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October 24 - October 31, 2022
Knowing when we are can change everything. Knowing whether it’s dawn or dusk changes how you live the next moment.
Such discernment is the fruit of reflection, rumination, contemplation.
A word of encouragement before you enter: don’t come so much to learn as to dwell.
Taking time to dwell with the images is the point. Taking the time to enjoy reading and to revel in language is one of the ways we learn to inhabit time well.
Thus begins our adventure of reckoning, discernment, and hope.
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That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by. —Ecclesiastes 3:15
A lot of contemporary Christianity suffers from spiritual dyschronometria—an inability to keep time, a lack of awareness of what time it is.
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.
Dang!!!
Even expressions of Christianity that seem to be fixated on time and history are, ironically, nowhen renditions of the faith that believe they are above time and history because they’ve been granted access to a God’s-eye view of it all.
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.
Our (shared) history makes all the difference for discerning what faithfulness looks like.3
Reckoning and hope scale to both soul and society.
What we need to counter spiritual dyschronometria and the fiction of nowhen Christianities is a renewed temporal awareness, a spiritual timekeeping that is attuned to the texture of history, the vicissitudes of life, and the tempo of the Spirit.
Spiritual timekeeping is fundamentally a matter of awakening to our embeddedness in history and attending to our temporality—both individually and collectively.
A faithful Christian life is a matter of keeping time with the Spirit. But 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.
This book is intended as a wake-up call to the significance of your temporality, our temporality—awakening to the way history lives in you, the way we inhabit history and history inhabits us, and the way futurity pulls us and shapes us.
It’s not as simple as seeing the spiritual significance of your calendar but instead discerning the spiritual repercussions of a history that precedes you, lives in you, and shapes the future to which you are called.
We don’t need coaches who will help us manage our time; we need prophets who make us face our histories (and futures).
Baldwin named this: White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us. . . . And it is with great pain and terror that one begins to realize this. . . . In great pain and terror because . . . one enters into battle with that historical creation, Oneself, and attempts to recreate oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating.5
The miracle that puzzled Nicodemus, that should astound us, is that the God of grace can redeem even me—this historical creation—can begin again with this history that lives in me, that is me. It’s the body with scars that is resurrected; it’s the me with a history that is redeemed, forgiven, graced, liberated.
We might imagine spiritual timekeeping as an expansion of the spiritual discipline of memento mori, the disciplined habit of keeping death before us. Christians appropriated this practice of the Stoics with the inflection of the Psalms and the scent of ash. Thus St. Benedict counsels in his Rule: “Keep death daily before your eyes.”
In the spirit of memento mori, consider this book an invitation to the discipline of 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.
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Heilsgeschichte, “holy history,” the unfurling of history as the drama of salvation.
We need to remember that at the heart of Christianity is not a teaching or a message or even a doctrine but an event. God’s self-revelation unfolds in time, and redemption is accomplished by what happens.
Kierkegaard says, in the Christian understanding of time, the instant of revelation—and the instant in which I am confronted by such revelation—is a decisive “moment” that changes everything. Things change in time, and that change is momentous—an emigration from darkness to light (Eph. 5:8), from death to life (Eph. 2:4–5), from nonbeing to being (1 Cor. 1:28). The moment is charged and pregnant, a turning point for the cosmos. History matters. What happens makes a difference. When I, at some point in time, am confronted with the mystery that the eternal God became human in the fullness of
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O. K. Bouwsma, was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard. You can sense that influence in a succinct and beautiful passage in which Bouwsma emphasizes “that Christianity is something that happened, and not a theory or an explanation or a set of doctrines.” Because Christianity is fundamentally a “happening,” we rightly understand it only in terms of story. We all know that the story to which I have now referred is a long, long story and that the happening is a long, long happening. The happening takes place over many centuries, the story is composed of innumerable episodes—a story that is continued
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Bouwsma argues, we need to understand this story as a “love story” in which the Christian “becomes a character in the as-yet-unwritten continuation of the story”
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. 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.
“Faith,” he says, is “the believing-understanding mode of existing in the history revealed, i.e., occurring, with the Crucified.” The radicality of Heidegger’s
Christian life is a way of life that lives as if this history still matters—to live as if this history is now, and that this history is my history.
Second, spiritual timekeeping reflects a sense of time shaped by covenant—a promise made in history reverberates through subsequent time.
Annie Dillard once observed, “The absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”
Jesus promises a dynamic work of the Spirit, who guides us into truth across time. This is the fundamental conviction of catholicity: the Spirit continues to guide and lead into the future, across history, still guiding, convicting, illuminating, and revealing, which is precisely why ongoing reform is necessary. The story is still unfolding. Listening to the Spirit is not an archaeological dig for some original deposit but rather an attunement to a God with us, still speaking, still surprising, still revealing.
apocalyptic literature in the Bible is interested not in chronos (“clock time,” as Heidegger calls it) but in kairos, a fullness of time, a time charged in a way that can’t be simply measured. Christian eschatological hope is a kairological orientation to an inbreaking future that makes an impact on our present. The end-times countdown is a decline narrative: the clock is ticking to the rapture; everything in the meantime is just time endured before the escape pod descends. In contrast, spiritual timekeeping tries to discern where the Spirit’s restoration is already afoot in creation’s
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spiritual timekeeping, in contrast, is characterized by a dynamism of keeping time with the Spirit.
dynamics of time are also important for one’s own spiritual life: to recognize, for example, seasons of a life with God, when the Spirit sometimes speaks sotto voce, almost inaudibly, and to discern what God asks of us in such a season—what God is doing in us in such a season. Hence, the wisdom and discernment of spiritual timekeeping is integral to a life well-lived.
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In this word picture, time is a frame for things to flower. It’s not merely a question of everything finding its slot in the calendar, but creation brought to fruition in time, unfurling and unfolding all its possibilities to attain the beauty always latent there. Rather than the mind simply tick-tocking its awareness of past and future, here the human heart is infused with a time above time, a spark of eternity carried in this temporal vessel.
our finitude—our lack of Godhood—is not something to resent or lament. Our inability to see the whole is not reason to despair. 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. “That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction [“pleasure” even, the NRSV says] in all their toil—this is the gift of God” (3:13). The Teacher’s counsel is provocative, even table-turning: lean into your creaturehood; live into your temporality; dig into your toil. There
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Everything past is thrust back from the future and everything future follows upon the past, and everything past and future is created and set in motion by the One who is always present. —Augustine, Confessions 11.11.13
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. It is to move in a world where things come to be and pass away: events, words, attention, activities all have the characteristic of a kind of passing.
We ride the cusp of a wave we call the present, driven by the past and headed for the shore of the future.
Tim O’Brien’s landmark novel The Things They Carried. While on one level it is a novel about the Vietnam War, the story compels almost universal interest because it tells us something about the human condition. What he says about these soldiers’ experiences is portable in a way: “They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”
Forgetting is the exhale of a temporal being, but with every breath, something has been kept.
Husserl spent a lifetime trying to understand this temporal character of selfhood and identity, and I’ve no doubt absorbed more from him than I realize. Indeed, this illustrates 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.
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What I have encountered, now in the rearview mirror, primes me for what I will encounter.
Husserl offers a technical concept that is illuminating here. My “I,” he says, is not just given, a thing of nature; I am generated: I am put together, “come about,” over time. My self (what philosophers like to call an ego, “I am” in Latin) has a history, and at the bottom of the “I” is what Husserl calls a “substrate of habitualities.”6 This “substrate” can be understood as a base layer of experiences that become habits for me and make further experience possible. The history of my own experiences becomes a seedbed cultivated by time so that future experiences have possibilities to grow.
Some of my habitualities mean I walk through this world with a limp. I carry them like a burden. Wounds shut down possibility. Some of my formative experiences have disposed me to ignore and exclude, willfully indulging the blind spots I’ve inherited. Racism, for example, is not just an attitude but a bodily schema of habitualities that I absorb over time.8 But compassion can become the same sort of dispositional habit, a bodily disposition woven into my very being because I have learned what it means to be vulnerable and to be cared for. Over time, someone has both showed me compassion and
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The question isn’t whether we have a style but which style we’ve (unconsciously) adopted given our histories. We wear time.
These same dynamics are communally and collectively true. As Anthony Steinbock puts it, who we are is how we are.9 We share horizons; each collective has its own temporal halo.
Spiritual timekeeping is the way we attempt to reckon with our temporality.
