How to Inhabit Time
Every Sunday, in the liturgy of our church tradition (and in many similar liturgies), together we proclaim the mystery of faith: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” Past, present, future. The reality in which we live. The reality of which we need to be reminded.
How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now (Brazos), the newest book by James K.A. Smith, is profound and personal. It’s both subtle and subversive. I’m not sure I fully understand it. But I’m pretty sure I need it. And maybe, just maybe, so do you.
“While an eschatological orientation will be characterized by a kind of holy impatience, there should also be something unhurried about an eschatological people. Our frenetic busyness is so often a practical outworking of an unconscious despair, for it is a refusal of hope. It is a refusal of hope because it is, functionally, a refusal of trust and dependence . . . There is an urgency that comes from a desire to see God’s reign realized; but there is another kind of urgency we manufacture to make ourselves feel needed. ‘They ain’t all waitin’ on you,’ Ellis tells the sheriff in No Country for Old Men. ‘That’s vanity.’”
