When I was 17...

or 18 even...who cares? The point is that life was so hard back then. It was so hard because I was so stupid. At the same time, life was so beautiful because I was so stupid. So let's recap for a little bit.

I was shy, naive, and clueless (or at the very least, a couple shades of grey from wherever I'm at right now). That was the time in my life where talking to a girl and getting her to hold hands was an incredibly big deal. My primary influences, as far as those executive day-to-day decisions go, were confined to my Catholicism and Jesuit education (I went to St. Ignatius the Jesuit Preparatory School for men of Cleveland, Ohio), Ben Folds and whatever musical selection I let whatever group of friends dominate my personal choice, and baseball (more specifically, the Cleveland Indians).

At any time in my life, being a Catholic may never be as much of a big deal as it was during this year. I managed to involve myself in a number of retreats. There was Kairos and Search. And nothing brought being an Ignatian together more for me than my experiences on Kairos. Meanwhile, Search brought a considerable influx of girls into my life (also good).

Mark 1:14-15 —Kairosis a time that requires a conversion from people.
Luke 12:54-56 —Kairosis extraordinary time, requiring interpretation. The capacity to read the signs of the times—the kairos—and respond is an issue of faith.
Luke 19:44 —Kairosis a dangerous time. It is critical to recognize it, for if you allow it to pass the loss will be immeasurable. There is a burden or responsibility tied up in the recognition of the kairos.
Romans 13:11-13 —Kairostime is here. It calls for action, conversion and transformation—a change of life.
11 Corinthians 6:1-2 —Kairosis not just crisis but opportunity and favour. God assists us in discerning the kairos—a moment of grace.

In short, Kairos is God's time.

Physicists see time differently. Time is a physical reality, not some illusion. Time is not some mathematical convenience or some mental construct. One day I'll get to see a Feynman diagram and really understand it. I'll see virtual particles being created and destroyed in some process such as Beta decay (and I wish they would), or they'll be at the heart of understanding something as complex as Hawking radiation (black holes don't grow forever). These diagrams are correct backward and forward in time and somehow allow for the most accurate approximation for the mass of an electron to be calculated. Virtual particles created under rules where such things as charge, color, or flavor are conserved. In short, physicists invent things that can't be directly seen in order to give a description to our reality that is both observable and calculable. Particle and nuclear physics owes so much to the QED. that Feynman so elegantly represents in these simple drawings.

It's hard to analyze my growth by looking forward and backward through time, it really is just a gross approximation at any rate. I look back and things don't seem to add up.

Talk to a cosmologist, and you may end up with the same poor understanding that time warps and bends with space due to mass. Einstein's model of the universe as formed in General Relativity transformed gravity from being something that just is into something that has cause behind it. Matter can only move through space and time, and so gravity is exhibited through the warps that are caused by mass. Even photons (wave and/or particle?) are subject to the bending and warping of space and time.

Time couldn't have moved more slowly while I was sitting across from a girl (named Christian, oddly enough) and fighting with myself to hold her hand for the first time. She laughed at the way I danced and had the slender figure of a ballerina. She was nice enough but being the nervous sort that I was, I tried forcing things along. So she was my girlfriend, but of course, I didn't know the first thing about what that meant. I dated the girl for two months without kissing her a single time and was petrified to try to hold her hand. I was sitting next to her in the back seat of her car while her father drove me home, and I felt like I was a light-year way.

Time goes hand in hand with entropy, as we see in the world of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. The universe is always become more disordered, instead of less. But even in a black hole, where there is the most amount of entropy in the universe, all information about a particle cannot be lost forever. Supposedly the information will get spewed back out in some decipherable form at some point in time.

I wore the Cross of Jerusalem around my neck for a very long time after my Kairos experience to remind me to live in God's time for all time. I thought I could add to the symbol for myself by involving it in every aspect of my mundane life. Truly, I viewed the object in the spirit of "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam" or "For the Greater Glory of God" (AMDG was frequently written on the top of our assignments at Ignatius and is more meaningful to me than the Gentleman's Rule). I thought the sweat that the cross generally bathed in on a day to day basis made it as more a part of me and me as more a part of it. I lost touch with that in college though. I was wearing it when we went up to Michigan State as pledges during walkout to visit the Kappa Sigma house there. It was around Halloween time, and so there was a costume type party the second night we were there. I got drunk for maybe the second time in my life and was introduced to the hottest girl there. After dancing for awhile, I started making out with her neck and got her to take me to her place much later. Trying to figure out why I would get into a car with a drunk girl that I had just met is beyond rational explanation. I was in way over my head and started giggling when I got my first handful of breast tissue. She asked what was wrong, and all I could say was that I had never seen boobs before. The night came to a quick end when she went to vomit. I was happy that I got to sleep on a mattress (on the floor and not in the same room as her) for the first time in over a week. It was the quickest night I had experienced thus far in my life.

I tried to reverse the effects of time though with a simple tattoo which is an inaccurate representation of the Jerusalem Cross. I suppose that in the same manner as the crusaders who originally wore it, I lost sight of what I was fighting for anyway. But like a stubborn old goat, I plodded on nevertheless. "God wills it!"

Light is impervious to times effects. It does not decay, and it is the principal (and only) carrier for all electromagnetic interactions. A photon is a messenger particle in this way.

Once in a great awhile, you can spend a night and be completely oblivious to the passage of time. You might be shocked when the first glimmers of the light of a new day make their way through your shoddy venetian blinds and interrupt an altogether beautiful escape from the physical reality that threatens to torture and gratify on a seeming whim. Sometimes your only away from your beautiful retreat just one day, and you look back and think it must have been some distant dream. And so it goes with God, for God's time is timeless after all.