When you have written a book on entering eternity with ease you have to grapple with what a New Year means in the light of eternity. What is a New Year? Is it just another mark in the cycle of time? The tiny speck of planet we crawl upon in the vastness of universal space, has completed another orbit around it’s radiating star. Our circling moon has completed 12 “moonths” as it circuits the earth.   Astrophysicists say that there are trillions of planets orbiting trillions of stars orbiting trillions of galaxies. So how can we begin to imagine the trillions of moons, orbiting their trillions of planets in “moonths” of one earth year or a hundred earth years?  All we can do is wonder in “awe filled” reverence at the unspeakable beauty of it all. The universe is so well-ordered that the Greeks called it “cosmos” or “beautifully decorated.” Cosmetics, as you know, is the art of beautifying people.

More and more today, scientists, philosophers, even theologians, are saying that the universe always existed. Therefore, what we traditionally called the Creator, who created “all of creation,” is more like the “soul” or “spirit” of the un-created universe.  In this view of ultimate reality, there never was a “beginning” of time, and there never will be an “end of time.” In other words, time and eternity form a cross, and become One, in the Oneness of Being.

I have been reading the American mystic, Thomas Merton, who wrote: “The world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness.” He also said that the universe is God’s body, that God is incarnate, that God becomes flesh in material reality. That is why you can say that whatever we humans believe is “a higher power,” expresses itself in us. Not just in us humans, but in all living entities, and also in the farthest galaxies.

Every human faith, every religion, every philosophy, and every spiritual practice has always experienced the un-namable, un-knowable, and the numinous as some kind of “divine dance” in time and eternity. And each of us is invited to the dance, by being born into this universe that the poets, and mystics, and dreamers of time and eternity are revealing to us, now and forever.

So Happy Eternity. Enter it with joy today, and find the mansion, the eternal dwelling place that has always been there for you. That’s why you were born. That’s why you die.