Time & God

Time carries many of the attributes people assign to God. It exists before us and will remain after us, without origin and without end. It is omnipotent in its own quiet way nothing resists it. Not mountains, not empires, not memory itself.

Time is also merciful. Given enough of it, pain softens, wounds close, losses blur at the edges. Suffering is absorbed, hardship wears thin, and everything returns to its elemental truth—ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We are reminded that we are made of dust, and to dust we shall return.

Yet if time resembles God in its power to erase and forgive, memory stands in opposition. Memory preserves what time seeks to dissolve. It resurrects pain long after it should have faded, anchors us to what no longer exists, and refuses the mercy of forgetting.

And if time bears any likeness to God, then perhaps memory, relentless and unforgiving, is the devil that keeps us human.