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January 27 - February 6, 2025
Knowing when we are can change everything. Knowing whether it’s dawn or dusk changes how you live the next moment.
book, you might say, is an exercise in such attunement, an invitation to ruminate on questions we perhaps haven’t asked. The wager is that such reflection, as Taylor says, changes us and thus changes how we live,
But disorientation can be temporal too.
We can’t discern why when makes a difference. We don’t recognize how much we are the products of a past, leading to naivete about our present. But we also don’t know how to keep time with a promised future, leading to fixations on the “end times” rather than cultivating a posture of hope.
We are blind to our own locatedness, geographically, historically, temporally.
Our (shared) history makes all the difference for discerning what faithfulness looks like.3
“What do we do now?” is one of the fundamental questions of discipleship.
We don’t need coaches who will help us manage our time; we need prophets who make us face our histories (and futures).
I won’t know who I am until I know when I am.
Heilsgeschichte, “holy history,” the unfurling of history as the drama of salvation.
Christianity accords a unique significance to time.
Heidegger emphasized, shockingly, that theology’s “topic” was not God but instead what he called Christlichkeit—“Christianness,”
Being a Christian, then, is not so much a matter of believing something about God as much as living in light of this event’s cascading effects on history.
the church’s practices are disciplines of attunement that calibrate the spiritual timekeeping we carry in our bones.
So, too, must the church be attuned to the living Spirit’s “conducting” in ways that are responsive to the moment: when to urge on, when to yield.
To be a creature is to be passing away, amid things passing away.
God’s creative word, “Let there be . . . ,” started the clock. For everything created, to be is to be temporal, and to be temporal is to be indebted to a past and oriented toward a future.
one of Husserl’s key insights: to be is to have been, and to have been is to have bumped up against others who rub off on us. They leave marks we might not always see. More than marks: they leave dents and deposits. Or they drill wells that become underground reservoirs from which we drink even if we don’t realize it.
edges of our world we see when we look in the distance. We
and hope. I am not always aware of what I carry and what I anticipate.
Our selves are fashioned; we are adorned with histories that incline us to saunter, swagger, or shuffle. Given our histories, some of us move through the world with a cape; some of us don baggy sweaters we hide behind; some of us still experience the world as if exposed. The question isn’t whether we have a style but which style we’ve (unconsciously) adopted given our histories. We wear time.
When we say something is “contingent,” we simply mean that it might not have been, doesn’t have to be, and could have been otherwise. And that is true of the entirety of the created cosmos, brought into existence by the free act of a bountiful, loving God. All of creation might not have been. That doesn’t make creation random or arbitrary, only contingent.
Thrownness is a way of naming our experience of contingency. On the one hand, we experience the conditions of our situation as given; on the other hand, we understand that they could have been otherwise.
Faithfulness is not loyalty to a past but answering a call to shalom given (and despite) our past.
The same dynamic of inheritance is true in the life of faith. Every person who carries a Bible in their hands, a collection of books between two covers, is an heir to the discernment of Christian councils in the fourth century. Our battered Bibles are living relics of their work. So, too, the vast majority of Christians worldwide worship with a repertoire of practices bequeathed to us from centuries past, and our spiritual disciplines carry something of the heat and light of earlier saints in the desert. This temporal inheritance, carried in the artifacts and rituals of the church, is the
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The only path to a future that is just runs through this confrontation, this confession, this reckoning.
The “past” that is pined for is always selected, edited, preserved in amber, and thus decontextualized,
Nostalgia is rarely antiquarian, a mere interest in history qua history. It is more commonly a sentimental pining for “the way it was.” Such nostalgia is always a form of arrested development. For example, there are sorts of nostalgia that are not-so-subtle longings for adolescence and thus resent adulthood.
Sometimes the most faithful act of remembering requires a destruction of our nostalgias; sometimes the most creative act of remembering is to ruin the illusions we’ve learned to live with.
When God can raise the dead, not even death is the end.
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.
There’s a difference between believing we are the ones we’ve been waiting for and realizing we are called to join the Spirit of God coursing through history.
This book is an invitation to a new consciousness of how to inhabit time. “Consciousness of an ironic situation tends to dissolve it”:
I am the carrier of desires that outstrip this mortal frame.
It’s not just that the past is with us, but that it persists in ways that grate against our present.
There are still new habits in my future that I can’t yet anticipate.
Shame is a nefarious enemy of grace that thrives on the backward glance.
My personal history isn’t something to regret; it is something God can deploy in ways I never could have imagined.
But the new creation is a resurrection, not a reset; we know because of the scars.
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”
everything could have been different.21 To recognize contingency without melancholy or malaise is one of the hardest disciplines of spiritual timekeeping.
Even this past has given me something, made me someone. I am who I am because of you and, strangely enough, I’ve come to love this me I’ve become. Even though you took something from me, in the remarkable economy of God’s grace I was given something.
Time here is bent and folded.
Liturgies- church memory has no time- all people are present in memory at the same time
“let no innkeeper or philosophy professor fancy that he is such a clever fellow that he can detect something if the god himself does not give the condition.”
You could say 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. This eternalizing of the historical and historicizing of the eternal at once sacralizes time and flattens chronos because it is “the moment”—kairos—that makes all the difference.
Christian liturgy enacts the sacred folds of kairos. The liturgical calendar rehearses the way time curves and bends around the incarnate Christ like a temporal center of gravity.
the Book of Deuteronomy are implicitly invited
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 Bible is riddled with second-person plural pronouns that situate us in a communal reality, and that community is continuous across time.
“We” are longer than our lifetime.
