The Monk and the Concept of Eternity

          The following folktale is from the introduction to an article by Orlanda S.H. Lie, entitled The Concept of Time in the Medieval World View. The paper is very informative, but my favourite section is definitely the story at the beginning, poignantly illustrating what eternal life might be like. You can read the rest of the paper here: 
http://www.medievalists.net/2014/04/01/concept-time-medieval-world-view/

          Once upon a time a monk left his monastery for a walk in the cloister garden. He had often been pondering the meaning of eternity and heavenly bliss and had frequently  prayed to God, asking him for an illustration of one moment of heavenly bliss. All of a sudden he heard the lovely song of a little bird, perched on the branch of a tree. He stopped to listen and enjoyed his song until the bird flew away. When he returned to the monastery, he was greeted by a porter, whom he had never seen before. “Who are you?” the porter asked. “I am a monk of this monastery,” he answered. “I stepped out for a little walk in the garden.” But strangely enough, he couldn’t find anybody there who looked familiar to him. But not only the people seemed different, somehow the whole place had changed. The monk was utterly confused and did not know what to make of it. When they asked him who the abbot was of the monastery, and whether he could name some of his fellow-monks, he provided them with the names of people none of them knew.  Finally they decided to consult the annals of the monastery. To their amazement they discovered that the monk was referring to people who lived more than three hundred years ago. Moreover, there was also an entry that registered the strange disappearance of a monk who left the monastery one day and  never came back…  And at that moment the monk understood what had happened. This was God’s way of answering his prayer: the pleasure he derived from listening to the bird’s song was God’s way of giving him a foretaste of the timelessness of  heavenly bliss.  If  the beautiful song of this little bird was already enough to make him forgetful of the time, how intensely more pleasurable and  never-ending must then be the joy of heavenly bliss in the after life!