Time travel to Bethlehem?

“If you could travel back in time to witness Jesus’ birth or any event in His life, would you do it?” Two enterprising Catholics posed this question to me during Advent.

“Yes” was my unequivocal answer.

“Doesn’t that undermine faith?” one replied with a genuine and savvy curiosity. “If you truly believe that Jesus is alive now and can see Him in the Eucharist, why would you go back in time?”

He would be right if I sought time travel to Bethlehem or Jerusalem in the manner of Thomas the Apostle: “Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25). When the believer demands proof as a condition of faith, he has no faith.

But I do not enter the time machine as Thomas. I enter because I want to see.

Faith is ordered toward seeing what lies beyond the senses. Through it “we see in a mirror dimly” God and His workings in the world (1 Cor 13:12). With death, the mirror disappears and we will see directly what we were created to see: God, in whose presence we will live forever. Hence, faith is a temporary virtue: it lasts as long as our lives on earth.

In Heaven, faith and hope pass away; Love itself pervades all of eternity. Faith, then, leads to love.

Because faith is incongruous with its divine object, it is never satisfied. We desire God but cannot reach full union with Him whose power explodes all earthly things and ideas. The life of faith, then, generates “mental unrest,” a dissatisfied longing for a deeper encounter with God, as Josef Pieper, following St. Thomas Aquinas, called it in Faith, Hope, Love.

This spiritual unrest resembles our experiences of longing for absent spouses and family members. Text messages, phone calls, and video chats cannot suffice to overcome the physical gap that frustrates us. Psalm 42 expresses this sentiment when it is directed toward God:

As a deer longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?

For a person of faith, to enter a time machine to see the newborn King in Bethlehem, or witness His miracles, or hear His teachings, or follow Him along the Via Dolorosa to Calvary, or encounter Him on the road to Emmaus is to slake his thirst for God. The time travel would facilitate a “back to the future” moment where the believer experiences Heaven by going back to see the Lord in the flesh.

The time machine may be fantasy, but we make many attempts to “see” God by incarnating our faith. Holy cards, sacred images, religious art, religious objects, and churches all bring faith from the intellect into the realm of the senses. God deigned to transmit His grace through sacraments, physical signs of his invisible power, because our corporeal nature needs to see and feel along with thinking.

And there is one pious practice that is as close as possible to entering a time machine: going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land to see for ourselves the places where Christ lived. We can visit the Basilicas of the Nativity and Holy Sepulcher, to touch the sites of the incarnation and redemption. We can see the seas Jesus sailed, the mountains He traversed, the places He performed miracles.

If faith were solely an intellectual act, we would not make pilgrimages. Imagining the holy sites, and Jesus in them 2,000 years ago, would be enough. But we are drawn to more than knowing. We are drawn to touch, to hear, to experience in our hearts what we know in our minds to be true.

In Lumen Fidei Pope Francis writes that “faith ‘sees’ to the extent that it journeys, to the extent that it chooses to enter into the horizons opened up by God’s word” (9). The journey is toward God. Abraham made one. Moses made one. The women hurrying to Jesus’ tomb at dawn on Easter Sunday made one. Faith is not solely for contemplation. The mental unrest, the holy longing, it generates sends us into action down roads that will lead us to God, who is our hearts’ desire.

On the other side of faith, God longs to meet us. Father Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen writes in Divine Intimacy that love “desires a fusion of hearts; and God, who infinitely loves the soul that sincerely seeks Him, desires nothing more than to unite it to Himself.”

Yet, paradoxically, God beckons so that our mental unrest may develop into a faith that is purified of every dependence and earthly crutch. “Do not hold on to me,” Jesus directs Mary Magdalen on Easter morning (John 20:17).

The perfect love to which God calls us demands a complete gift of self, free from all dependencies—even those healthy ones that bolster our faith. As we move away from these earthly things, led by grace, God (continues Father Gabriel) “clothes [the soul] with Himself, with His own divine life.”

Is entering the fictive time machine to travel to Bethlehem this Christmas a step back from union with God then? Not if we go to see—to adore—as we will at the end of our lives, when we will be free of all earthly dependencies and beg for forgiveness of our sins. For in seeing we will be overwhelmed by God’s grandeur, which, in Bethlehem, concealed by His human nature, only illuminates faithful souls such as the Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, the Magi, and the shepherds.

So if a time machine will give me the chance to adore the Lord in the manger, as I pray I will get to do in Heaven, then I’m climbing in. However way we come, let us adore Him.