coNTENTSNOMOUS MAN' o~ Temporal Mediation Childhood: the Father o~ the Man Youth: the Unfinished Man and His Pain Manhood: the Finished Man among~emiesw Age: the Child o~ the ManCH THROUGH TIME AND MEMORY,ries and Stories o( God9f the Past: Once There Was a Godof the Present: Now There Is No Godof tbe Future: Someday God Will BeITHIN MINDII9I20126~35I44~54~6917o~79 ~87 ~952II227PrefaceI WOULD LIKE TO PURSUE in this book a search for God in timeand memory. It is a search that will carry us on quests and jour-neys through life stories, through hells, purgatories, and heavens,through ages of life, through stories of God. It is the sort of thingyou might undertake if you were writing an autobiography orcomposing a personal creed. Writing an autobiography would involve you in a process ofbringing time to mind. You would start by trying to recall in asmuch detail as possible your past. As you began to put your pastlife into w9rds, though, you would probably find that the storycould be told in many different ways, depending on the kind offuture you thought it was leading to. This would start you think-ing about the possible relationships between your past and fu-ture. You would not be able to foresee the actual events of thefumr~ nor even, for that matter, to recall the entirety of the past,but you would have begun to think about your life as a whole,about all the elements of drama in it: the plot, the characters, thethought content, the modes of expression, the setting. Thinkingthis way would carry you to the edges of your life, backward tobirth and forward to death; it would give you a sense of yourlifetime being part of a larger time. It would make you wonderhow your life fits into your times, whether it is a reenactment of vii