T.S.Eliot speaks in Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, of man and ‘the enchainment of past and future’, and ponders on whether ‘all time is eternally present’. It is those glimpses – as through the experience in the rose garden at Burnt Norton— of a reality outside of time, which are so disorienting that ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality’. They are too rich and glittering for us to contemplate; they confront us with a reality in which ‘the end and the beginning were always there before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now’. The more we contemplate the true nature of our physical birth and death in a wider context of Oneness, the more we may wonder at why such a fear of death has been able to arise in us. Hugh Ross observes that there is no evidence that ‘death was a pressing problem’ to the people to whom Jesus spoke; and ‘there is nothing …coming directly from the living Jesus, to substantiate the extreme emphasis our Churches place on death and the after-life’. Apprehension about physical death goes hand in hand with ahankara. The more we learn to question the proposition of death as a fearsome gateway to judgment and potential damnation, the more we may begin to see in our own lives that ‘Time past and time future , what might have been and what has been point to one end, which is always present’. The unfolding idea of the Kingdom which is in our centre and about us, and is accessible to us here and now, takes on a greater degree of reality.

So when Jesus alludes time and again in Thomas to the Place of Life, the place where the beginning is, and the more we are aware of the Light as being the state of perfection from which we came, so we may be able to envisage in our mind’s eye, and come to experience, the oneness of beginning and end. We may seek to liberate ourselves from the paralysing spectre of a linear destiny in time, and recognise that the quality of our state of being here and now may be an end in itself, no longer a mere bargaining counter with the God of the New Testament for a life in the world to come.

* Hugh McGregor Ross Thirty Essays on the Gospel of Thomas (Element Books 1990)

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