Eternity on our pavement and in our hearts

A French thinker and writer called Albert Camus thought that beauty was unbearable because it gave us a glimpse of eternity. I think I get what he means. It is those times when you’ve gazed in wonder at something so beautiful your heart aches and it aches to hold onto whatever evoked that feeling. We are left feeling like there is something more that we can’t quite hold onto.The other time we get this glimpse is in the midst of tragedy and despair. We experience a senseless death, a life cut short, and think there must be something more. Life doesn’t make any sense if this is all there is.

One man, Arthur Stace, made it his life’s work to get the city of Sydney to think about something more. This something more was captured by one word: Eternity. He chalked the word Eternity almost 500,000 times in beautiful copperplate on the streets of Sydney over many years. The profound effect of this in the psyche of Sydney was seen at the 2000 New Years Eve fireworks when the Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up with the word Eternity as the crescendo of the fireworks. Arthur’s aim was profound. He wanted city workers to think about God, the creator, the one who stands over space and time, the one who is said to dwell forever, who is eternal.

There is little doubt that Arthur’s goal and drive to get people to think about eternity sprang from his own change, his own experience of something more. Arthur was born into the suburb of Balmain. It is now gentrified and trendy but in the 1880’s it was a slum. His parents were drunkards, his sisters ran brothels and his brothers were drunkards. As a young boy he was involved in various criminal activities working as a lookout for illegal gambling games. He grew up in desperate circumstances which were made more desperate by his own drinking.

At one point his circumstances became so desperate that he asked a local police sergeant to keep him locked up in prison because in prison he couldn’t drink. Drink was a demon that held him and he could not escape its clutches. He was desperate for change but could not change himself or his circumstances.

Then, one day he heard a famous Sydney preacher in Broadway Anglican Church, right on the edge of Central Station. He left the church, walked across Parramatta Road into Victoria Park. There he sank on his knees and gave his life to Jesus. Then and there he profoundly experienced something more. He never drank again.

After this his life changed for the better. He found employment and a lovely wife. He joined a church and community. It was an experience of God, the one who dwells in eternity that changed him.

God, in mercy, has fulfilled that desire for something more for many people. In John's biography about Jesus from the Bible this is beautifully captured when Jesus meets a woman at a well. Her physical need for water, her thirst, represents her spiritual ache for something more. This woman has searching for something more and hoping to find it in love, sex and relationship. But again and again that ache is left unmet. The relationships have come and gone. She is still thirsty but she gives up and resorts to living with a man out of convenience. Jesus says to this woman that he is the answer to her ache for something more. The woman wants what Jesus offers and realises that her thirst can be met by him. (Read the full account).

We tend to think about eternity and even glimpse it when life is so good, it is like standing on the peak of a mountaintop or when struggling in the valley. But that usually isn’t a good time to dwell on eternity. The highs are too high to think clearly and the valleys are often filled with mist and fog. The time to think about eternity is now. The woman met Jesus at the well in the middle of a daily routine. She glimpsed in him a beauty that answered her deepest needs. Her eternal needs.