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

by James K.A. Smith

Karl Knausgaard captures the sad ambivalence about this realization: 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 sheltered souls, but it is founded on a fundamentally human insight and longing: everything could have been different.21 To recognize contingency without melancholy or malaise is one of the hardest disciplines of spiritual timekeeping.

Grace, we have said, is overcoming. Not undoing. Not effacing. Not regretful, but overcoming. 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.22 It is this me, the fruit of zigs and zags, stitches and scars, who is then renewed, empowered, called. I am the only one I could be. None of this justifies or excuses the heartbreak. 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.

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. So, thank you? Framing gratitude as a question is a way of trying to talk myself into it. To want to overcome is the beginning of overcoming.

Here, we might say, echoing Niebuhr, is the irony of personal history: everything I’m able to dream and hope and chase in the future is because of what has been bequeathed to me by those who have preceded me. There is a mystery of inheritance at work here: I am no doubt an heir to dispositions and habits and even pretensions from ancestors I’ve never met. God’s grace enables me to make friends even with my ghosts.

Do not say, “Why were the former days better than these?” For it is not from wisdom that you ask this. 11 Wisdom is as good as an inheritance, an advantage to those who see the sun. 12 For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money, and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom gives life to the one who possesses it. 13 Consider the work of God; who can make straight what he has made crooked? 14 In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider; God has made the one as well as the other, so that mortals may not find out anything that will come after them.

Wisdom, he reminds us, is like an inheritance: it is accumulated, and it is passed on. 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.” Every nostalgic impulse to turn back the clock is a foolish willingness to sacrifice all we’ve learned. Here is the paradox of temporality: to be is to become; to become is to lose and to gain. The “good old days” are only tempting when you forget how foolish you were. You can’t go back and keep the advantages you’ve gained.

You can see how the Teacher braids wisdom and humility here. In a fashion you’ll also find in Socrates, wisdom is knowing what you don’t know, recognizing what you can’t see, relinquishing the hubristic desire to inhabit some space above time.

Here is counsel for mortals, for “those who see the sun”: Look at what God has done. There is an inexplicable mystery about it. You couldn’t have imagined your life, its bends and pivots, its zigs and zags. The crookedness of your unlikely life is not a failure. The wending paths aren’t mistakes. The looping route that looked like it was going nowhere was a switchback climbing a mountain. The jagged line that is your story tracks the path of God’s companionship and care. Who, indeed, can straighten what ...

Don’t imagine that your times are a measure of God’s presence or absence, G...

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all. For no one can anticipate the time of disaster. Like fish taken in a cruel net, and like birds caught in a snare, so mortals are snared at a time of calamity, when it suddenly falls upon them. (Eccles. 9:11–12) Wisdom is recognizing our mortality, our shared vulnerability, our solidarity in this sea of chronos. For we mortals “who see the sun,” time is no respecter of persons. But neither is God who, in every time, is as near as our heart (Deut. 30:14).

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. —Søren Kierkegaard

One who was born to history “in the fullness of time” and who is, at the same time, before all things and the end of all things. When we recall that such images were almost always painted for sacred spaces, Olivier Clément’s observation is apt: “The dance of the liturgy does not seek the dissolution of time into a static eternity that is at once pre-existent and co-existent. Instead, the liturgy of the Church unveils and celebrates the true eternity that, rather than being opposed to time, is revealed in the very heart of temporal existence.”

This marvelously strange, time-bending imagination of historic Christian faith is radically different from so many Jesus-ified versions of escapism that resent time and romanticize eternity. Too many forms of Christianity merely endure the present as the price to be paid for reaching an atemporal eternity. As Olivier Clément observes, in the scriptural imagination almost the exact opposite is true: “Eternity is oriented toward time.” It is most acutely in the liturgy of the church that “time is revealed not as an opposition to eternity but as the vessel chosen by God to receive and communicate the truth of eternity.” All gathered together in one frame, these saints across the ages, face to face with Christ and Madonna, bear witness to the sacredness of time as such. “Man cannot open himself to the eternity of God by turning his back on temporal existence. The encounter with the eternal ripens in time, through the lived moments of hope, faith, and love.”

The trick, says Kierkegaard, is to neither underestimate nor overestimate the historical. On the one hand, the incarnation of God in history is everything. The incarnation is the fulcrum of the cosmos. Creation finds its fullness in the incarnate God. The enfleshment of God in “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4) is the turning point of possibility for being human. On the other hand, the incarnation is not merely a historical event, nor is our proper interest in the incarnation antiquarian or documentary.

There is a grace needed to glimpse the God who graces history.

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. Thus Kierkegaard sees the God who grants the condition as the reconciler of all generations.14 God is no respecter of ages. To repeat Annie Dillard’s phrase, “the absolute is available to everyone in every age” insofar as both the contemporary follower in AD 33 and the follower-at-second-hand in 1843 are in immediate relationship with the Absolute. God is as near to the twenty-first-century disciple as to the medieval saint. And the medieval peasant is as near to God as the first-century apostle.

the distance of chronos is drawn near by the intimacy of kairos. This is not an evisceration of history as much as a curious kind of compression: not history or eternity, but eternity in history and hence a gathering up of history by the eternal God who stoops to inhabit time.

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Dillard suggested, any moment is susceptible to irruption: kairos attends chronos as an ever-present possibility.

Daniel Weidner has said, speaking about the theologian Paul Tillich, kairos means “every moment might be the small gate through which the messiah will enter.”

This annual rehearsal of incarnation and passion is only “repetitive” in the Kierkegaardian sense of a repetition forward, a return that generates new possibilities.20 Perhaps we could say that the Christian inhabits time as cyclical and linear.

This continuity is real because of the enduring presence of the same God to whom all generations are connected, and also because habitualities are collective as well. Hopes are inherited; so are idolatries. Just as agency is bequeathed and inherited, so responsibility bleeds across generations.

Hence the relativization of chronology. Wave and particle. The present matters, but now is not only the present. Our now is pregnant: it bears possibilities from a past that will be borne into a future. The time stamp of a generation’s existence is caught up and enfolded into an ongoing reality that both precedes and follows us. The generation of Israel standing on the shore of the Jordan is defined by that part of its “body” that wandered in the wilderness. The past generation’s experience is in them, a defining part of who they are as they embark on this possibility. And to be who they are called to be in the promised land, they must remember who they are.

Time, for the people of God, is both linear and cyclical. What unfolds in history matters. There is no turning back the clock. Yet we do revisit those events in our now as a matter of orientation, resynchronizing our internal and collective clocks, so to speak—to remember when we are.

We’re all choosing to synchronize our watches with someone’s configuration of time. We’re all counting the days based on some calendrical convention. Pick your calendar wisely. The answer to the question “When are we?” is determined by whose “timing ball” we’re watching.

“The joy of dancing as a follower is to listen for the barely said.”

Imagine the church not like a railway timetable but as a dance hall. Every worship service is practice for dancing into the world. The bride of Christ is invited into the distinct, creative joy of following, attentive to the leader, listening for the music. Poised, attentive, attuned: What now? What next?

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too —John Keats, “To Autumn”

Margaret Renkl about the feeling of fall in the late chapters of a life. Perhaps the reason I didn’t feel sad about the onset of fall when I was younger is only that I was younger, with my whole life still ahead. In those days my only worry was that my real life, the one I would choose for myself and live on my own terms, was taking too long to arrive. Now I understand that every day I’m given is as real as life will ever get. Now I understand that we are guaranteed nothing, that our days are always running out. That they have always, always been running out.1

Learning to be a creature is a matter of learning to let go.

We are robbed by the brokenness of the Fall. But not everything that fades has been stolen. Not all passing away is an outworking of the curse. Learning to live with, even celebrate, the transitory is a mark of Christian timekeeping, a way of settling into our creaturehood and resting in our mortality.

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I want to be present to the present, to luxuriate in the now without the anxiety of losing it. By giving myself over to the moment, I can carry these joys with me in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

To be temporally aware of our creaturehood is to wear mortality comfortably. To live mortally, we might say, is to receive gifts by letting go, finding joy in the fleeting present. This is temporal contentment: to inhabit time with eyes wide open, hands outstretched, not to grasp but to receive, enjoy, and let go. Sometimes knowing this won’t last forever compels us to hold hands in the present.

There are lots of religious people for whom their faith amounts to a leap into a nostalgic past or an escapist future, but the present bedevils them: awkward and unsettled, they stumble and waver. They know how to be faithful anywhere but now. “But to be able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand to walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian—only that knight [of faith] can do it, and this is the one and only marvel.”6 To know how to dance in divine time and walk like a human being is a marvel.

Ephemerality is not something that befalls creation; it is a feature of finitude.

St. Augustine says that my very self is the present nexus of past and future. He ventures that neither the future nor the past really exists, technically speaking. “Perhaps it would be exact to say: there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come. In the soul there are these three aspects of time, and I do not see them anywhere else.”8 Augustine, quite audaciously, suggests that the present is all there is. Which is why ephemerality is constitutive of creation. Augustine’s examples often invoke speech or song as a case study for how being human requires getting used to this flow of arrival and loss.

The Teacher is counseling us not to resent that reality but to face it. He doesn’t despair that life is like “chasing after wind” (Eccles. 1:14); rather, as Leithart points out, the Hebrew phrase should be translated “shepherding the wind.”12 This is not a counsel of despair or resignation but rather an invitation to reframe expectations such that I can “enjoy” what’s before me, who is with me, fleeting as their presence might be.

Japanese term for it is mono no aware, “a sense of beauty intensified by recognition of temporality.”

“They must know mono no aware, ‘Ah-ness of things’—sensitivity and the ability to perceive things as they are—and keep their mind clear. They must notice and keep their heart alert to the scattering of flowers, the falling of leaves, dew and showers, and when the leaves change color.”15 A sensitivity to the “Ah-ness of things”: that, it seems to me, is the way to enjoy even what is transitory.

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To be faithfully mortal is a feat of receiving and letting go, celebrating and lamenting. Being mortal is the art of living with loss, knowing when to say thank you and when to curse the darkness.

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One has to learn how to lose: 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. There is a lightness of touch to this poem, a wit and humor, that feels a bit like trying to talk oneself into this posture. The grin and chuckle feel like a nervous attempt to fake it till we make it.

A young Augustine experienced this sort of disaster, an experience of loss where we lose our stars and the entire cosmos dims to a jaded meaninglessness. But looking back, the older Augustine would say that his younger self hadn’t yet learned the art of losing and hadn’t yet imagined how loss is reframed by resurrection. “‘Happy is the person who loves you,’” Augustine prays, “and his friend in you, and his enemy because of you. Though left alone, he loses none dear to him; for all are dear in the one who cannot be lost.”18 The art of losing is not easy; for mortals, it amounts to an acrobatic feat on the tightrope; but we practice above the net of the God who is all in all.

“Space offers us something to love, but time steals away what we love and leaves in the soul crowds of phantasms which incite desire for this or that. Thus the mind becomes restless and unhappy, vainly trying to hold that by which it is held captive. It is summoned to stillness so that it may not love the things which cannot be loved without toil.”21 The trick, Augustine says, is to learn to love what you’ll lose. That doesn’t mean despising what can’t endure or hating what is transitory. It means holding it with an open hand, loving it in the ways appropriate to mortal things. When love is rightly ordered, we can embrace even the ephemeral.

The world-weariness is palpable but hard-earned. But it is penned in hope.

The Teacher’s wisdom is different: life is not meaningless; it is just brief, tenuous, liquid, melting away, hard to hold on to. Embodied spirits like us live on breath; vapor is living water too. Inhale, the Teacher says.