How to Inhabit Time

We think biblical ideas are timeless formulas to be instituted anywhere and everywhere in the same way. While we rightly entrust ourselves to a God who is the same today, yesterday, and forever, we mistakenly imagine this translates into a one-size-fits-all approach to what faithfulness looks like.

There are also implications for personal discipleship. For example, nowhen Christianities that treat time as flat lack the pastoral subtlety and nuance to minister to people in different seasons of life. Whether in my own spiritual life or, say, the lifelong journey of a marriage, recognizing the reality of seasons can be incredibly liberating, not only because it changes our expectations but also because it attunes us to receive God’s grace in different ways in different eras of a life.

We are mortal, not just because we die but because we are the sorts of creatures whose very being is lived in time. Being mortal means being temporal.

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.

Facing up to the spiritual significance of time, history, and futurity is almost the exact opposite of “management”; it is more like voluntary exposure to disruption, making oneself vulnerable to haunting. To face the spiritual significance of history is to contend with ghosts.

We don’t need coaches who will help us manage our time; we need prophets who make us face our histories (and futures).

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.

What happens doesn’t really change anything, for Socrates. Even when I become “enlightened,” when I come to know the truth, he says, I’m only recollecting what I already knew. Time doesn’t really make a difference. Indeed, the goal is to somehow overcome time to get to eternity. In contrast, 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 time, “then the moment in time must have such decisive significance that for no moment will I be able to forget it, neither in time nor in eternity, because the eternal, previously nonexistent, came into existence in that moment.”

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 in sequels indefinitely.

“becomes a character in the as-yet-unwritten continuation of the story” insofar as they come to see the story as a story about themselves, a story that transforms them not least by transforming their self-understanding.

Faith, he’s saying, is a how, a way of being, a “form of life” that is primarily a call to live “in” the historical event of the Crucified—the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the incarnate God.

Living into this event is fundamentally about communion with the crucified God. Whatever else we might say about it, the 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.

how to forget, how to remember; how to mourn, how to enjoy what’s fleeting; how to wait, how to hope.

Primitivism is a curious view of history that sees God’s presence limited to only key points in history. Most importantly, primitivist Christianities assume that the Spirit was present in the first century and then somehow absent and forgotten for the long intervening centuries until someone (usually the leader of their sect) rediscovered “the truth” in the nineteenth century, say, and spawned a “renewal” movement that “recovered” the original, primitive truth. Such primitivism writes off vast swaths of history as “Ichabod,”16 devoid of God’s presence,

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.

But 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 groaning.

What we need is not sensationalist end-times countdowns but a practical eschatology that enables us to live as a futural people animated by hope.

In nowhen forms of Christianity, the watchword is “preservation”; faithfulness is understood as the prolongation and preservation of what has been (often oblivious to how recent their version of “the fundamentals” is). In other words, in nowhen Christianity, faithfulness is a matter of guarding against change. In spiritual timekeeping, the watchword is “discernment”; faithfulness requires knowing when we are in order to discern what we are called to. In nowhen forms of Christianity, faithfulness is equated with sustaining a stasis; spiritual timekeeping, in contrast, is characterized by a dynamism of keeping time with the Spirit.

If tempo were just a mechanical factor of timekeeping, “it would be sufficient to play the orchestra a couple of ticks from a metronome, or, as sometimes in dance bands, say ‘One—two,’ to set the right tempo for the whole piece.” But of course that’s not what happens with an orchestra, because playing the symphony well requires different timing across the course of the work. “One of the beauties of music,” Salter remarks, “lies in its subtle variations of pace—the urging on, the yielding, the big broadening.” The conductor is helping the entire orchestra to become attuned to these subtleties.17

to recognize, for example, seasons of a life with God, when the Spirit sometimes speaks sotto voce, almost inaudibly,

In spite of what God has put in our hearts and minds, there is so much that eludes us: “Yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end” (3:11). Even with eternity in our hearts, we are temporal creatures inhabiting this mortal vale. The past and future are limited at our horizons.

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 are gifts you might never have imagined: pleasure, happiness, joy.

All these joys are attended by loss. To be a creature is to be passing away, amid things passing away. The Teacher knows this and so reminds us: “God will call the past to account” (3:15 NIV); “God seeks out what has gone by” (NRSV); God will chase it all down and restore what the locust has eaten. Just you wait.

Our horizons are always indexed to some location. If I am down in the valley, or walking the chasm between midtown skyscrapers, my horizon is limited, constrained. If I climb to the top of the bluff, or drive through the western plains, my horizons swell and expand. But even on that plain, my horizons shift with my location: new sights emerge, others disappear in my wake. Yet even what disappears behind me is carried in me in some way. What I have encountered, now in the rearview mirror, primes me for what I will encounter.

I don’t always know what I remember and hope. I am not always aware of what I carry and what I anticipate.

On the one hand, these habits of being make my life possible; on the other hand, these habits and dispositions and learned ways of being in the world also come with their limits. 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.

Given our histories, some of us move through the world with a cape; some of us don baggy sweaters we hide behind; some of us still experience the world as if exposed. The question isn’t whether we have a style but which style we’ve (unconsciously) adopted given our histories. We wear time. And this is true not just for me or you. It’s true for every us. 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. Our temporality is sticky: we pick up things along the way—things we need, things we cherish, things that weigh us down. We move through time not just ticking along from moment to moment but with a temporal halo of retention and anticipation. So what does it mean to be faithful amid such flux? What does it mean to be steadfast when, as a creature, I am ever unfolding? Spiritual timekeeping is the way we attempt to reckon with our temporality.

All of creation might not have been. That doesn’t make creation random or arbitrary, only contingent.

the possibilities were also decided for me before I ever emerged on the scene. Heidegger describes this as our existential sense of being “delivered over.” This “plunge” into what’s been handed down—that range of possibilities to which I’ve been delivered over—is mostly concealed by our everyday dramas of keeping up, getting ahead, and enduring the tranquilizing effects of mass consumption.

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.14 But the only hand we have to play is the hand we’ve been dealt by the history that has come before us. Because

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.

There can even be unwitting gifts in a past we spurn. We might believe ourselves to have overcome history with our supposed enlightenment and not realize the extent to which we are living on the borrowed capital of a past that has sustained us.17 When, for example, movements seek to dismantle the institutions and practices of a democratic republic, whether in a spirit of revolutionary fervor or conspiratorial quasirevolution, they are often not aware of how much their own capacity to do so depends on the institutions and practices of a democratic republic. In this sense, the legacies still make possible even the attempt to erase them.

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. The entanglement of gifts and poisons, grace and lament, is powerfully embodied in the Avett Brothers’ song “We Americans.” Picture it being sung on Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, when the nation pauses to express gratitude for those who “shivered and prayed approaching the beaches of Normandy” in order to defend a country they love, a country founded as a republic of freedom. But the celebration is complicated, and the narrator confesses it: 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 people18 The song grapples with what to do with such a legacy, but it can only do so because it faces that legacy. It unearths the history we’d rather bury.

God, will you keep us wherever we go? Can you forgive us for where we’ve been? We Americans.

To even ask the question, as prayer, is to entertain a different way of inhabiting time. This song, like a hymn of spiritual timekeeping, braids lament and hope, refusing both nostalgia and despair.

We should blast it with soil to encourage such growth and consider this new camouflage as a deliberate creative act, transforming the sculpture into a memorial to the end of the war—not to the traitors who led it.” In other words, Stallings comments, “to let vegetation weather a monument into a ruin, to let a ruin grow back into a mountain.”23 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.

The phenomenon is described as “hyperbolic discounting”—a bias in human psychology that leads us to imagine that the future, and ourselves in that future, will be quite different from the past, despite all the evidence to the contrary (which is to say, despite what we’ve exhibited in our past up to this point).24 Such romanticism about the future is like nostalgia in negative. It is not hope but hubris.

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.

knowing how to inherit—what to do with what we’ve been given. This is the work of discernment.

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. But even then, we’re trying to see at dusk, which is always difficult. Reason squints. As Rev. John Ames writes in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, “Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time.”30 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.”

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 discernment in the midst of history is our central burden: listening for the beat, feeling for the tempo so we can keep time with the Spirit.

There is an important difference between imagining history as a blank slate for our accomplishments and imagining it as a symphony we are asked to play a role in.

The latter is more like a historical 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.

Written in the midst of the Cold War, in the face of US hegemony and hubris, 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.”

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.”

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.

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.

Our bodies are not just clocks; they are time capsules, but time capsules that, like those dripping whale skeletons, keep emitting possibility in us. 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.

Given the ways I’ve been attuned to the world, my being-toward-the-future has already been calibrated in certain ways, both in terms of the dispositions that I bring and the horizons of possibility available to me. Building on a concept we encountered earlier, Heidegger has a marvelous term for this: thrown possibility.

“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. And you don’t know what’s to come. (“No one knows what is to happen,” the Teacher counsels, “and who can tell anyone what the future holds?” Eccles. 10:14.)

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.

past. On an individual level, while our culture does romanticize childhood and adolescence, 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.

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.

Easter Sunday’s light doesn’t obliterate the long, dark shadows of Holy Saturday. Grace doesn’t justify evil; grace overcomes it. That “we are more than conquerors” doesn’t make the distress a blessing or the sword a plowshare (Rom. 8:35–37). 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. In the hands of such an artist,

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. Such nostalgia parades itself as recovery. But it is, in fact, a recipe for loss. The hidden price of getting what nostalgia wants is losing what has been given to you.

What would you give to walk again down Foxton’s Station Road, knocking at the door of Lionel Looker’s council home? What would you give to be four years old again, and own God in the adjoining meadow? What would you give to see the ghosts of village children playing in the school courtyard? What would you lose to bring back a time and land in which everything could be believed? The security of a village held in time. What would you leave to live with your silver-haired father on the high cliffs of Requa? What would you give to have heaven be the way you imagine, made of the familiar and welcoming? What you will give is your life to have your life back.

If nostalgia romanticizes the past as bliss, shame can’t imagine a future for our past.

Grace, we might say, is like a Sankofa bird.17 An important symbol of the Akan religion in Ghana, the Sankofa is a majestic bird with its head turned back over its shoulder to look back. But the bird is moving forward, attentive to its past. In its mouth it carries an egg or a seed, signifying life that is to come. It is a fundamentally futural symbol, flying forward, bearing the seeds of possibility. The look back is not a longing to return but an awareness of where one has come from in order to live into the future well. The symbol is attended by a proverb, Sankofa w’onkyir. A literal translation would be, “Go back and fetch it.”

These forms of ahistorical, atemporal, nowhen Christianity—often hybrid legacies of revivalism and modernism—imagine the “Christian life” as such an utter displacement of the life that I have lived that we are puzzled by the perdurance of habit (which is why it too often morphs into judgmental legalism).

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.

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.

Dorothy was at the age where choices revealed themselves as errors, increasingly acquiring the patina of irrevocability.

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.

that maybe I should thank the one who did this? (That “maybe” is important: it gets at the dark mystery of what’s going on here.) 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.

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.

Don’t imagine that your times are a measure of God’s presence or absence, God’s blessing or curse. “When times are good, be happy” (Eccles. 7:14 NIV). And when the times are bad? Again, the counsel to contemplate: “consider.” Look. “God has made the one as well as the other.” The question isn’t whether we’re living in some special, divine time. As Annie Dillard reminds us, “The absolute is available to everyone in every age.”

Wisdom is recognizing our mortality, our shared vulnerability, our solidarity in this sea of chronos.

What El Greco achieves is not simply a bland “eternalization” that denudes humans of their history. Each figure bears the marks of their historical vocation. We know who they are because they wear badges of what they experienced in history: Stephen’s stoning; John the Baptist’s sackcloth; Peter’s promised keys of the kingdom. What enables El Greco to collect them all into this one sprawling scene is not a diminishment of history but some kind of curvature in time, bending toward the 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.

what is going on in these strange paintings where saints and sinners separated by centuries inhabit the same scene? Is this a feature of ignorance, a quaint relic of a primitive humanity for whom historical consciousness had not yet dawned? Could these painters not tell time? Or is it, rather, a signal of the peculiar nature of sacred time? In these paintings, all created for liturgical contexts, Christian spirituality is the original quantum theory. The burghers of a fourteenth-century Spanish town and the bishop of a fifth-century African city are part of the same worship service. Mendicant friars from the early Renaissance encounter the resurrected Jesus alongside desert fathers. In a chapel, at prayer, the cosmos folds in such a way that Christ and Cecilia are contemporaries. ● ● ● 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

God’s self-communication, as Kierkegaard would put it, is always indirect, which means it takes more than ears and eyes to see and hear. God can come to the creation he made and yet not be received or perceived (John 1:10–11). When God empties himself, humbles himself, taking the form of a servant, the revelation is oblique (Phil. 2:6–7). On the road to Emmaus, not even resurrection immediately translates into recognition; something else has to be given. There is a grace needed to glimpse the God who graces history.

That is why “someone who comes later must be able to be the genuine contemporary.” In other words, there are ultimately no “followers at second hand,” because anyone who is going to encounter the paradox, whether in AD 33 or 1843 or 2023, needs the perceptual grace, granted by the same God, to see around corners, to catch what’s told slant. The epiphany of the paradox cannot be achieved by bottom-up speculation, even from the historical facts. The indirect communication that is the incarnation requires something we lack, an illumination only God can provide. And insofar as only God can provide that to each of us, each follower is in direct relation to the Absolute. Someone “who comes later must receive the condition from the god himself and cannot receive it at second hand.” And “if the one who comes later receives the condition from the god himself, then he is a contemporary, a genuine contemporary.”13 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.

In the paradoxical calendar of incarnational time, 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.

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. Like light that is both wave and particle, the event of the incarnation makes a decisive dent on the calendar—there is no going back once the Creator God has made himself a creature subject to the vicissitudes of time.

This twosome, it turns out, is fictional. Each dance, she observes, is collaborative, but “there are actually two leaders. One is the person you are dancing with, who leads you through a series of figures in time with music. And the other is the music itself. The task of the follower is to listen to both of them, to hear them, and to respond creatively in turn.”

The art is in the response. Wills captures this beautifully and suggestively: A follower is all antennae. She, or he, must cultivate a kind of active uncertainty, a positive doubt. She must be relaxed enough to feel the slightest of cues from her partner, and yet sufficiently poised, mentally and physically, to be able to play—to respond, to hold back, to make form out of commitment, interruption, and hesitation.

The dance is ephemeral. In five minutes the music stops. But now that dance is carried in you. “Another kind of past is held in the body of the dancer herself,” says Wills. “What gets called ‘muscle memory’ is just part of it. The memory into which you step as you begin to dance includes all the dances you’ve ever danced before, all the partners you’ve ever had, all the practice you’ve put in, all the music you’ve listened to.” But the dance is in the moment. “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?

they freeze this moment in a photograph, focused on clicking at just the right instant. The faces are obscured by upstretched arms, and a thousand tiny replications of the event float above their heads. Bent on capturing the moment, they are no longer present to it. Determined to hold on to the experience, they miss the opportunity to experience it. The moment is lost by the desire to seize it. This contrast reminded me of a remarkable insight in photographer Sally Mann’s memoir, Hold Still. She is reflecting on the death and loss of two beloved men in her life: her father and a dear friend, artist Cy Twombly. Her memories of Twombly are vivid: she can immediately recall “his drawling voice, his wrinkled face, the gap between the front teeth—Cy is right here.” His presence can be invoked by memory itself. But then this surprising observation from a professional photographer: “I am convinced that the reason I can remember him so clearly and in such detail is because I have so few pictures of him.” Twombly lives in her, a companion of memory, in a way very different from her father, she admits: “Because of the many pictures I have of my father, he eludes me completely. In my outrageously disloyal memory he does not exist in three dimensions, or with associated smells or timbre of voice… . I don’t have a memory of the man; I have a memory of a photograph.” The father captured on film is lost to her; the friend remembered is present. Mann diagnoses why our ability to freeze-frame reality is actually a loss: Before the invention of photography, significant moments in the flow of our lives would be like rocks placed in a stream: impediments that demonstrated but didn’t diminish the volume of the flow around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can: when we outsource that work to the camera, our ability to remember is diminished and what memories we have are impoverished.

The result is a diminished experience of both present and past. When I’m bent on capturing the moment in a snapshot, I am less present to the present; I’m fixated on a future memory—which ends up being a sad substitute for an emotion or vision I can carry in the caverns of my soul.

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.5

Christian timekeeping is like a dance on a tightrope: on the one hand, we are called to inhabit time in a way that stretches us, to be aware of so much more than now. As a traditioned people, mindful of our inheritances, we live futurally, looking for kingdom come. On the other hand, we always live in the present. Past gifts and future hopes coalesce in us in the present. I can’t not be now. The challenge is to faithfully inhabit the present without caving to a present-ism in which only now matters (the recipe for indulgent Epicureanism). The trick is to live fully present to the moment without being defined by the Zeitgeist.

I say “trick” but perhaps I mean “feat,” in the spirit of Kierkegaard’s knight of faith who is such a ballet master that he can make the stunning leap of faith seem effortless. The knights of infinite resignation, he says, leap into eternity but never figure out how to land in the world in which they find themselves: “Every time they come down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the world.” 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.

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. Suppose I am about to recite a psalm which I know. Before I begin, my expectation is directed towards the whole. But when I have begun, the verses from it which I take into the past become the object of my memory. The life of this act of mine is stretched two ways, into my memory because of the words I have already said and into my expectation because of those which I am about to say. But my attention is on what is present: by that the future is transferred to become the past.

“A person singing or listening to a song he knows well,” Augustine continues, “suffers a distension or stretching in feeling and in sense-perception from the expectation of future sounds and the memory of past sound.”10 There is no joy in music without the fugitive nature of sound; there is no delight in the song without the gift of ephemeral notes that rise, linger, then fade to make way for more.11 To embrace the ephemeral is to live with such flux, to live gratefully amid change, which is just to say: to live as a mortal. Here might be the deep lesson of the Teacher’s wisdom in Ecclesiastes: to not bemoan our mortal estate but to face it, accept it, and find rhythms in sync with the fleeting nature of time. One might say it is an exercise in redeeming vanity. “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love,” the Teacher counsels, “all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun”

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. The question isn’t whether we can escape this condition but how we will receive our mortality, how we will shepherd what’s fleeting yet given.

What if enjoying mortality means we stop chasing the wind and learn how to hoist a sail?

It is the lesson that centuries of Japanese poets taught with their countless haiku about cherry blossoms. The Japanese term for it is mono no aware, “a sense of beauty intensified by recognition of temporality.” I have no doubt this is why God gave us art—to cope with the mystery of our mortality, to make sense of the fact that each life comes stamped with an expiration date. Or is mortality itself the gift because it adds such richness to life?

“If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, how things would lose their power to move us!”14 The intense beauty of the cherry blossoms is haloed by the short life of each bloom.

What we experience is not just mortality and creaturehood but its postlapsarian variety ruined by sin, a world that is not just temporal but a temporality in which the Fall has wreaked havoc. It becomes difficult to sift tragedy from good, creaturely rhythms in which even good things fade. Because mortality in this fallen world is so bound up with wrenching heartbreak, we come to resent mortality itself. All decay seems like disaster.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Some things, the poet observes, seem intent on being lost, made for their demise (“planned obsolescence,” as Silicon Valley puts it). These things have an arc of existence, and we shouldn’t be surprised by their twilight fade to black. Still, there’s an art to losing. One has to learn how to lose: to see the signs of what’s made to be temporary, to enjoy without clinging and clasping,

“A few years after we began coming to St. Cuthbert’s,” Terpstra recalls, “someone rose during the service and sang Handel’s ‘And the Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible.’” The title of the music alone had me thinking about my three brothers-in-law, who had died fifteen years earlier, in their late teens and early twenties, within six months of each other, of the disease muscular dystrophy, with which they were born. And something happened. The singer was suffering from a cold that day, and had trouble reaching some of the high notes. But the un-reached notes began to meld with the brothers’ short lives, which they had lived to the full, and with thoughts of their bodies, corrupted by disease, until it seemed clear that the singing suited their memory, and the music, more truly than if every note had been hit dead on.20

Having lived through a traumatic displacement in my childhood, my body kept score. This loss is one of the things I carry. Of course there were a thousand important differences! We weren’t being torn from a home; we were choosing to move to a beautiful new house where our kids could blossom and we could show hospitality. Our move wasn’t bound up with the dissolution of a family. But nobody told my body; nobody informed my gut; nobody sat down with the heartbroken child I carried in my soul for whom moving meant tragedy—an ending. I can see now, with almost a decade of retrospect and the gift of a good counselor: moving houses tore open a wound.

In one of his earliest works, called Of True Religion, Augustine begins to address what will be an enduring theme across his corpus for the rest of his life: how to love. “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.

To not be surprised by the seasons when desire fails and mourning is the order of the day, when all the vessels that hold water are broken and we are ever so thirsty. To walk into the fog of those seasons when we see dimly through every window and to not imagine that God has left us, because even the vapor is the Lord’s.

Sometimes we are called to embrace; in other seasons we might best bear witness to justice by refusing to embrace some pseudoreconciliation. There will be times when we should be building, launching, founding; but in a transitory world, sometimes wisdom will be knowing when to shut it down and dismantle.

Seasons are focal insofar as they ask something of us for a time. But that focal demand is not only passive (that we should undergo something); sometimes the season calls for us to be active and agential: we are called to do something “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14 NIV).

return again to one of the core disciplines of faithful temporal awareness: discernment. More art than science, discernment is an effort at orientation, and I am suggesting one of the most significant exercises of discernment we can undertake across our lives is to grasp our seasonal location. The challenge is that a season coalesces most often ex post facto: it’s only after we’ve come through a “time” like Ecclesiastes describes that we recognize it as a season. This is Hegel’s point when he says the owl of Minerva flies at dusk: insight tends to crystallize at the end of things.

we need to discern our seasonal location while in medias res, in the middle of things. In this regard, discernment is more like echolocation than a God’s-eye overview. We never get the luxury of being able to transcend our season, to rise above it and see the whole with some kind of spiritual drone. Discernment, especially temporal discernment, is more like being in the midst of a cornfield and achieving dead silence so that you might hear a truck’s crunch on the gravel road or the faint babbling of the creek and thereby get your bearings.

Discernment, he says, “calls for something more than intelligence or common sense. It is a gift which we must implore. If we ask with confidence that the Holy Spirit grant us this gift, and then seek to develop it through prayer, reflection, reading and good counsel, then surely we will grow in this spiritual endowment.”9 Discernment requires something of us, but it is not a feat of our ingenuity; “discernment is a grace.”10 We need only to achieve the posture of receptivity to welcome it.

Often discernment is exercised in small and apparently irrelevant things, since greatness of spirit is manifested in simple everyday realities. It involves striving untrammeled for all that is great, better and more beautiful, while at the same time being concerned for the little things, for each day’s responsibilities and commitments.”

This isn’t the same as mere prioritization, though it is certainly related. On a personal scale, for example, discerning one’s season will often be a matter of prayerfully listening for what aspect of my multiple callings should take precedence and then living into the freedom of such focus. “Oh, OK: this is what I’m supposed to be doing now.”

In the later chapters of a life, we might find that, whatever we might have had planned for that season, the Spirit is calling us to attend to a loved one who is ill and fading. To answer that call is to recognize a vocational focus for a time. Giving ourselves over to that might be difficult; we may also have to mourn what we had planned. “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.”12 To give ourselves over to the burden is to entrust ourselves to the God who calls.

We will learn to embrace seasonality only if we cultivate the gift of discernment. It is discernment that enables us to grasp what season we’re in, what that season requires of us, and what we might need from it. To embrace seasonality is to cultivate an availability to the moment, entrusting ourselves to the Lord of history and willing to live through the mystery that is time. This requires a special kind of patience that is a willingness to not judge a zig until we’ve lived through the zag, so to speak—to wait for the season to unfold before resenting what it’s taken. Sometimes the gifts come at the end.

no company or organization in the past had to negotiate the advent of the internet or figure out the dynamics of a gig economy. While there might be lessons to learn from the church’s experience enduring a global pandemic one hundred years ago, that prior case won’t yield much insight into how virtual worship and broadcast technology might have indelibly affected worship. There are enduring parameters in history, but history is also a source of unfolding novelty that requires another facet of discernment, particularly at the collective level of institutions. What is required is a particular way of attending to history, not so much because those before have experienced what we are now enduring but because we need to understand how we got here. Only if we understand when we are can we intentionally forge a future.

Francis urges that discernment requires a kind of apprenticeship to history. “The accumulation of human experiences throughout history is the most precious and trustworthy treasure that one generation inherits from another.

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.

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, the swirling array of contingency that congeals into a life, a society, a history. Genealogy recognizes that our present rests not on some predetermined bedrock but on “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or underneath.”

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.

the seasons of ebb and distance need not be alarming, even if they might be difficult and puzzling. But the seasons of relating to God might also be varying dynamics of how one experiences God’s presence.

“But,” Hume points out, “though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.”2 Even our most outlandish imaginings are compositions of what we have experienced. Even our wildest dreams bear the imprint of what we have already seen. Such limits are not losses. These are simply the constraints of creaturehood, the parameters of finitude. This limitation is why human hopes for the future are longings for a world like the one we’ve experienced, minus the sorrow. While God promises to exceed all that we could ask or think, God still speaks to our hope with pictures of a future world that thrums with the life of the world we know. When

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.”6

A properly eschatological orientation to that future also runs counter to utopianism and dominant mythologies of progress. The futural orientation of authentic Christian timekeeping is not some Pelagian “planning.” The future is not ours to engineer. The strange posture of eschatological hope is one of active receptivity, an intentional openness, a labor that, paradoxically, awaits a gift. Gutiérrez is, once again, helpful on this point: “For Jesus the Kingdom was, in the first place, a gift.