We cannot escape the reality of living in time. "We, both individually and collectively, are products of a contingent history. Our identities are bound up with roads taken and not . . . our character and capacities reflect histories that amount to our own story. A faithful Christian life is a matter of keeping time with the Spirit. But what the Spirit asks of us always reflects history- our own, but also the history of the church and the societies in which we find ourselves. 'What do we do now?' is one of the fundamental questions of discipleship."
"This book is intended as a wake-up call to the significance of your temporality, our temporality- awakening to the way history lives in you, the way we inhabit history and history inhabits us, and the way futurity pulls us and shapes us." It's about "discerning the spiritual repurcussions of a history that precedes you, lives in you, and shapes the future to which you are called." Smith calls us to contemplate and recognize these realities. Ultimately "the point is to transform our attention to reality by reframing our focus." "Knowing when we are can change everything."
"Consider this book an invitation to the discipline of what we might call memento tempori. Remember you are temporal." "Each chapter of this book is an exercise in cultivating temporal awareness, a new angle on the ways the Spirit courses through time." Smith does this by looking at a number of areas, in bold below and followed by select thoughts:
The spiritual significance of timekeeping
We normally think of disorientation as a purely physical concept, but it can be temporal, too.
"A lot of contemporary Christianity suffers from spiritual dyschronometria- an inability to keep time, a lack of awareness of what time it is." "We don't recognize how much we are the products of a past, leading to naïveté about our present. But we also don't know how to keep time with a promised future, leading to fixations on the 'end times' rather than cultivating a posture of hope."
Though God does not change, what faithfulness looks like can be a product of time and place. Ignoring this is a problem that "actually generates unfaithful responses to the present." There are seasons (in our personal life stages, communities, and cultures as a whole), and recognizing this "attunes us to receive God's grace in different ways in different eras of life." This should not demoralize us; "Our being subject to the conditions of temporality is not a prison but a focus."
"Spiritual timekeeping is fundamentally a matter of awakening to our embeddedness in history and attending to our temporality- both individually and collectively." It is "discerning how time shapes us, as both history and future."
"We need to remember that at the heart of Christianity is not a teaching or a message or even a doctrine but an event. God's self-revelation unfolds in time, and redemption is accomplished by what happens." "Because Christianity is fundamentally a 'happening,' we rightly understand it only in terms of story." One result is that "Faith is a how and, more specifically, a way of living in light of an event." "Being a Christian, then, is not so much a matter of believing something about God as much as living in light of this event's cascading effects on history. Christian faith is ongoing participation in the Christ-event which continues to rumble through human history. Christianity is less a what and more a how, a question of how to live given what has happened in Christ."
Smith argues that "spiritual timekeeping [ST]- living out the faith with a disciplined temporal awareness- is informed by four fundamental convictions."
1. ST "is the working out of our creaturely finitude as creatures embedded in time." This includes "how to forget, how to remember; how to mourn, how to enjoy what's fleeting; how to wait, how to hope."
2. ST "reflects a sense of time shaped by covenant." Jesus's promise to never leave nor forsake us "is a promise of a presence through history- not above it or in spite of it."
3. ST "is nourished by Jesus's promise that the Spirit will guide us into all truth across time."
4. ST "is animated by the future."
How to face our forgetting
When and where we live impacts and shapes us in ways we don't always realize. "[T]o be temporal is to be indebted to a past and oriented toward a future." It is "to be the sort of creature who absorbs time and its effects." "We move through time not just ticking along from moment to moment but with a temporal halo of retention and anticipation."
This past/inheritances shapes us; it can "constrain and channel the way we live." Recognizing this "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."
"When we recognize that we are 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?"
We are also contigent. "Contingency means that of every history we can say 'It didn't have to be this way' and 'This is the way it is.' The question at the intersection is, Now what? How to live forward?"
How to learn from ghosts
"Our past is not past; it oozes into the present." "Sometimes this fuels possibility and opportunity . . . [sometimes] 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." So we must face it.
Our pasts, both individually and culturally, mean that "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 . . . that is not a limitation as much as a focusing, a gifted specificity. This corner of earth I've been given to till. Thes neighbors I am called to love. These talents I'm exhorted to fan into flame."
The bad things in our past (done by us or to us) can be of surprising value. "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."
The good things in our past are blessings to be celebrated, but nostalgia is dangerous. "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 what God wants to use." We must remember that "because of my past, God's renewing Spirit can birth in me insights, empathy, attention that are exactly what someone needs in the world."
How (not) to be contemporary
"Too many forms of Christianity merely endure the present as the price to be paid for reaching an atemporal eternity." That is not what God calls us to. "The Christian inhabits time as cyclical and linear." Our annual church calendar- a liturgy of sorts- invites us to participate in these events as all the saints who have been (and will be). "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." "Past and present permeate each other; the now is porous."
How to love what you'll lose
"Learning to live with, even celebrate, the transitory is a mark of Christian timekeeping, a way of settling into our creature hood and resting in our mortality."
Moments can be lost by the desire to seize them. "Bent on capturing the moment, [we] are no longer present to it." Thus, "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."
The Fall corrupts, yes, "but to dwell mortally is to achieve a way of being in the world for which not all change is loss and not all loss is tragic- while at the same time naming and lamenting those losses that ought not to be."
How to inhabit your now
We all experience seasons in life. "Seasonality means that, rather than being governed by the unceasing ticks of a minute hand, our lives unfold in eras." And these can be "episodes of duration rather than punctiliar events." It is important "to grasp our seasonal location."
Each season has good and difficult aspects, with different blessings, trials, and expectations. "Seasons are transitory yet focal. Seasons are temporary yet bequeath to us something we carry forward. Seasons ask something of us. They both take time and give something back." "Giving ourselves over to the season is a way to receive what we need to take from it into the next." "If there are seasons in which we should expect certain kinds of experiences to befall us, there are also times when certain actions are expected of us."
"God's nearness looks and feels different depending on the season you're in. You will also find that Scripture sounds different, depending on your season. Or rather . . . you fill find yourself differently attuned to the same Word you've heard a thousand times before." "God and God's Word remains the same, but the place and season in which I (and we) hear it creates new resonances, new epiphanies."
How to sing Maranatha [come, O Lord!]
"Christians are a futural people. Every day we pray for God's kingdom to come. But as long as we are praying it, it hasn't yet arrived, which means we are also a waiting people."
Yet we wait for what's to come. "We are never called to turn back the clock. Appeasl to God's actions in history are not invoked in a spirit of 'Golden-age-ism'; Eden is never celebrated as our destination. Our pilgrimage is not an Odyssean return. We are pulled toward a home we've never visited. We are oriented to what is coming, not what has been."
But this waiting is not done inactively. "If you believe Christ is coming, the key question isn't When? but How? The question is not How long have we got? but rather How should we live now, in light of that expectation? How will the future shape your present?"
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This book is outstanding. Smith has a way with a sentence- this work is peppered with prose that is simple and succinct yet profound and powerful. So many phrases were like gut punches of insight, and their frequency left me reeling- but thankful.
Rating: A+
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