Dumitru Stăniloae’s illuminates time as a journey on which we may grow in response to the love that God offers us, a journey towards sharing in the eternity of the perfect, interpersonal communion of the Trinity. God, in His Incarnation, shares the journey with us in Christ, so that time enters into eternity and eternity is brought into time. At every moment, we are free to choose between responding to His love or rejecting it. Time to be open to eternity; time is fulfilled when God’s eternity breaks into the temporal sequence, as happened supremely at Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, as happens also at every Eucharist. Our faith is the true rationale of time: mutual love after the image of the Trinity.
Ah yes, that’s lovely, and I agree. It also is consistent with my belief that God created time and being eternal, exists apart from it while being ubiquitous at all points in it, through His omnipresence, through the Holy Spirit, through His incarnation, and we acknowledge this in the prayer to the Holy Spirit at the beginning of the Hours:
“O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, Who art everywhere present and fillest all things, Treasury of good things, and Giver of life: Come and dwell in us, and cleanse us of all impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.”
There is another similiar prayer which also states that He is present at all times, but I cannot recall where in the liturgy it is. It might even be Oriental Orthodox, but I am certain it is either EO or OO. But I can’t remember if it is in the liturgy of the Divine Office, which church it is in, etc.
Also I would note that nothing in the doctrine you shared or other Orthodox doctrines concerning time appears to contradict General Relativity, specifically the idea that space and time are essentially the same thing, with gravity being curves in spacetime caused by massive objects. Not that I am trying to mix science and theology, rather, I am merely pointing out that there is no apparent conflict (where theology completely contradicts science, it means that one or the other is wrong, and I would note that the theologies of heterodox forms of Christianity and of other religions like Islam do tend to contradict even the most basic understanding of science that was available to the ancients, for example, Muhammed’s insistence that the world was flat and that the disappearance of ships over the horizon was an optical illusion, and the Sura in the Quran where Alexander the Great travels as west as you can get, and finds the sun relaxing at an oasis, and spends a few hours chilling with the sun, before the sun has to leave to travel to the eastern end of the world so that he can begin illuminating the planet for the next day. I strongly suspect the Quran was the result of a mix of encounters with a demon impersonating the Holy Archangel St. Gabriel, who those churches on the New Calendar commemorated last week at the feast of St. Michael and the Bodiless Powers (we know for sure that “Jibreel” was either a figment of Muhammed’s imagination or a demon, since St. Gabriel would not squeeze Muhammed so that he felt unable to breathe or give him a false revelation), and the use of psychedelic substances. Perhaps massive amounts of Khat; if I recall khat grows in the Yemen where it is collected and sold to Muslims in Ethiopia and Somalia.
