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August 16 - September 15, 2022
There is a strange irony to the fact that our bountiful harvest is plucked from gardens and fields that are dying. The gifts arrive at the end.
“When all year long you eat those same second-rate fruits and vegetables that have been flown in from the other side of the world or grown in industrial greenhouses, you can’t actually see them for what they are when they come into season, when they’re ripe and delicious. By that time, you’re already bored.”3 When our senses are dulled by a manufactured availability, we lose our ability to taste, to judge, to discern.
gardening, with all of its microseasons within seasons, has attuned me to seasonality—the way time is lived in windows, chunks of history within parentheses. Life itself is epochal even if the scale is simply my life, which is hardly epic. Seasonality means that, rather than being governed by the unceasing ticks of a minute hand, our lives unfold in eras.
Giving ourselves over to the season is a way to receive what we need to take from it into the next.
“Taking the time” is a way of letting the season shape us, and ultimately there is a trust that God’s providential and caring hand is not only behind the season but holding us through it.
discernment should be a primary, ongoing spiritual discipline of the Christian life and the Christian community. “Discernment is necessary not only at extraordinary times, when we need to resolve grave problems and make crucial decisions,” Pope Francis continues. “We need it at all times, to help us recognize God’s timetable, lest we fail to heed the promptings of his grace and disregard his invitation to grow. Often discernment is exercised in small and apparently irrelevant things, since greatness of spirit is manifested in simple everyday realities. It involves striving untrammeled for all
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“We must be willing to let go of the life we had planned,” says E. M. Forster, “so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”12 To give ourselves over to the burden is to entrust ourselves to the God who calls.
there are times to live with these things, to dwell with them in order to let them do their work. To recognize their seasonality is to grant them a focus for a time—to give oneself over to it—but to do so in a way that recognizes it as temporary and transitory. Go with it; don’t get used to it.
To embrace seasonality is to cultivate an availability to the moment, entrusting ourselves to the Lord of history and willing to live through the mystery that is time. This requires a special kind of patience that is a willingness to not judge a zig until we’ve lived through the zag, so to speak—to wait for the season to unfold before resenting what it’s taken. Sometimes the gifts come at the end.
when we are humbled, friendship across generations becomes a lifeline, an almost sacramental means of transcending the purview of our now as God gives us an outside glimpse of our moment.
Discernment is not well served by self-congratulating histories that simply narrate our founding mythologies and confirm the stories we tell ourselves. Discernment requires an attention to history that is willing to be vulnerable to what we’ve buried, ignored, and would rather not hear. Only when we face those facets of our history will we properly understand when we are and who we’ve become.
A life lived with God through time is a period of incubation in which the Spirit of God is creating the capacity in us to hear the same Word anew and to make the Word echo afresh in the new crevices in our heart.
“We ought not to want to live ahead of time with only the saints and the righteous.”6
Christians are a futural people. Every day we pray for God’s kingdom to come. But as long as we are praying it, it hasn’t yet arrived, which means we are also a waiting people. There are significant dangers in trying to rush the kingdom, as if we could now live “with only the saints and the righteous.”
Christians keep time differently because we are citizens of a kingdom that will arrive from the future. Living eschatologically is not so much a matter of knowing the end as knowing when we are now. An eschatological orientation isn’t only about a future expectation but also a recalibration of our present.
faithfulness is never synonymous with a recovery project. We are never called to turn back the clock. Appeals to God’s actions in history are not invoked in a spirit of “golden-age-ism”; Eden is never celebrated as our destination. Our pilgrimage is not an Odyssean return. We are pulled toward a home we’ve never visited.10 We are oriented to what is coming, not what has been.
The strange posture of eschatological hope is one of active receptivity, an intentional openness, a labor that, paradoxically, awaits a gift.
to inhabit the present in such a way that the future is the beating heart of my now.
Christian political theology has a public role to play simply by renarrating to late-modern liberal societies their religious and theological inheritance.
The hymnbook of hope is organized around two repeated refrains: “How long, O Lord?” and Maranatha!
the graced posture we are called to cultivate on the way is faithful labor in the present, rooted in discernment, always with our eyes on that coming city.
To be unhurried is a tangible discipline of hope.
the Lord of the star fields and Creator of the cosmos was attuned to the specificity and particularity of the histories we have endured in time, addressing the strange and perplexing ways we carry absence and loss in our heart and bones, the way a profound lack could exert so much power on our lives.
The God who saves is a mosaic artist who takes the broken fragments of our history and does a new thing: he creates a work of art in which that history is reframed, reconfigured, taken up, and reworked such that the mosaic could only be what it is with that history. The consummation of time is not the erasure of history.
