Getting the Timing Right

In How to Inhabit Time: Understand the Past, Facing the Future, and Living Faithfully Now, James K.A. Smith explores the practice of “spiritual timekeeping” as a remedy to the malady he labels “spiritual dyschronometria,” the inability to keep time, an affliction he sees as endemic in contemporary Christianity. According to Smith, there are forms of Christianity that so fixate on the eschaton that history becomes ultimately insignificant, bland, and textureless. And then there are forms of Christianity that fixate instead on the particulars of history to the point of forgetting about the full universality of the faith. Neither way of inhabiting time, Smith argues, adequately grapples with the reality of temporality, and so both approaches become “nowhen” spiritualities incapable of being faithful to the present moment.

Smith suggests that the practice of “spiritual timekeeping,” learning to be aware of when one is, can cure both forms of temporal displacement. To be aware of when one is requires that one carry a sense of indebtedness to one’s historical past, charged with gratitude for what one has been given, as well as honest lament for what one has suffered. This grateful indebtedness ought to be accompanied by a practice of attentive vigilance for the ways God is presently working in one’s life, a vigilance that is shaped by an eschatological orientation.

The book itself is meant to be an invitation to the reader to practice such spiritual timekeeping. Rather than presenting a philosophical treatise on the nature of time, Smith offers a series of reflections, guided by selections from Ecclesiastes, and interspersed with personal memories, stories, poems, and images, for the reader to linger over and dwell with. Undergirding these reflections is the conviction that time and eternity are open to each other: eternity is not the absence of time, but time’s fullness. Attentiveness to the way time is porous to the eternal can transform the way we choose to live as creatures in time. 

For the Christian especially, this means understanding Christianity not as a philosophical system or a set of inherited doctrines, but rather as a happening. The Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, and the establishment of the Church, are indeed distinct events in history, but, precisely as historical events, they are living events. Drawing from Kierkegaard, Smith tells us that being a true follower of Christ is not limited by our historical proximity to him. “Historical proximity,” Smith says, “is not the same as an encounter with the God who arrives in history.” God’s arrival in history, and the invitation to follow Christ, is not restricted to the historical particulars of first-century Palestine. Rather, God works from within these historical particulars to make Himself available to all generations, thereby opening up a community that transcends time.

Reflecting on El Greco’s “Burial of Count Orgaz,” Smith invites us to consider the way in which the true Christian understanding of eternity does not involve the erasure of history, still less its forgetting. Instead, it involves a gathering together of time that preserves and redeems the particulars of history. The painting depicts saints from across time periods coming together at the funeral of the fourteenth-century Spanish mayor, each person spiritually present and donning the garb appropriate to his time period. 

For Smith, the belief in the preservation and restoration of historical particulars in the community of saints that is expressed in this image frees us to engage our temporality differently. We can see our temporality and our finitude not as a curse, nor as something to be overcome, but as a way that God entrusts to us a particular horizon—and entrusts us to that same horizon. This mutual entrustment frees us to receive ourselves in time with gratitude for our particularity. 

But this requires that we truly reckon with our contingency: “Who we are is ineluctably bound up with when we are.” We are given to be in a particular context, in a particular place, at a particular time. In our fallen and broken world, contingency is also bound up with tragic loss and suffering. Reckoning with our contingency means accepting such limitation, loss, and suffering as a reality, though not by merely gritting our teeth and enduring such hardships. Rather, we are to live with these realities in a way that is open to the in-breaking of grace, with an openness to the God who works within our finitude and even within our fallenness to bring about new life. Meditating on Brandi Carlile’s lyrics in “Every Time I Hear That Song,” Smith observes that Carlile shows us there is a strange way in which we can feel indebted to our wounds—or even to those who caused them—because these wounds became the site of God’s grace, playing a role in making us who we are today. 

Smith makes an important distinction between tragic loss and suffering, and the loss that is simply a part of being finite. While these two kinds of loss are often entangled, Smith makes clear that “Our finitude is not a fruit of the Fall (even if it is affected by the Fall). Contingency is not a curse.” What is given to us in time is given to us for a time. We are to receive what is given with open hands, neither grasping at the gift and trying to cling to it as if it were eternal, nor rejecting the gift on account of its finitude.

Part of this open-handed receiving requires that we learn to recognize the seasonality of our lives. Seasons in a life are not just “punctiliar events,” but “episodes of duration.” Smith calls us to give ourselves over to each season, to let it run its course in our lives, but also to receive from each season what that season uniquely offers to us. Such mindful dwelling rests on the trust that God’s providential care is guiding each season and guiding us through each season.

Antonio de Pereda, Allegory of Vanity, c. 1632 - 1636

Still, we are not passive when we give ourselves over to seasons. Just as we receive in our contingency a horizon in which to act, we also receive in each season a time in which to act in a particular way. In some seasons, this acting will be a building and a creating, in other times it will be a resting and an enjoying, and in other times, a taking down and a dismantling. Our task involves discernment: reading the signs to see what season we are in now. Smith points out that it is often easy to recognize a season once we have passed through it, but it is more difficult to recognize the season we are in now. This discernment is a key part of “spiritual timekeeping.”

The call to discern the season we are in now does not require that we somehow become privy to a God’s-eye view of our life. Discernment, instead, asks for vigilance: an active waiting for indications of what might be coming. Smith compares it to preparing for sleep: we perform the nightly rituals of preparing for bedtime to make ourselves available to receive the daily “season” of sleep, i.e. the rest it provides in itself, and the rejuvenation it offers for the coming day. Learning to practice vigilance for what might be coming frees us to give ourselves more fully over to each season. The recognition that what is being asked of me right now is only being asked for a specific period of time can help to assuage my fears, to let go of what I do not need to worry about during this time, and to give me a focused task around which I can order my other obligations and cares.

Discerning the season, Smith suggests, might also enable us to hear the different ways God speaks to us throughout our lives: “While God is eternal, creatures are seasonal, and thus our relationship to God is characterized by a seasonality that is natural, expected, and good.” The way we experience God’s presence in our lives may change with the seasons, but this need not indicate a failure in faith. The seasons of our lives—and the way that our experience of God changes throughout them—call for an ever-attentive ear to the voice of God. “[R]epeated listening” is asked of us. Smith points out that this is enacted liturgically in the Church as we repeat patterns of scriptural readings that call for listening afresh each time. God can speak differently at different times through the same words, stories, and images.

Being attentive to the ways in which God reveals Himself in our lives differently at different times is also a way of enacting what Smith terms “practical eschatology.” As Christians, we are called to live with a futural orientation, to live in hope for the kingdom that is to come. Living in this hope requires us to resist both the temptation to disregard (or even despise) what is present out of an alleged desire for the eternal kingdom and the temptation to seek to build this kingdom on earth. Practical eschatology asks that we allow the promised kingdom we await in hope to flow into our now. We are not to wait idly for what comes next: we are to let what we hope for shape how we live now, where “shaping” means both motivating our activity and tempering our expectations for what can be accomplished now. 

Living in hope also means living with a sense of need, Smith tells us, since anticipation of the future kingdom involves recognizing that our now is still incomplete. Our present is riddled by sin and tragedy. Thus our eschatological orientation should be charged with an aching desire and “a kind of holy impatience.” Yet this “holy impatience” must be paired with a certain ease and unhurriedness. We persevere in our aching desire by means of a “trust and hope that God is always and ever acting in, around, beneath, and sometimes in spite of our own labor.” With this trust and hope, we can allow ourselves to rest in the midst of struggle, to receive time as a gift.

Banksy There is Always Hope

Smith’s apt diagnosis of much of contemporary Christianity’s “spiritual dyschronometria” calls us to be attentive to the ways in which we fail to regard time as a gift and instead take it as a commodity to be used and spent, or else as the sheer absence of eternity that needs to be endured. The book issues a much-needed call to return to the practice of philosophy as a way of life, offering its reader wisdom intended to spur self-recognition as well as spark a deeper attentiveness to reality. Reading Smith’s How to Inhabit Time is itself a practice of spiritual timekeeping, granting the attentive reader a space and time in which to give herself over to reflection.

Caroline Arnold is a Program Fellow at the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture. She holds a BA from Villanova and a Masters in Philosophy from Boston College.