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August 16 - September 15, 2022
The absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less. —Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
We will begin to understand our place and calling in the spiritual adventure of history only if we find a way to hit the pause button on our frenetic absorption in the everyday and resist the tyranny of the urgent.
I hope this book revives the ancient art of philosophy as spiritual counsel. Philosophy matters only if it teaches us how to live, how to be human.
But the question isn’t simply what’s true; the question is what needs to be said and done now, in this place and in this moment given this particular history.
recognizing the reality of seasons can be incredibly liberating, not only because it changes our expectations but also because it attunes us to receive God’s grace in different ways in different eras of a life.
what the Spirit asks of us always reflects history—our own, but also the history of the church and the societies in which we find ourselves. “What do we do now?” is one of the fundamental questions of discipleship.
Facing up to the spiritual significance of time, history, and futurity is almost the exact opposite of “management”; it is more like voluntary exposure to disruption, making oneself vulnerable to haunting.
We don’t need coaches who will help us manage our time; we need prophets who make us face our histories (and futures).
if the future is going to be different—if grace is going to reach these behemoths of history—the painful labor of confronting that history is the only way to give birth to a different future.
But your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself and save yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.6
what we might call memento tempori. Remember you are temporal. Keep your history daily before you. Remember there is a future after the sand runs out, and that future is already bleeding into your present. Dum spiro spero: while I breathe, I hope.
a renewed time consciousness transforms our sense of place in God’s story—what German theologians, in a wonderful word you can sort of chew on, liked to call Heilsgeschichte, “holy history,” the unfurling of history as the drama of salvation.
the truth is born at the very intersection of time and eternity, like a chemical reaction that requires both components. It might take only an instant, “the blink of an eye,” and yet it is the happening that makes all the difference.
Christian faith is ongoing participation in the Christ-event which continues to rumble through human history. Christianity is less a what and more a how, a question of how to live given what has happened in Christ.
spiritual timekeeping is the working out of our creaturely finitude as creatures embedded in time
For every creature, to be is to become; to exist is to change;
spiritual timekeeping reflects a sense of time shaped by covenant—a promise made in history reverberates through subsequent time.
spiritual timekeeping is nourished by Jesus’s promise that the Spirit will guide us into all truth across time
spiritual timekeeping is animated by the future. Such a futural orientation we call “hope.”
Christian eschatological hope is a kairological orientation to an inbreaking future that makes an impact on our present.
Our being subject to the conditions of temporality is not a prison but a focus. Gifted with boundaries, we are given room to be happy, to find joy, to enjoy time and—perhaps?—even toil.
To be temporal is to be the sort of creature who absorbs time and its effects. A rolling stone might carry no moss, but a temporal human being picks up and carries an entire history as they roll through a lifetime.
Consciousness, he says, is both “retentional” and “apprehensive”: we retain a past and we anticipate a future, which is precisely why my own consciousness eludes me.5 I don’t always know what I remember and hope. I am not always aware of what I carry and what I anticipate. The measure of my “I” is always broader than this now of which I am conscious.
But the only hand we have to play is the hand we’ve been dealt by the history that has come before us. Because we are heirs of such history, possibilities open up for us. Thrownness is not a negative thing. Because I’ve been thrown into the life and time in which I find myself, I have a future that calls for me to realize possibilities latent in what has been handed down. But those possibilities are not infinite, and what is called for is also a factor in this handed-down history.
Our past is not what we’ve left behind; it’s what we carry. It’s like we’ve been handed a massive ring of jangling keys. Some of them unlock possible futures. Some of them have enchained our neighbors. We are thrown into the situation of trying to discern which is which. We are called to live forward, given our history, bearing both its possibilities and its entanglements.
We might believe ourselves to have overcome history with our supposed enlightenment and not realize the extent to which we are living on the borrowed capital of a past that has sustained us.17
faithfulness can be confused with preserving the past rather than having gratitude for a legacy meant to propel us forward.
Hegel’s suggestion is that wisdom begins to dawn at the end of the day—that we need to get through something before the clarity of insight arrives. Only endurance yields wisdom, and often it will feel like insight arrives late. Why couldn’t we have known this earlier? That is one of the scandals of temporality.
the whole drama of human history is under the scrutiny of a divine judge who laughs at human pretensions without being hostile to human aspirations.
“Consciousness of an ironic situation tends to dissolve it.”38
God’s grace does not lift us above the vicissitudes of time’s flow; rather, the God who appears in the fullness of time catches all that’s been thrown our way in an embrace that launches us into a future that could only be ours because only we have lived this life that Christ redeems.
God’s sanctifying presence in my life doesn’t erase what’s gone before. Indeed, what God has prepared for me depends on what has gone before. My personal history isn’t something to regret; it is something God can deploy in ways I never could have imagined.
The God who saves is the God who calls and commissions us to a ministry of reconciliation; and in that call and commission, God wants to unleash the unique constellations of talents and experiences that make me who I’ve become. When the distinct amalgam of my history—including its traumas and wounds—intersects with the renewing power of the Spirit, a chemical reaction of possibility awaits. That possibility is a calling: the “good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Eph. 2:10).
To recognize contingency without melancholy or malaise is one of the hardest disciplines of spiritual timekeeping.
There is a mystery of inheritance at work here: I am no doubt an heir to dispositions and habits and even pretensions from ancestors I’ve never met. God’s grace enables me to make friends even with my ghosts.
to collect them all into this one sprawling scene is not a diminishment of history but some kind of curvature in time, bending toward the One who was born to history “in the fullness of time” and who is, at the same time, before all things and the end of all things.
Christian spirituality is the original quantum theory.
“Man cannot open himself to the eternity of God by turning his back on temporal existence. The encounter with the eternal ripens in time, through the lived moments of hope, faith, and love.”4
In the paradox of the incarnation we witness “the eternalizing of the historical and the historicizing of the eternal.”
The enfleshment of God in “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4) is the turning point of possibility for being human.
God can come to the creation he made and yet not be received or perceived (John 1:10–11). When God empties himself, humbles himself, taking the form of a servant, the revelation is oblique (Phil. 2:6–7). On the road to Emmaus, not even resurrection immediately translates into recognition; something else has to be given. There is a grace needed to glimpse the God who graces history.
there are no latecomers in the communion of the saints, which is just to say that all of us are latecomers to the arrival of a hidden God.
the immediacy of Christ to every generation. In the paradoxical calendar of incarnational time, the distance of chronos is drawn near by the intimacy of kairos.
There is a real and significant continuity of a people constituted by the covenant. This binding of a people across time and generations is the same reality expressed in the communion of the saints. The later generation lives into specific possibilities because of what it has inherited from those who crossed the sea and wandered the wilderness. This continuity is real because of the enduring presence of the same God to whom all generations are connected, and also because habitualities are collective as well. Hopes are inherited; so are idolatries. Just as agency is bequeathed and inherited, so
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Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn’t diminish the volume of the flow around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished.4
The penchant to capture every instant of beauty on my iPhone becomes a way of losing the world. Rather than living with me in my visceral memory, all the joy and beauty I experience ends up buried in a photos folder I rarely look at. The result is a diminished experience of both present and past. When I’m bent on capturing the moment in a snapshot, I am less present to the present; I’m fixated on a future memory—which ends up being a sad substitute for an emotion or vision I can carry in the caverns of my soul.
To be temporally aware of our creaturehood is to wear mortality comfortably.
He doesn’t despair that life is like “chasing after wind” (Eccles. 1:14); rather, as Leithart points out, the Hebrew phrase should be translated “shepherding the wind.”12
What is art but the practiced discipline of evoking but not pinning down? A film, a poem, a song can invite us into multiple states of mind, evoking conflicting emotions yet managing to hold them together so that we dwell in the world with an unspoken appreciation for its messiness and a newfound humility in the face of its complexity.
The Teacher’s wisdom is different: life is not meaningless; it is just brief, tenuous, liquid, melting away, hard to hold on to.
