I Am

There is, in almost everyone’s memory, a blackboard.

The schoolmaster stands before it, a long wooden ruler in his hand. Three columns are drawn in chalk: the past, the present, the future. The ruler taps the first, and the class recites with one voice: I was, you were, he was… Then the second: I am, you are, he is… Then the third: I will be, you will be, he will be…

Last evening, it was my grandson, bent over his notebook, stumbling on that very verb, to be. And suddenly, over his shoulder, I saw again my own blackboard, my own schoolmaster, the same ruler tapping the same three columns. Half a century had passed. The verb had not moved a single letter.

For that verb is not recited only at school. We conjugate it all our life.

The first column, the past, is the column of what is no longer. I was young. I was healthy. My father was here. The more the years go by, the longer that column grows. At my age, it has become the longest of the three: the column of yellowed photographs and empty chairs.

The third, the future, is my grandson’s column. It overflows with promises: I will be big, I will be a firefighter, I will be… Bright, and yet so fragile, for no one holds his future in his hand. It is not a possession; it is a suspended hope.

That leaves the middle column. The present. I am. We would think it ours, since it is where we live. But look closely: our present never stays in place. Barely spoken, already it slips into the past. Today’s “I am” will be tomorrow’s “I was.” We inhabit a present that runs through our fingers.

And then there is Someone, in all the universe, who conjugates this verb in only one column.

One day, in the desert, a man asked God his name. And God, instead of a name, gave a verb: “I am who I am.” Not I was. Not I will be. The very Name of God is a verb planted in the middle column. He never says “I was” — he loses nothing. He never says “I will be” — he waits for nothing. He is, simply, and forever.

When the Son came, he kept the grammar intact. Seven times, in the Gospel of John, he laid his hand on the ordinary things of life: I am the bread, I am the light, I am the way… Always in the present. Never “I was the bread.” For he is not a memory to be revived, but a presence to be met. And one never meets anyone in the past tense.

One day, they reproach him for his age. He answers with a sentence that ought to stop our heart: “Before Abraham was, I am.” He does not say “I was before Abraham” — that alone would be staggering. He says: I am. Abraham belongs to the first column, swept along by time. He stands in the second, motionless, present to every generation of children reciting at the blackboard.

This is what I would whisper to my grandson, for the day when he is grown, when his own column of the past begins to lengthen. Everything you can say of yourself will end up tipping into the past: I was little, grandpa was here. But there is an “I am” that will never become “I was.” A presence that does not pass into the past.

He even did the unthinkable with death. The only time he allowed himself a past tense was to declare: “I was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore.” Even death he pushed back into the first column — behind him — keeping before him only a present that never ends.

So when all the rest has slipped into the past, there will remain the One to whom we can always speak in the present. Even at the edge of a grave. Even with empty hands. To say to him, simply, this word that time will never take back from him:

You are.