Time&Eternity

No Concept of Time without Narrated Time 53
Time becomes good because the day of salvation, the time of grace, dawns
brightly in the heart of the believer. 343 Goodness does not appear to be a
characteristic of time per se; rather, it is something that time is granted
through divine promise and divine action. 344 Only divine activity can qualify
time as truly good time. The flowing away, that is, time’s transitoriness,
which is basically experienced as negative, appears, on the other hand, to
belong to the essence of time itself. What human beings experience as the
destructive power of time is thus made relative—from the human perspective—by
the subsequent qualification of time as a time of grace. This
qualification accomplished by the saving acts of God in Christ also finds a
partner in a preexistent qualification of time by divine foreknowledge:
Lang, ehe wir geboren,
hast du uns angesehn!
“Sie sinds, die vor den Toren
des Lebens wartend stehn.
Gebt ihnen Raum .l.l.” 345
Divine, loving foreknowledge lends time a connection to eternity, so to
speak, from the very beginning, and thus creates trust in the beings who are
subject to all the destructive powers of transitoriness. On this basis, on the
one hand, hope for an increasingly better understanding of divine truth is
possible; 346 and, on the other hand, an ethically responsible management of
time is provided. It is necessary to be watchful, 347 to make use of the brief
time that one has, 348 and to use it properly, 349 as well as to heed the “signs of
the times.” 350 Those who are rushed and pressed should take time to stop 351
and live in God’s now. 352 Daily life should be a liturgy that celebrates the
victory of Jesus each and every day. 353 As already mentioned, in more recent
hymns, times of suffering are no longer dealt with by being content to wait
for eternal peace; rather, one strives to search and find meaning in the present.
354
Two hymns from the Catholic tradition mention a special time that
serves as a place of purification, namely, the interim state of purgatory. 355
As already established, the otherworldliness of eternity has moved increasingly
into the background during the twentieth century. It does not
disappear, but time, growing in significance at its side, distinguishes itself as
the habitat of human beings. Kurt Marti expresses an extremely radical thisworldliness
in his text from 1986:
In uns kreist das Leben,
das uns Gott gegeben,
kreist als Stirb und Werde
dieser Erde. 356