Abraham, John and the Great I AM

But Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you”, and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I AM who I AM.’ Exodus 3:13-14

The Jews answered Jesus, ‘Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?’ Jesus answered, ‘I do not have a demon; but I honour my Father, and you dishonour me. Yet I do not seek my own glory; there is one who seeks it and he is the judge. Very truly, I tell you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.’ The Jews said to him, ‘Now we know that you have a demon. Abraham died, and so did the prophets; yet you say, “Whoever keeps my word will never taste death.” Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died? The prophets also died. Who do you claim to be?’ Jesus answered, ‘If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing. It is my Father who glorifies me, he of whom you say, “He is our God”, though you do not know him. But I know him; if I were to say that I do not know him, I would be a liar like you. But I do know him and I keep his word. Your ancestor Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad.’ Then the Jews said to him, ‘You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.’ So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple. John 8:48-59

Here we are, 10 a.m., November 17, 2013.

Where were you a year ago today?

A year ago on November 17,  Martha and I were at home in Port Chester, enjoying a visit from our daughter Victoria.

Five years ago on November 17, I had just returned from Denver, Colorado, where the General Assembly of the National Council of Churches held its annual meeting. It was a quiet Monday, and I came home from work early to take Katie to an appointment.

Ten years ago on November 17, 2003, it was also Monday. Martha was up early to drive to work in Manhattan. Still living at home, Victoria was a Port Chester seventh grader. Katie was a student at Ardsley High School and I was a freelance writer and independent communications consultant working at home.

The calendar is a marker for our personal lives and a tool for historians. But can the calendar also be a mystical mirror into the eye of God? 

Fifty years ago at this time today, November 17, 1963, John F. Kennedy had just finished a Sunday breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, and coffee. He was relaxing at his family home in Palm Beach, Florida, and anticipating a busy week that would take him to Tampa, Miami, Fort Worth, and Dallas.

One hundred fifty years ago today, on Tuesday, November 17, 1863, Abraham Lincoln was in the White House reading dispatches from Tennessee, where the siege of Knoxville had begun. Whenever he had a free moment, Mr. Lincoln mentally polished the 272 word speech he planned to give two days later at the dedication of the new national cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

Eighty years ago at this time today, 10:20 a.m. November 17, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was meeting in the Oval Office with William C. Bullit and Maxim Litvinov to formalize U.S. recognition of the Soviet Union. In a historic first, Litvinov telephoned his wife and son in Russia.

Seventy years ago at this time today, 10:30 a.m. November 17, 1943, Eleanor Roosevelt was pursuing a busy schedule in her Manhattan apartment as her husband was on a ship en route to a World War II summit meeting with Stalin and Churchill in Tehran.

The participants in all these historic and mundane events are, of course, long gone. But just how gone are they?

When I was a very small boy growing up in Morrisville, N.Y., there was a very old woman on our street who remembered Lincoln. She never met Lincoln, but she was a young girl when all Americans were directly affected by what he said and what he did.  

Today, no one alive remembers Lincoln. Those who remember the Roosevelts and President Kennedy are no longer young, and soon there will be no one left who remembers them. This is inevitable. As Woody Allen observed, every 150 years the world gets a whole new set of people.

So, one must ask, what happens when the memories are gone? What is the substance of long passed events once they have faded beneath the dusty pages of an old history book? And it’s not just an abstract question because the implications are so personal. What could possibly be the consequence, on November 17, 2163, of the lives you and I are living out so hopefully on November 17, 2013?

If we are going to ask these doleful questions, this is the week to do it. Before we see another Sunday, we will mark two bygone events that will be remembered by the whole new set of people who will replace us in 150 years: Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg address delivered 150 years ago this Tuesday; and the assassination of John F. Kennedy 50 years ago this Friday.

Of course, our view of these events is blurred by the fact that we think of them in the past tense. Abraham and John were. They have no connection with us, who are. And looking ahead to what will be, we cannot know how they will be remembered by future generations.

But if the memory of these two events does not impact our present tense, what memory would?

Volumes, of course, have be written about the Gettysburg Address. One of the best is Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, by Garry Wills. Wills makes the case that Lincoln’s brief utterance did more to redefine the U.S. as a popular democracy than the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, or the Civil War itself. 

And for many of us sitting here on November 17, 2013, the Kennedy assassination is a memory we will carry to the end of our days. Its images are indelibly etched in our brains and its emotional burden is no less heavy with each passing year.

Michael R. Beschloss , one of my favorite historians, tweets photos of historic events several times a day. (@BeschlossDC) The photos breathe new color and new life into long gone events. Whether Beschloss posts pictures of Boston Red Sox player George Herman “Babe” Ruth in the 1918 World Series, or images of a darkened Times Square in 1945, he resurrects old memories of things that were.

This week, Beschloss’s postings have created an eerie simultaneity of the past and present by posting pictures of the grassy knoll in Dallas taken in November 1963 and November 2013. The knoll has not changed in 50 years. This is doubtless by design of the chamber of commerce as thousands flock to the site every year to see where history happened. If you look carefully on Elm Street in front of the knoll, a white X marks the spot where JFK was fatally hit.

For me, the murder of President Kennedy lives in my memory as if it happened yesterday. 

I am 17 years old and I am walking into my high school homeroom. Several students with stricken faces are gathered around the teacher, Mr. Nickel, who quietly repeats the same sentence every time someone else joins the huddle. “Yes, President Kennedy is dead. He was assassinated.” I am stunned. All the dead people I know lingered for weeks before they drew their final breaths. I can’t believe the President of the United States could be extinguished in a second. In fact, I don’t believe it. I look down on my shirt and touch the Kennedy for President button I had been wearing since the 1960 campaign. I sit at my student desk fighting back tears. My father, a teacher whose homeroom is two doors down the hall, steps into Mr. Nickel’s room and looks at me silently. Mrs. Drake, the librarian across the hall, walks in several times to impart the latest rumor. “Johnson has had a heart attack.”  “Jackie has fainted.” “The Russians are going to attack.” 

None of my memories of that day are hazy or uncertain. The memories have not dimmed. When I close my eyes, it is as if President Kennedy has just died. 

Assuming the brain is not the sole receptacle of the soul, it is remarkable how effective it is in keeping the past alive.  Some memories seem to get brighter as the brain begins to dim. As my father-in-law descended deeper into Alzheimer’s, he seemed to dwell in a place no one else could see. It seemed to be a happy place, probably his old village in Cuba. Long after he no longer recognized his wife or his daughter or his grandchildren, he would occasionally claim to see a loved one who had been dead for years. Strangely, the only member of his family he seemed to greet by name was me, although it was not my real name and I think it was because I look like some important figure who dwelled in the past. He would call me “Jefe.”

Memory, as we know, plays tricks on you. But one of those tricks, I like to think, is a fleeting trailer of the epic that is God’s eternal plan.

Doctors say there is no one area of the brain that contains all our memories, and that may be why some memories fade while others remain forever bright. While our instinct is to separate the past from the present and from the future, the brain sometimes performs the ultimate mind meld, mystically merging the past with the present. If nothing else, such déjà vu can remind us that for God, there are no such tenses as “was” or “will be.” God always is, the great “I AM.” Any god who “was” is useless, and any god who “will be” is idol speculation. The God who provides the ground for all being is the God who is.

None of us would say, as Jesus did, “Before Abraham was, I AM.” But on rare occasions, it seems the Arranger of our Gray Cells permits us to perceive what God’s eternity is like.

In the Great Continuum of Existence emanating from the Great I AM  there is no past or future. Jesus never “was,” but always is. 

Similarly, in God’s Eye, Abraham Lincoln is not past tense. He, in the view of the Great I AM, is; and November 17, 1863 is not long past but is happening now in God’s Eye.

On occasion I have seen apparitions that I have taken to be friendly ghosts: a gray figure wearing a three-cornered hat on a misty night in Valley Forge park, or a human shape glimpsed fleetingly out of the corner of my eye.  Sometimes I amuse myself by thinking – based on no metaphysical or scientific evidence whatsoever – that these phantasms are not ghosts but haphazard previews into the Great I AM.  For example, when Winston Churchill claimed he saw Lincoln sitting in a chair in his White House guest room in 1942, he assumed it was a ghost. But could it have been a brief foretaste of the divine continuum of time where Lincoln, exhausted by his labors, still sits in the darkness where it is eternally 1862? 

Amateur metaphysicists (and some theologians) theorize that there are times when the veil between life and eternity is so thin it becomes transparent. Perhaps the more intense the memory the thinner the veil. 

Even so, none of us sitting here on November 17, 2013 have any idea what is happening on the other side of the veil, although it can be entertaining to speculate. 

As a history buff, I like to imagine that beyond the veil, the earthly forms of Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt can be viewed as God views them, in an eternal present. And I like to think the day will come when I will step behind the veil into the presence of the Great I AM, and stand beside the liberated souls of Abraham and John and Eleanor, gazing with mutual bemusement into the mysterious mirrors of 1863, 1943, and 1963, watching their historical bodies pursue their erstwhile earthly labors.

That’s a historian’s voyeuristic pipe dream, of course, but it has some enlightening possibilities. When we are reminded that God, the author of existence, has no past or future but exists in perpetual present, we may be led to a marvelous revelation about the nature of eternal life. 

No doubt you have heard people say, “I don’t want to live forever,” or, “I’ve lived long enough and I just want it to be over.”

But the God I AM will liberate us from all our dreary yesterdays and scary tomorrows, and no matter what we did or suffered on earth – crime, illness, crushing responsibility, betrayal, defeat, assassination – welcome us into the eternal present.

When we shuffle off this mortal coil, we will not  face the dubious prospect of continuing to live forever – and ever – as one potentially dreary millennium fades into the next. For many, that does not sound like heaven. It sounds like vampire immortality.

This, then, is God’s promise: When our human bodies are liberated from their bondage to the calendar, to the past, and to the unknown future, we will be united with the Great I AM in a glorious now where bliss never fades and grace never ends and love never fails.

Our memories of the past and the biological blips in our brains may offer some hints of what that eternity will be like.

But even more reassuring are the words of Jesus himself, who stepped across the veil to enter our frustrating earthly world that is so in bondage the past that it fearful of the present and terrified by what the future may hold. 

Stop worrying, Jesus said. There is no past and there is no future. Only the Great I AM.

Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.’ John 8:12