(I thought that I had posted this yesterday, but apparently not . . . !)

     In the movie The King's Speech, which I saw recently, again, we see a monarch encouraging his nation to lift its eyes beyond its immediate situation to a larger picture, a picture that is almost a sort of eternity, a singular expansiveness, an enlarging of ken that supersedes the theatres of the war, a vantage point in which the vagaries and machinations of the present moment would find their ultimate direction and meaning.

     Oddly, however, though a semblance of eternity would be the peoples' measure, it would also be their burden:  they would not be able to understand nothing apart from it.
     The prophets of ancient Israel believed they had a burden from God, a burden so visceral and overwhelming that they could do nothing else but preach it.  This burden was their truth--their conclusions about the words of God--but it was also their daily challenge:  everything they did was bound to it.  Each day, they labored under the convicting grip of this burden, compelled to proclaim to their audience the stakes before them, the stakes of eternity.  For it was in these stakes of eternity that the prophets believed they found that which infused their actions with purpose:  creation met its destiny.
     If eternity exists, our actions have a permanence that exceeds any earthly approbation or praise we may experience in them.  King George gave many magnificent speeches throughout the war, but only as they prompted his people to trust in a larger permanence of thought did they have any lasting significance and staying power.
     If eternity exists, we live in its shadow every day, balancing the ineluctable fact of death with the affirmation of another age, one into which all our earthly form and quests will eventually go, an existence which will guarantee ultimate point for our present moments.  Ours is a burden to live in temporality even as we ponder a life beyond it, the lilting actuality of a vision that encompasses and moves all that is presently real.  The burden of eternity.