even in peculiar tongues like the Amondawa language, whose speakers reside in the Amazonian rainforests of Brazil, that have no words to discuss time as a concrete subject or the passage of time, the speakers still understand the world ‘in time,’ sequentially. According to a BBC article discussing a study done on the language, “The study, in Language and Cognition, shows that while the Amondawa recognize events as occurring in time, it does not exist as a separate concept.” [1] Time is a feature of our reality and is therefore inseparable from communication.
This becomes important when addressing the human relationship with God. The Bible instructs that “whatever you ask the Father in [Jesus’] name He will give you” (John 16:23). Christians are told to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), which, when coupled with Jesus’ teaching on prayer in Matthew 6 (the Our Father), must at least not exclude linguistic prayer. This means that, as the general practice, speaking to God occurs in a sequence: one word follows another and the words are sequentially situated thanks to tense, aspect, and other temporal signifiers. God, however, is not temporal. He is not listening to words in a sequence, and He is not bound by a forward, sequential kind of motion. Yet, this is impossible to understand as time is a reality of our condition, a framework we use to view the world, not a thing in the world that we can view. This means that humans are unable to understand how exactly God communicates with and understands us. Yet, the Christian psyche still longs for the eternal.
Does our lack of understanding not make it difficult to be drawn into relationship with God? Human relationships are fostered by communication in time, which is fundamentally different than a human’s relationship with God. To truly commune with God, the Christian would have to build a relationship for which there is no parallel example, pattern, or time-liberating capacity.
This problem is intensified when we realize that it is our language that may shape our understanding of time. For example, English speakers conceptualize time in terms of distance. We see time as a line moving from left to right and consider our days long or short. In contrast, Spanish speakers conceptualize time in terms of volume, thinking of days as being full rather than long. A study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, General proposes that this does literally affect our conceptions of the passage of time. [2] Because time is a part of the way we experience the world rather than an abstract, comprehendible reality, our conceptions of time are crafted by the medium of our communication and thought—language.
Not only are we communicating with a being who is not bound by our sequential framework, but our linguistic tradition binds us even further into a particular way of viewing the world in time, of conceptualizing life, days, and how God views them as well.
Yet, regardless of our situation in time or our personal linguistic tradition, Christians are called to communion with God.
Perhaps the more important question then is not whether our communication with God is hindered by existing in time, but what benefit is gained from being temporal beings simultaneously called to commune with the one sempiternal God?
The easiest point of departure for this question is the Bible. Psalm 90:12 implores God to “teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” It’s interesting that being cognizant of the time is supposed to lead us towards wisdom. Why? Recognizing that we are bound by a beginning and an end perhaps causes us to place greater value on the space between those moments, our lives. This isn’t so strange. It’s modeled in the way we speak. The Guugu Yimithirr language, for example, has no words for left, right, front, or back. Its speakers therefore think of someone “standing east of the house” rather than in front of the house as English speakers would. [3] The words we use to describe things shape our thoughts about things themselves. And the way we think about things influences our actions. It makes sense that thinking of our limited time would cause us to be wiser about spending that time.
But that is, to some extent, a cop-out answer. What does wiser actually mean? Sure, we may care more about the time we have, but what practical contingencies does the cognizance of time bring about? Could the knowledge of time not just as soon lead us to ‘eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die?’ . [4] I’ll draw on language once more to answer this question. Just as the words we string together in a sentence become a useless string of sounds without the proper order, our lives suffer a similar fate. The aim of life, as with language, is meaning. And for the Christian, a meaningful life is one in which God takes the foremost place.
How can the Christian know what really is most important, how to assign God the premier place? One way is by noting what becomes most important in the face of significant danger. The approach of the ultimate danger, death, often reveals interesting priorities: forgiveness, reconciliation, and spending time with loved ones. Time, therefore, has a peculiar way of showing us the importance of being in right relationship with those around us (through reconciliation, forgiveness, etc.) and inspiring us to develop deeper relationships with our fellow men. This aligns with the Bible’s first and second great commandments: to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. [5] Time is thus shown to foster wisdom by causing the Christian to more strongly seek meaning by placing God and His commands (to love God and others) at the center of our lives.
Yet it would be dismissive to say that time always fosters wisdom. Time also holds one particular danger I fear many on Yale’s campus are compelled towards: the grind mentality. Rather than ‘eat, drink, and be merry,’ the other extreme is doing so much work that it becomes equally meaningless, that the obsession with being busy overruns other important parts of our lives. This includes the overthinker’s tendency to worry about making decisions and therefore doing everything so that they are not forced to choose, because heaven forbid they make the wrong choice. I’ve done this more times than I’d like to admit. By allocating all of one’s bandwidth to accomplishing as many tasks and participating in as many groups as possible, one can find themselves with very few meaningful engagements, no emotional bandwidth to devote to important relationships, or a few fulfilling activities that are so overwhelmed by sheer busyness that they lose their enjoyable qualities. It’s a horrifyingly easy trap to fall into.
The Bible cautions against overworking due to this human inclination. Yet this doesn’t diminish the effectiveness of time in providing a universally recognized impetus for the doing of important, meaningful things. Moments of severe danger, exhaustion, and misery are remarkably good at helping us to note what is most important and helps us sort out our priorities. For the Christian, this is called a reordering of our life towards God. It also perhaps informs 2 Corinthians 4:7: “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” Part of our suffering may be to remind us to choose God and what He prescribes for our lives, such that we are able to participate in His timeless and eternal glory.
I suppose it is the moments that remind me of mortality that make me feel like God is writing me a letter, the moments when I am suddenly and acutely aware of my finitude and human experience. These moments are like messages from God, reminding me to seek Him, to love Him, and to appreciate Him through the people and things around me as I have only this allotment of time while He waits for me in eternity.
1. Jason Palmer. “Amondawa tribe lacks abstract idea of time, study says.” May 20, 2011. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-13452711.
2. Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos. “The Whorfian time warp: Representing duration through the language hourglass.” April 27, 2017. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih. gov/28447839/.
3. Betty Birner. “Does the Language I Speak Influence the Way I Think?” 1999. https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/does- language-i-speak-influence-way-i-think.
4. Ecclesiastes 8:15 and Isaiah 22:13.
5. Matthew 22:36-40.