If time was a dimension wholly within the boundaries of material creation, and if God was beyond time, then he could, if he so wished, accept the prayer of a man who lived at the end of the second millennium and apply it to the needs of those who had gone before. Were not the death and Resurrection of Christ still active and effective, not simply as a linear chain of cause and effect, but as a living thing whose generative power is undiminished? The Mass itself was a mysterious suspension of time, a reaching through impossible barriers into the eternal Present, a moment of union with the Sacrifice on the Cross of Calvary. History, therefore, was a limited dimension, a compression of an unspeakably vast and beautiful dance into a solid icon, an incarnate Logos, a terrarium of fertile gardens in the cup of a Hand. The metaphors mixed and agitated in his mind, each reflecting a facet of the light of understanding, none of them complete, none of them a summation of the entire problem.

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