How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

by James K.A. Smith

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. Things didn’t have to be this way, and if history—mine, ours, the world’s—had swerved in a different way, we would have inherited a different set of possibilities and a different configuration of burdens.

William Faulkner’s insight: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”15 Our past is not what we’ve left behind; it’s what we carry. It’s like we’ve been handed a massive ring of jangling keys. Some of them unlock possible futures. Some of them have enchained our neighbors. We are thrown into the situation of trying to discern which is which. We are called to live forward, given our history, bearing both its possibilities and its entanglements. Faithfulness is not loyalty to a past but answering a call to shalom given (and despite) our past.

Holten tries to transcribe the subtle languages in the swirl of marble, the patterns of grooves in sandstone curbs, the hieroglyphics we never notice in the limestone at Grand Central Station. What can the lines in the landscape tell us? Where are we going? What will we leave behind? Rocks bear witness. All the lines, cracks, holes, marks, dots, wrinkles, and fossil traces that appear in stones over and over again, and on different scales, must be trying to tell us something about the life of the city, of the Earth; about the metabolism of the buildings, of the planet. Messages percolate from the past, up through cracks and scars in the metropolis’s skin.16

Every day we live amid relics of time. Fossils of our past that live in laws, in institutions, in policies and practices, and in a vast repertoire of habits we inherit from generations that precede us. Just like the rocks that surround us, these cultural and institutional “givens” compose an “action environment” that shapes how we live and move and act. We experience their givenness in the simple refrain “This is how it’s done.” The very givenness of these realities is a false invisibility: because we don’t see them, we are unaware of how we’re shaped by such inheritances and how they constrain and channel the way we live.

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 tangible expression of what we call “catholicity.”

These zombie fossils of history can be tangible, visceral, carried in the stuff that surrounds us and that we consume. We live off, live from, this environment forged by contingent history. As we ingest it, the fruits of such histories become part of us. No history is pure; no one’s history is pure; what nourishes us is also tainted. You might say that, even as we sit down and give thanks for what’s on the table, there is always a legacy to lament too. Every “grace” is a confrontation.

I am a son of Uncle Sam And I struggle to understand the good and evil But I’m doing the best I can In a place built on stolen land with stolen people

The only path to a future that is just runs through this confrontation, this confession, this reckoning.

Which is why we are not victims of our history as if the past predetermines our future. “We are more than the sum of our parts,” the narrator reminds us, “All these broken bones and broken hearts.” We can hope for a future that might be otherwise. Hence the song concludes with a prayer: God, will you keep us wherever we go? Can you forgive us for where we’ve been? We Americans.

This song, like a hymn of spiritual timekeeping, braids lament and hope, refusing both nostalgia and despair.

“So much of the trouble of this world is caused by memories,” wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard, “for we only remember half.”19 The “past” that is pined for is always selected, edited, preserved in amber, and thus decontextualized, even if this past is invoked as marching orders for restoration and recovery.20 Whenever the past is invoked as a template for the present, the first question we should always ask is, Whose past? Whose version of the past? And what does this invoked past ignore, override, and actively forget? Which half is recalled? Whose half is forgotten?

“A monument is a future ruin,” Stallings wryly observes.

The ruined monument is a better act of remembering than obliteration. 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.

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Such romanticism about the future is like nostalgia in negative. It is not hope but hubris.

When God can raise the dead, not even death is the end. Resurrection and forgiveness mean the future is always an open source of surprise.

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Matthew Aucoin offers a generative metaphor: “History is not a dead weight . . . but rather a still-living, ever-mutating compost heap, a fertile ecosystem within which we forage, hunt, build.”26 History is alive in us and in our institutions. Because our history is never past, discernment is a core virtue of temporal faithfulness. We are growing in this compost of history that needs to be sifted: there is certainly refuse to leave behind, but also transmogrifications of our past that are now fertile soil for a different future. Some seedlings are emerging that we might transplant.

Hegel developed a view of history as the unfolding of a purpose from within, through tragic conflict to a higher reconciliation. . . . History moves to heal the wounds it made.”28

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.

Discernment is the hard work of peering around us when everything is cloaked in the coming shadow of night. Hegel says as much when, just before noting the owl’s liftoff, he offers a caution on our hunger for instructions on how the world ought to be. Philosophy, he says, “always comes too late to perform this function.” Perhaps there is a discernment that needs to come before philosophy arrives on the scene at dusk. “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy.”31 But sometimes such recognition is an achievement that puts us on the path to a different future.

The fact that insight arrives late doesn’t release us from the burden of discernment. Nor should insight be dismissed because it is almost always hindsight. The Spirit—Hegel’s Geist—calls to us in history. Discernment is first and foremost not a matter of explaining history but looking to forge forms of life in concert with the Spirit’s unfolding redemption in time.

Charles Taylor tries to capture this when he says that, for Hegel, the movement of the Spirit is “in train” and “it is incumbent on men to recognize and live in relation to it.” The movement of the Spirit is something to be joined, which requires something of us. “To recognize one’s connection with Geist is ipso facto to change oneself and the way one acts.”32 And for Hegel, religious transformation is at the heart of this: a change in reality is intertwined with a change in consciousness. This is why discernm...

Taylor’s concluding comment is dense but worth considering carefully: “There is a difference . . . between a view which sees widespread willed social and political transformation as something to be done by those who would achieve regeneration and a view which sees the relevant social and political transformations as needing to be discerned and hence accepted and lived in the right spirit.”33 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.

Augustinianism, a graced temporality in which the Spirit is afoot and on the move and we, by grace, are invited to join and thereby both be transformed and be part of the unfolding transformation.

Niebuhr’s notion of “irony” is specific, almost technical (not of the Alanis Morissette variety). He emphasizes that our situation—the human condition—isn’t merely “pathetic.” We aren’t simply victims of history who deserve pity as passive “patients” of forces beyond our control. We are both creatures of time and actors who shape history:

Nor is our condition merely tragic, a situation in which we are forced to make unjust decisions because of some code or environment that befalls us. Our situation, rather, is ironic: so many evils are of our own making, and yet so many of those evils are generated by our blinkered virtues and the unconscious shadows of our best intentions. “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.”35 This failure to recognize will be an important theme for us, bound up with the importance of discernment.

He who sits in the heavens laughs with derision at our vain plots, the psalmist says (Ps. 2:1–4). The laughter is derisive, Niebuhr comments, “having the sting of judgment upon our vanities in it.” Our situation is laughable, but in God’s laughter, which is humbling, there is a warmth and empathy that conveys another possibility: forgiveness. “If the laughter is truly ironic,” Niebuhr continues, “it must symbolize mercy as well as judgment.”36

the irony of our history always means a different future is possible, both because God can turn the tables (“the stone the builders rejected” becomes the chief cornerstone, Ps. 118:22) 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.

“Consciousness of an ironic situation tends to dissolve it.”38

“Consciousness of an ironic situation tends to dissolve it”: that doesn’t mean it solves our problems, nor does it absolve us from our limits. Recognition doesn’t lift us above the vicissitudes of history. It only makes us newly attentive to our conditioning, perhaps less confident in the purity of our good intentions and more conscious of our limited purview, our mixed motives, the ways even our best plans can unravel in unintended consequences in a future we can never control.

Niebuhr ends, finally, with discernment. “This divine source and center must be discerned by faith because it is enveloped in mystery, though being the basis of meaning. So discerned it yields a frame of meaning in which human freedom is real and valid and not merely tragic or illusory. But it is also recognized that man is constantly tempted to overestimate the degree of his freedom and forget that he is also a creature.”41 When we recognize that we are always embedded in a when, a pressing question dawns from this recognition: When are we? And where is God in this when? Where is the Spirit afoot in our now? Such discernment is fraught. Niebuhr rightly wonders whether we could ever achieve the “detachment” necessary to read our present, to discern the Spirit’s tracks through the history in which we are embedded.

“Lincoln’s responsibilities precluded the luxury of the simple detachment of an irresponsible observer. Yet his brooding sense of charity was derived from a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning than that of the immediate political conflict.”43 Lincoln’s distance on the situation was made possible by the fact that American history was not the only story he inhabited. His “religious awareness”—which, in Lincoln’s case, was a distinctly theological attunement—gave him a vantage point from which to see the irony and horror of the two sides of a war who “read the same Bible and pray to the same God,” as Lincoln put it in his second inaugural address. Lincoln’s recognition of the irony also led to contrition; but such recognition and contrition did not preclude discernment and action. To the contrary, recognition and contrition made it possible for Lincoln, both cautious and bold, to chart a course for action rooted in discernment:

This conviction, rooted in discernment, with “firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”

Discernment always entails risk. Though the work of discerning must be communal, there will never be uniform agreement. The work of discernment is never finished because the Spirit is always afoot in history. To become attuned to the Spirit’s song is to change your life.

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Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. —Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time”

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 up through the crust of your prior life are miracles of grace. (Remember when you thought nothing could ever grow there?) They’ve never lived through your winter. They don’t know how long your night has been. By the grace of God, you’ve endured the dark.

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Our past is not past; it oozes into the present. Skeletons in the closet from generations past still drip, drip, drip into our lives. Sometimes this fuels possibility and opportunity, lighting a lamp for us. Sometimes these bones invisibly drip fuel onto the fire of our anxiety and rage. A buried past is not dormant. Ignoring the past is not a way to escape it. Indeed, the buried past probably takes more than it gives.

Sometimes a body remembers what it can no longer do. Muscle memory is not always matched by the muscle’s capacity. My body’s habits outstrip my body’s ability. In the words of that Top Gun commander, sometimes my ego writes checks my body can’t cash.

Given our histories, our bodies plot stories we can’t always live out. We carry habitualities that are anachronistic, out of joint with the time in which we find ourselves. Because we swim in time’s flow, our bodies bring habits of intention and desire that don’t always align with our present—sometimes they are misaligned with our present version of ourselves. These might be trauma responses harbored from a past life that are wildly out of place in our present, and yet they persist, puzzling those around us. But it could also be an inclination to prayer that catches us off guard because we thought we had left the faith long ago. Or we might pick up the phone to call a friend, seeking communion, only to eventually remember that they died eight months ago. Or we relate to our children as we always have—as fierce protectors, moral guides, life directors—even though they’re now in their thirties and need something different from us. 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 way we experience the world—which is a singular amalgam of environment, experiences, gifts, and traumas—bequeaths to us possibilities, dispositions, desires, hopes that reside in us like spiritual muscle memories. What I aspire to is a factor of what I’ve inherited. What I imagine as a possible future—even what I can hear as a “calling”—is a reflection of what my past has made imaginable. Our now is always bequeathed to us.

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,”12 for the horizons that circumscribe you are not fencing you out of something but entrusting you to this field of possibility. What’s thrown your way is what you can do.

Reflecting on my personal history is like looking at archaeological strata; the layers of my identity are possibilities into which I have lived. What I can imagine, can choose, can hope is a factor of what I’ve inherited. 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.

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 this life that Christ redeems.

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 new chapter of my life, not starting a new book after throwing out the first draft of my prior existence. Shame denies that our very being is possibility, whereas grace, by nature, is futural. Grace is the good news of unfathomable possibility. God’s sanctifying presence in my life doesn’t erase what’s gone before. Indeed, what God has prepared for me depends on what has gone before. My personal history isn’t something to regret; it is something God can deploy in ways I never could have imagined.

Grace is not a retroactive magic that makes evil good. Easter Sunday’s light doesn’t obliterate the long, dark shadows of Holy Saturday. Grace doesn’t justify evil; grace overcomes it.

Shame wants us to regret our thrownness; grace wants us to see it as thrown possibility. Nostalgia wants to undo time, walk it all back, as if this were some sort of recovery. Grace wants to unleash our history for a future with God that could only be ours—living into the version of ourselves that the world needs.

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—what I’m calling “nostalgia in negative”—keeps looking back, too, but in a way that paralyzes, crushes, disheartens. If nostalgia romanticizes the past as bliss, shame can’t imagine a future for our past.

God does not want to undo our pasts; nor does he want us to nostalgically dwell in our pasts; God’s grace goes back to fetch our pasts for the sake of the future.

“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 this bodily history rises to new life. If all that I’ve lived through was simply erased by grace, then “I” am lost rather than redeemed. If all that I’ve become and learned and acquired and experienced was just overwhelmed and made null by grace, then salvation would be an obliteration rather than redemption.

The God who saves is the God who calls and commissions us to a ministry of reconciliation; and in that call and commission, God wants to unleash the unique constellations of talents and experiences that make me who I’ve become. 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” (Eph. 2:10). Each of us is a singular poiēma, Paul tells us: a unique, original, one-off work of art precisely because only this “I” with this history could be the self God can use in this way. 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.

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