By Stephen P. White

God, whose love is infinite, loves a finite number of people. He may love everyone, but the number is still finite.

I read somewhere that the total number of human beings who have ever lived is estimated to be somewhere north of 100 billion. That's a lot of humans. How one estimates such a number is somewhat obscure to me, but if we take that number as reasonably accurate, it means that something like seven or eight percent of the people who have ever lived are alive today.

This somehow strikes me as vaguely disconcerting - like the feeling one gets the first time one realizes that the years one has already lived probably outnumber, or at least balance, the years one has left to live. Not that such things are really ours to know - neither the day nor the hour - but it's just less worrisome to be, as it were, driving around on a full tank. It gives one terrific peace of mind.

God promised to Abraham, "I will bless you and make your descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore." I checked (read: I Googled it) and apparently there are a lot more grains of sand than there are people who have ever lived, by many orders of magnitude. And the number of stars in the heavens dwarfs the number of grains of sand. In this context, 100 billion seems a modest sum.

Without presuming the Lord intended to be taken with mathematical exactitude, maybe there's a whole lot more of us to come. Maybe, someday, many millennia from now, men will look back at our own age and wonder what it was like when the human race was so very small and very young. And maybe they will wonder, these future men, when the Lord will finally return in glory. Will they think, surely it must be soon? Or will they think, surely not for a long while?

Our own lives are almost comically brief. "Seventy is the sum of our years, or eighty, if we are strong," writes the Psalmist, adding, "Most of them are toil and sorrow; they pass quickly, and we are gone." The short time we have is a gift. This is true in several senses: in the sense that life is a gift; in the sense that our time on earth being limited is a gift; and even in the sense that we experience time at all is a gift.

This might seem far out, but bear with me.

At the end of the Biblical account of the Fall there is a very curious conversation God has with Himself which is easily overlooked. "Then the LORD God said: See! The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil! Now, what if he also reaches out his hand to take fruit from the tree of life, and eats of it and livs forever?" God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden as punishment for their disobedience. So far so good.

But the punishment is also an act of mercy, as we are reminded in the Mass during Sundays of Ordinary Time (Preface 3):

For we know it belongs to your boundless glory,

That you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity

And even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself.

That the cause of our downfall,

Might become the means of our salvation,

Through Christ our Lord.

Life is good; a gift. But it would be miserable to be stranded in this fallen state forever. Immortality in this life would not be a blessing but a curse.

As I said, time itself is a gift. Not just the discrete allotment of hours and days we have before we die, but the very phenomenon of passing through existence which we all experience and which we call "time." From the first instant of our existence, everything we experience happens within the inescapable framework of time: our growth, our thriving, our learning, our thinking, our remembering, our forgetting, our aging, our death. All of the beauty and fragility that makes us human presupposes our being bounded by time.

This becomes immediately apparent when one considers angelic beings. Like us, angels are created; they have a beginning. Like our souls, they are immortal. Like us, they were created free; some have even fallen. But our freedom is exercised...