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January 26 - February 13, 2024
to see the signs of what’s made to be temporary, to enjoy without clinging and clasping, so that when such things are gone it’s not a disaster.
does this apply to congregations?
Though left alone, he loses none dear to him; for all are dear in the one who cannot be lost.”
Not all change is loss, and not all loss is tragic, but some loss is tragic. This is why hope is entwined with lament, and even our resurrection songs are sung with voices that crack and break.
the very act of bequeathing wisdom to the next generation is a defiance of despair,
All is vapor. And yet here we are reading the ancient text of Ecclesiastes in the twenty-first century.
all life is a vapor, the Teacher reminds us. All that’s coming, young man, is vapor. That doesn’t mean life is empty or meaningless; it’s just that our lives are fleeting, ephemeral, fugitive, given to rhythms of consolidation and dissolution. Like a mist that evaporates, not only does our mortal life come to an end, but the seasons and microepochs that make up our lifetime coalesce and form like clouds that appear solid and formidable, only to disappear in the afternoon.
“Remember in the darkness what you learned in the light.” Store up while the garden gives to survive the winter ahead. Because, dear friend, a winter is coming.
in every season, we revolve around the Son.
To say that there is a time to die and a season to mourn is to recognize that dying asks something of us and grief takes time.
Letting the season take the time it demands can sometimes be grueling and doesn’t immediately translate into rejuvenation. Sometimes what is required of us is to pass through a season of reckoning, including reckoning with our own (collective) sins and failures. To give ourselves over to such a season—to focus on what it demands—means not to rush to resolve it or escape but to endure, undergo, let go of what needs to be taken from us.
“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 is an effort at orientation,
“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.”
but if Ecclesiastes is right, 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.
Discernment is not some magical affirmation of whatever happens; it is an attentiveness to the gifts we might have missed.
an almost sacramental means of transcending the purview of our now as God gives us an outside glimpse of our moment.
like the gospel itself as they gently say, “Be not afraid.”
Trading testimonies across generations turns the communion of saints into a time machine.
“In the current conditions of human society they are not capable of seeing anything except ruin and woe; they go around saying that in our times, compared to the past, everything is worse; and they even go as far as to behave as if they had nothing to learn from history, which is our teacher.”
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. Too many of our histories are hagiographies.
truth or being do not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.” Even if we affirm that we live and move and have our being in the triune God, the economy of creation means that our now is shaped by such accidents,
seasons are environmental and involuntary.
Seasons can be expected and are something that befall us rather than something we bring on. It is important to recognize this so we don’t confuse a season with our identity, nor imagine that a season is either a reward or a punishment.
We can’t hasten either their arrival or their end.
I am not what I’m enduring. I am not reduced to what I am experiencing. A season doesn’t define me.
While God is eternal, creatures are seasonal, and thus our relationship to God is characterized by a seasonality that is natural, expected, and good.
ebb and a flow, with varying waves of intimacy and distance, enthusiasm and struggle.
seasons of relating to God might also be varying dynamics of how one experiences God’s presence.
God’s covenant faithfulness is a steady state of enduring. If the person from the exuberant season could see the “you” in that contemplative season, it might look like a kind of distance or coolness from the outside. But that exuberant “you” doesn’t yet have the capacity to comprehend the unspeakable comfort found in that contemplation to come. God’s nearness looks and feels different depending on the season you’re in.
Part of the profundity of the Bible is the way it can give itself to us so differently across an entire life—indeed, across millennia and generations, like a never-ending, cascading waterfall whose presence is steady but whose notes and sounds are constantly different.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t hear it differently, that it doesn’t mean anew. This is why repeated listening is a gift.
this desire was enough for what strength remained to her; its fulfillment would have exceeded her strength.”
The Christian life is like living in escrow: the Creator has retaken possession, but we’re waiting for closing.
This limitation is why human hopes for the future are longings for a world like the one we’ve experienced, minus the sorrow.
“They were so intensely good at being precisely what they were.”
There is an interesting exchange, later in Augustine’s life, in which he counsels Boniface, a Roman general governing the precinct of Africa at the time. Frustrated by uprisings and incursions of those who despise the Christian faith, Boniface is becoming impatient. He thinks he knows what the kingdom of God is supposed to look like, and so he is increasingly tempted to impose it—to make the kingdom come, as it were. But Augustine cautions him with an admonition that could shape an entire life: “We ought not to want to live ahead of time with only the saints and the righteous.”
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.
we are citizens of a kingdom that will arrive from the future.
This misguided school of thought remains alive
bold to call a church father wrong headed
Clement’s ancient demonization of “this age”
seems like a strawman especially since the scriptures talk of"this age" in a negative way.
What we long for is a future for this world that has unfolded in history and endured time with groans and cries.
Eden is never celebrated as our destination.
We are pulled toward a home we’ve never visited.
“For Jesus the Kingdom was, in the first place, a gift. Only on this basis can we understand the meaning of the active human participation in its coming; the Zealots tended to see it rather as the fruit of their own efforts.”
“eschatological radicalism”: a hope rooted in labor that is awaiting the advent of an upheaval, a parousia of another order, a restoration and reconciliation of all things.
“How could we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land?” (Ps. 137:4) is also a question of time: How can we sing kingdom songs in the now? The chords will often be minor, sung with weeping. But in Christ, we are already singing in the future as well. The choir that is the body of Christ is the edge-point of history such that even the new song of Revelation (5:9; 14:3) will be a reprise. We’ll sing motifs we learned in history. We’ll bring chords with us into the kingdom.
Instead of being defined by waiting, my active life is shaped by what I hope for. I am acting now on the basis of the future. I receive myself from the future. I am what I am called to be.
In an important way, I inherit who I can be. To be is to be “indebted,” as Heidegger puts it.
the projection of a possibility that takes up my past. If, for example, later in life, I finally discern and resolve to answer the call to be a poet or a pastor, that possibility pulls together my past in a new way. All my formative experiences are now recast by this different future, and my past becomes something I never could have anticipated in the past.
Heidegger defines this as temporality: that distinctly human way of being-in-the-world such that I “come back to myself” from the future.
