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January 26 - February 13, 2024
discernment is a core virtue of temporal faithfulness.
“the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.”
The movement of the Spirit is something to be joined, which requires something of us.
Niebuhr cautioned against overestimating our capacity to manage history. At the very moment that we see ourselves as a superpower, actors on history, we become blind to all the ways we are shaped and constrained by history.
“The evil in human history is regarded as the consequence of man’s wrong use of his unique capacities. The wrong use is always due to some failure to recognize the limits of his capacities of power, wisdom and virtue. Man is an ironic creature because he forgets that he is not simply a creator but also a creature.”
a different future is possible, both because God can turn the tables
and also because recognition can yield contrition—which can, in turn, lead to a change of course. It’s never too late for us to become who we’re called to be.
Recognition should find its end in contrition—a posture increasingly unintelligible to us in a society dominated by “the liturgy of moral self-appreciation.”
man is constantly tempted to overestimate the degree of his freedom and forget that he is also a creature.”
Lincoln’s distance on the situation was made possible by the fact that American history was not the only story he inhabited.
recognition and contrition did not preclude discernment and action.
Objectivity is not always the arbiter of what is most truly true.
“The Arctic receives, strangely, the same amount of sunshine in a year as the tropics, but it comes all at once, and at a low angle of incidence—without critical vigor.”
A cross-section of the bole of a Richardson willow no thicker than your finger may reveal 200 annual growth rings beneath the magnifying glass. Much of the tundra, of course, appears to be treeless when, in many places, it is actually covered with trees—a thick matting of short, ancient willows and birches. You realize suddenly that you are wandering on top of a forest.
Don’t compare your sturdy temperate trees to your neighbor’s Arctic forest. You can’t imagine how much implacable energy it took to grow those saplings. You might not be able to fathom what they have endured. You don’t know how ancient that forest is, how much time it has spent enveloped in darkness. Even more importantly: don’t compare the trees of your tundra existence to someone else’s equatorial rain forest. God doesn’t. They live in different conditions. The sun shines upon the just and the unjust, but not at the same angle or with the same intensity. The birch saplings that have punched
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Suspended from the ceiling by chains and metal bars, the skeletons still drip oil. “Poor whales,” Jamie laments, “don’t they know when to stop? The same whale oil that greased the machines and lit the streets and parlours, the oil of soap and margarine. All that oil! Here they were, dead for a century, still giving out oil!”7
Skeletons in the closet from generations past still drip, drip, drip into our lives.
over time repeated rituals and rhythms wear a groove that is at once psychological and physiological.
Sometimes a body remembers what it can no longer do.
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. This is why you can’t go home again:8 because the you that arrives is not the you that left, and the home you left is not the home to which you return. The raucous welcome-home party for the prodigal won’t immediately undo the habits formed in a distant country. But pieces of home went with the prodigal into that distant country, and it was that embedded history that served as his wake-up call to who he was, pulling him homeward.
Heidegger argues that the very being of being human is being possible.
The way I’ve come through the world means my possibilities for the future have already coalesced in specific ways—like
This doesn’t mean the future is set or completely decided in advance. It’s more like concrete in its liquid state: it has been poured into a frame, but you can still make an imprint, shape it by your decisions.
thrown possibility.
As a potentiality for being that I am, I have let some possibilities go by; I constantly adopt the possibilities of my being, grasp them, and go astray. But this means that I am being-possible entrusted to myself, thrown possibility through and through. I am the possibility of being free for my ownmost potentiality of being. Being-possible is transparent for me in various possible ways and degrees.
We are bundles of potentiality, but the possibilities are not infinite. We are thrown into a time and place, thrown into a story that is our history, and these form the horizons of possibility for us—our temporal halo we described earlier. That is not a limitation as much as a focusing, a gifted specificity. This corner of earth I’ve been given to till. These neighbors I am called to love. These talents I’m exhorted to fan into flame. This neighborhood in which to birth a future. “Go with your love to the fields,”
The future keeps unfolding, and what was future becomes the past that launches you into new possibilities. This dynamic of thrown possibility keeps unfolding across a lifetime. Formation never stops. My horizons are not petrified at twenty or even fifty. What I can’t possibly know are the environmental conditions that are going to be thrown my way in the future and how those will reconfigure my horizons. There are still new habits in my future that I can’t yet anticipate.
What it means for me to be transformed is a factor of how I have been formed. I am not a blank slate of willpower; neither am I a robot programmed by a past.
This situatedness of the human condition is no surprise to God, who reaches us under these conditions, within our horizons. Ultimately, to entrust oneself to God is to trust that it is God who has thrown us into this. That doesn’t nullify the contingency or specificity of our histories; but it does assure us of God’s presence in our histories. 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
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While repentance is a turning, it should not be confused with nostalgic regret for...
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there is a more insidious version of nostalgia in negative: shame.13 Shame is a nefarious enemy of grace that thrives on the backward glance. Shame keeps craning our necks to look at our past with downcast eyes, as a life to regret. There are highly spiritualized forms of this fixation that parade themselves as holiness. But in fact this is the antithesis to grace. Shame lives off the lie of spiritual self-improvement, which is why my past is viewed as a failure. Grace lives off the truth of God’s wonder-working mercy—my past, my story, is taken up into God and God’s story. God is writing a
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What changes is who is with us and what God can do with our suffering. Shame teaches me to look at my past and see something hideous that makes me regret my existence. In grace, God looks at my past and sees the sketch of a work of art that he wants to finish painting and show the world.
Even my sins and struggles hold the possibility for compassion and sympathy. Only such a God could make even my vices the soil in which he could grow virtue.
Nostalgia wants to undo time, walk it all back, as if this were some sort of recovery.
The hidden price of getting what nostalgia wants is losing what has been given to you.
To walk back a life is to lose it; to get what nostalgia craves is loss. To have your life back would be to lose everything that unfolded and that God wants to use.
shame can’t imagine a future for our past.
“blank-slate-ism.”
The particularities and contingencies of our personal histories are effaced by a version of grace that, rather than saving us, simply obliterates this “I” that has a past. Of course, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Cor. 5:17). Baptism is a burial, and we rise to newness of life (Rom. 6:4). But the new creation is a resurrection, not a reset; we know because of the scars. Just as the resurrected Christ bears the mark of his wounds—his “history” with the Roman Empire—so the new self in Christ is the resurrection of a self with a past. The “I” is saved only if this me with
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unique constellations of talents and experiences
All of this also explains why there will be tribes in the eschaton. our cultures will not be obliterated or at war with one another but will worship the Lamb together.
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.
Because of my past, God’s renewing Spirit can birth in me insights, empathy, attention that are exactly what someone needs in the world.
Grace is not a time machine. Grace is not a reset button. Grace is something even more unbelievable: it is restoration. It is reconciliation of, and despite, our histories of animosity. Grace isn’t an undoing; it is overcoming.
Every single moment of life stands open in several directions, . . . as if it had three or seven doors, as in a fairy tale, into rooms that all contain different futures. These hypothetical offshoots of time cease to exist whenever we make a choice, and have never existed in themselves, a little like the unknown faces we see in dreams. While the past is lost for ever, everything that didn’t happen in it is doubly lost. This creates a particular kind of feeling of loss, the melancholy of an unrealized past. The feeling sounds over-wrought and unnecessary, something to fill our idle and
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There is something scandalous about the way God takes up this contingency in our lives—all of it, even the heartbreak and sorrow, the evil and injustice—and forges it into this singular life that is mine, that is me.
To be human is to be the product of a history that should have been otherwise: that’s what it means to live in a world off-kilter due to sin and evil. And yet now I am the me with that history, and without it, I would be someone else.
Wisdom is the unhurried fruit of time served as a mortal. As such, wisdom is, pretty much by definition, what you lacked in “the former days.”
The crookedness of your unlikely life is not a failure.
The jagged line that is your story tracks the path of God’s companionship and care.
