g the more distinctive features of our thought, and one which, though understandable (how else to assign order, and therefore, even if only retroactively, a meaning, to the flow of things as they pass?) is nonetheless remarkable. The Earth, our birthplace, common home, and final resting place, is now in roughly the same position in its apparently eternal perambit around the Sun as it was when Heaven saw fit to share My Lady with this world. When I consider that, in but a few more full lunar cycles, fully twenty complete circuits of the Earth around that small yellow star will have lapsed since first I met you, I am all the more amazed by it all. For, surely it cannot have been so long since that first meeting. Surely, something of that nature must have only just happened, given the immediacy and tangibility of it all. It may even be that there are only a few real "events" at all - that the flow of ever-present nows is only occasionally punctuated by anything of any importance, and so, marking the importance of these few moments, our poor clouded minds attempt to build a chronology retroactive and prophetic around them. I cannot be certain. Scripture records that it pleased the Lord to permit humans to use the Sun, moon, and stars to mark dates and times. Therefore, it must be that these bodies exist, if only in part, to bring back to our minds, as if some sort of cargo of recollection, events of great importance - to us, if to no one else - events which happen but once (if at all), not merely in the span of a single human life, but perhaps once even in the entire succession of instants that mark the period from "Let there be Light" to the as-yet unknown (and perhaps unknowable) final end. This explains, perhaps, what I experienced last night, standing in my garden, looking up at the moon and stars, silent witnesses and reliquaries, as it were, of events which - though long since past - are yet present even now. If this constant presence and immediacy of the past be an image of eternity, then my eternity will be nothing more than the continuous experience of "now," with what my feeble intellect calls past and present and future all rolled into one homogeneous whole, experienced and savored perhaps as some sort of nostalgic anticipation of happiness. On these terms, eternity will be distinguishable from my experience last night only by the facts of location and duration, both of which will fall away with the gross matter of which my self is compounded. Eternity will be me standing in my garden, perhaps, only there will be no garden, nor even an "I" to stand in it - only the thoughts, ever-present, and without end precisely because they will be liberated from the constraints and illusions of matter and self and time.