Eternity with Jesus: Now and Forever

Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.

- Dan Brown, Angels and Demons.

The day started like any other weekday morning at the Escamilla home, with Raymond’s alarm clock set to go off at 4:30 A. M. but him beating it by waking up earlier by five minutes. He found it quite easy to program himself to do this, as he had been doing that for the past 30 years of his married life to Becky. In contrast to his proclivity to being an early morning bird, she was a perennial night owl who shunned the wee hours of the morning. Although these circadian rhythms that were severely at odds with each other had been the fodder of countless early morning squabbles, they were of significantly lesser importance now that his two adult children who still lived at home were not dependent upon their mother for transportation to and from school as they had been in earlier years. In fact, Becky routinely told Raymond not to worry about waking her up as she could always fall back to sleep. Waking up his son Art and his daughter Nicole was also highly unlikely, as their home was a large, almost mansion-size expanse with their rooms far from the master bedroom and the kitchen that housed a highly coveted early-morning appliance called the coffee maker. Although Ray had always been blessed with an almost manic reservoir of energy, he was requiring more than the usual four hours of sleep that previously had sufficed when he was much younger than his current 54 years. Although he could sleep an extra hour every weekday, he preferred a slow start consisting of coffee and a light breakfast prior to beginning his professional workday. It was amazing to see just how well he worked under pressure, why with deadlines and all the different and at times taxing personalities that he worked with every day. However, Ray always said that his day had to start off slow or otherwise it would not be a good day for him at all.

Ray nimbly turned off his alarm clock and slowly made his way to the coffeemaker that had been programmed to start brewing at 4:30 AM. He always waited by this modern-day contraption since the time that he was a child, as no familial prohibitions were ever placed on him to not drink the stuff by his parents. Now, as then, it was as if though he was symbiotically attached to the machine’s workings, experiencing an increase in feeling alive as it worked its magic, beginning with the first sizzle of the heating chamber, to the following hollow slurp of water as it was being sucked up into it, and then the first aromatic flow of the luscious brew which just signaled the beginning of life anew. This invigoration was more primal than rational, or even psychological, as it was much more like the fabled hungry, experimental Pavlovian dogs that salivated at the mere sounds that had been temporally associated with food. These experiences also occasionally made Ray reminisce about his early years growing up poor in a drafty wooden home on a cold winter day and feeling the warmth that came with the first sip of this magical elixir. Then, as now, Ray’s awakening reaction was prompt, and his usual routine was to then pop 2 cinnamon raisin slices of bread in the toaster while the coffee brewed. The joint smell of these 2 favorites just exploded into Ray’s senses, completely heralding the beginning of a new day.

Grabbing his first cup, Ray’s usual routine was to step out onto his back deck which faced his swimming pool and breathe the fresh country air which today was chilly as his home was nestled in the woods with mountains off in the distance. The sky was brightly lit with gorgeous stars against a pitch-black sky, with a peacefulness that only occasionally would be interrupted by a shooting star, causing Ray to marvel each time at the awesome power of God who was the author of 150 billion galaxies and counting. In contrast to Einstein’s uninvolved, arms-length God, Ray had always felt that God knew him by name, and the truly awesome reflection was that He truly cared for each and every one of us. This morning it reminded Ray of the times when as an inquisitive youngster he had stood near an ant pile to observe its workings and feeling the caring for these little creatures that he felt as he gently moved away rocks and other debris which made taking that little morsel of food back to their den just a little easier.

Raymond Luis Escamilla, Ph.D. was a man who through the decades of his life had painfully become accustomed to the fact that he was different from others, and as a result, after much inner conflict, introspection, and resolution had carved a personality that fit his life-long metamorphosis as a composite amalgam of these differences. He was 5’6”, weighing a svelte 175 lbs. and sported broad shoulders and a 32” waist. Although his face was youthful in appearance, it was only his iron-colored hair that draped the sides of his forehead that immediately gave his age away. Despite numerous requests from others to dye his hair, he adamantly refused, stating that his own life-long strict adherence to his strenuous workout routine had earned him the right to display this incongruous mixture of youth and middle age. His slight Spanish accent had likewise been the fodder of private discussion among his peers, with a few of them venturing so far as to prop their courage to propose, without seeing the inherent racial slur, that he should investigate the specifics of speech therapy to remove this perceived deficit. This usually prompted Ray to initiate an advanced vocabulary test with them, and after soundly besting them in such an exercise, he would laugh out loud and tauntingly asked them to repeat their previous pronouncement on his verbal weakness. To anyone who had known Ray throughout his lifespan, he would be the first to acknowledge how merciful Ray had been in his belittlement of his criticizers when utilizing this approach, as opposed to the bitingly caustic counter-criticism of decades past as a younger man. These traits of Ray’s personality yielded a solidity that was at once off-putting and attractive, depending on the emotional integrity of the recipient of the counter-punch, and this solidity was aptly demonstrated by Ray’s demeanor, bearing, and swagger as he made his way down the hall.

In fact, Ray was a man of seemingly irreconcilable predilections that did not fit the mold anywhere. Although this intrapsychic constellation was frequently the trigger for feelings of dysphoria and alienation in his childhood growing up in the barrio, he was at peace with it now. As such, his daily routine consisted of activities and perceived responsibilities that are not usually housed within one person. In this regard, he was an impeccable scientist who had expertise in physics, mathematics, engineering, and experimental design. However, from an early age, Ray was a student of all sciences, having excelled in and written articles in several leading professional journals in the areas of anthropology, psychology, and physics. Although he was a strict quantitatively-oriented scientist, he was also a deeply spiritual man, a staunchly conservative Roman Catholic who practiced his faith through his daily devotionals and attendance at mass. He likewise had the uncanny ability to both see and appreciate the oft–perceived enormously disparate and at times contradictory biblical accounts and science. In this regard, many a nouveau scientist and evangelical person had seen him as an easy target for either their holier– than– thou or condescendingly intellectual mire, only to be given a harsh lesson in not only the respective subject matter but also in divergent and convergent thinking. In fact, Ray’s frequent coup de grace was the question “Don’t you see how God has absolutely charged you, with reconciling these seemingly irreconcilable positions, as a predicate to understanding the ontological and epistemological bases for our existence?” In fact, the real coup de grace was that this last question was usually delivered with a snidest grin and a blink of an eye. Most people at this point waved him off and heard his laughter as they walked away from him.

However, just as the accomplished gunslinger from the old Wild West always lived with a slither of fear that he would someday run into the faster man that would send him into eternity, Ray lived with that same slither of fear that his own day of intellectual reckoning would come. Having come from a very poor family and understanding, albeit somewhat late in high school, that education was a way out of the barrio, Ray enrolled in a local university where he graduated summa cum laude with a major in physics and a minor in mathematics. Graduate school quickly followed in Ivy League schools where both masters and doctoral degrees were granted while still in his early 20s. Despite his orientation to detail, by predilection and natural talent, Ray was a “big -picture” thinker, always striving to integrate the minutest scientific findings within the broader picture of truth as we knew it.

Although a consummate intellectual elitist, Ray vowed never to be a social elitist and frequently looked with disdain at ethnic minority scientists who seemingly forgot where they came from and gave out insincere airs of being someone other than themselves. Much to the ever-present scorn of such people who both envied his genuineness as he engrossed himself in the intellectual challenge of the moment while afterward enjoyed and participated in the usual Tex-Mex banter and predominantly male outlandish antics at “barbachas” (bar-b-ques) and barrio dance halls, such critical people were always afterward left thinking about what fun and joy they had given up whenever they decided to become scientists themselves and give up their cultural roots in the process.

With respect to his spiritual side, Ray recognized that salvation through the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus and faith in this belief was the ideal. However, he also recognized that the ultimate decision belonged to the person’s relationship with God and to God Himself. However, this type of uncertainty was one that he decided long ago to not rely on for both himself and his family. Although he advocated to everyone the importance of having a personal relationship with their Creator, he was frequently heard repeating a particular phrase that encapsulated how important our relationship with God and a rock- steady belief in our own salvation through Jesus was. In this regard, he frequently stated that belief in salvation through the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus’ redemptive death was the ultimate formula for insuring salvation, and he was likewise frequently heard saying that security in attaining salvation was like walking. In this regard, he would say that walking was good for you, your health, and ultimately your longevity. He would then add that a personal relationship with God was likewise good for our eternal salvation. But, as the Bible stated that salvation is impossible by any other name other than Jesus, he would frequently quip, “You can walk in the park, or you can walk on the freeway. The walking is the same but the danger has been remarkably reduced in one versus the other.”

Ray was blessed in his family life. In this regard, he was blessed with a faithful, loving wife who was an excellent mother and household caretaker who frequently took up the slack for Ray’s late hours and, at times, exhaustion at the end of the day. Although her major skills were in practical mechanical applications, which frequently precluded the paying of repairmen with the fixing of household appliances and services, her grasp of the complicated nature of Ray’s work was exceptional. Moreover, her support was vital, as it involved allowing Ray to be the test subject himself and subject himself to all sorts of dangers, both known and unknown.

What was most remarkable about Becky was how much she towered over Ray in all matters mechanical. In fact, this was a difficult pill for Ray to swallow early in the marriage as he came from a very traditional Mexican American family. Men were expected to take care of these things, either singly or with the camaraderie of other male relatives. Not being particularly gifted in this area and having had a father who was likewise the same and an inpatient teacher to boot, Ray frequently walked away from these household jobs which his father tackled and retreated into the set of his favorite books as a child, which was the World Book Encyclopedia.

But I digressed. Getting back to the early dawn experience at the Escamilla home, after downing 3 cups of joe, Ray headed to the Chapel of Adoration at his local Catholic church. Despite his incredible capability for thinking outside of the box, Ray was a man of strict routines, responsibilities, and devotional practice. He liked arriving at the church a full one hour prior to the mass and thus pray the Holy Rosary, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, and the Seven Offerings of the Precious Blood of Jesus prior to Mass. Ray believed that God heard all prayers, verbal, mental, and otherwise. However, he once heard of Catholic lore and not necessarily church doctrine that prayers made at the moment of the consecration of the host were the most powerful prayers of all. It is during this time that the ordinary species of bread and wine are converted through transubstantiation into the actual body and blood of Christ. This concept was usually the one Catholic doctrinal truth that he usually evaded during skirmishes with Protestant brethren for whom this most sacred of acts was merely symbolical. However, with all his acumen in Catholic apologetics, he could defend this point entirely. But the reading assignments which he assigned to his debaters at the onset of a challenge, which comprised a vital part of his own training in this most complex of subjects, was categorically avoided by his opponents. As such, he reserved most of the expenditure of his time to those who truly were sincere in their wanting to learn the reality of this difficult subject.

Ray continued his early morning revelry on the road to church this morning. It is truly amazing how much a person can reflect and understand in the quiet wee hours of a pre-dawn experience. Ray had been having these reflective episodes more frequently as of late, as would be expected of someone with a staggering load on their shoulders and facing the possibility of personal annihilation in the process. Having Becky in his life had been an enormous, God-given blessing in many respects. But fundamentally, the greatest things that he had learned from being married to her were that he learned how to be interdependent with someone else. This was no small feat for Ray, as he was temperamentally a staunchly independent person who preferred to work alone. A man like that habitually trusts very little to others, and Becky’s love and her being a “born mother” oriented him to the greater challenges of being a father and a true patriarch. These experiences were the training ground for his present role as team leader of the most momentous undertaking in mankind’s history.

Although the day was typical in its routines, it was anything but for Ray. He had become progressively tenser in the past few months following the finalization of his mathematical calculations and his intense integrative work with other world-class experts in their respective fields which was indispensable to the accomplishment of goals that had never been attempted by other scientists and which was seen as next to impossible in the current scientific world. He had been having difficulty with sleeping, particularly in the past week, and it was beginning to show in facial worry lines and tired eyes that he was not completely able to hide. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was truly a matter of life and death for him. However, the importance of his success reached way beyond his own life which he was risking as the first human test subject, as it had profound implications for the world and how he viewed his role would become considering this. As such, the stakes were as high as they could be. Being a man accustomed to challenges, he had fought many a battle in the academic world. However, this was one experiment where he would no longer be the detached scientist-observer. He would be the sole participant in a quest that almost every human being throughout the ages has fantasized about in his or her lifetime. Then, as now, most of us don’t have an inkling of the dangers involved. By contrast, Ray had seen the horrifying reality of those dangers with his very own eyes. Every bit of his knowledge of mathematics and understanding of space-time, every calculation made by the scientist members of his own team, indeed everything that he had learned in preparation for this quest were on the line, and the quest was this: Is it possible for a human being to travel to the past and remain alive and conscious in the process, and return alive and cognizant of all that he had learned so as to bring back to our modern wayward world what was most needed to re-orient humanity to the need for a personal relationship with God and a renewed love and respect for our fellow human beings?