Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,
Pax Christi!
I have returned from Poland where Dr. Seiler and I had a very fruitful mission, thanks to the wonderful hospitality of our new-found friends over there. We are deeply grateful for all of the prayers that so many of you offered up on our behalf. There is no doubt that your prayers obtained many special graces. We began our mission in the ancient city of Krakow where World Youth Day was held. Two churches had been assigned as places for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass to be offered according to the traditional form. The Church of the Conversion of St. Paul was selected for English-speaking pilgrims, and it was there that Dr. Seiler and I were invited to give a presentation, after the official catechesis by a Bishop.
Since catechesis at World Youth Day is only given by Bishops, it was an incredible grace to be able to speak to the pilgrims at an official catechesis, especially since Divine Providence arranged for us to speak between the official catechesis of the Primate of Ireland and the Holy Mass, so that we had the largest possible audience in the church, perhaps as many as 500 people. As a further sign of Our Lord and Our Lady's orchestration of the event, in his remarks the Primate of Ireland quite unexpectedly quoted Pope Benedict XVI's words, "We are not some meaningless product of evolution," only a few minutes before we were invited to speak.
We do not normally like to read our presentations, but since we could not exceed twenty minutes and we wanted to be able to make our text available for publication after the event, we read a prepared text that covered as many points as possible related to our theme: "Divine Mercy demands that we live and proclaim that God specially created one man for one woman for life from the beginning." A few days later, Life Site News agreed to publish the whole text of our remarks, another fruit of your prayers, and the first time that any of our talks or articles has been published there. You can read the full text of our remarks on the Life Site News website here.
I recently returned to Virginia to several days of whirlwind activity with 13 of our 16 grandchildren, including caring for animals, collecting various creatures in stream and forest, planting late summer crops in our Back to Eden Garden, and offering a writing workshop to our three oldest grandchildren. Not long ago, I was working in the Back to Eden Garden with one of our grandchildren and a neighbor around his age--a little under ten years old. As we were spreading mulch, we exchanged riddles. Our neighbor offered this one:
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beast, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.
Birds, beast, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.
The answer, of course, is TIME.
But this got me thinking.
The riddle implies that TIME is a real substance that acts and produces effects throughout the world. This illusion plays a key role in evolutionary brainwashing, since we are led to believe from childhood that, "given enough time" non-living matter can turn into a living cell, and anything can turn into anything else. In reality, time is not a substantial reality at all. It is only a MEASURE of the changes that take place in real things. Thus, before creation there was no time, because there were no changeable things.
St. Thomas tells us that once the angels were created--even if nothing material had yet been made--time existed, because angels are changeable creatures, and the succession of their acts was sufficient for time to exist. Thus, it is an illusion to say that "time devours"; it is rather the intrinsic instability of created things, the "bondage to decay" that began with the Original Sin, that causes all material things to move from order to disorder. Time only MEASURES this motion; it does not produce it.
On the other hand, the riddle contains a true, anti-evolutionary lesson, because it bears witness to the law of entropy, to the universal tendency of material things in this fallen world to move from order to disorder. Thus, the evolutionist's belief that time is "the hero of the plot" that turns non-living chemicals into the first living cell and reptiles into birds is not only wrong. It is the opposite of the truth. It is important to point this out to people when the opportunity presents itself.
Time measures the changes that take place in nature; but those changes never produce anything essentially new--no new organs or physiological functions, in plants or animals. All of the different kinds of creatures and all of their essential organs and physiological functions had to be created in the beginning, before time could begin to measure their changes. But in the beginning, before the Original Sin, although creatures changed, they were not subject to the "bondage to decay" as they are now.
St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022) who saw in divine vision the original state of Adam and the first created world tells us that:
God did not, as some people think, just give Paradise to our ancestors at the beginning, nor did He make only Paradise incorruptible. No! Instead, He did much more. Before Paradise He made the whole earth, the one we inhabit, and everything in it. Nor that alone, but He also in five days brought the heavens and all they contain into being. On the sixth day He made Adam and established him as lord and king of all visible creation. Neither Eve nor Paradise were yet created, but the whole world had been brought into being by God as one thing, as a kind of Paradise, at once incorruptible yet material and perceptible.
Thus, time was originally the measure of things that changed without corruption, even as some things were made as food for other things, like plants for animals and Adam and Eve. This was a foreshadowing of the "new Heavens and the new Earth where righteousness dwells," where in an even more wonderful way, the blessed will walk with God in a permanent state of glory and incorruptibility.
May His Kingdom come!
Yours in Christ through the Immaculata,
Hugh Owen
