by Ben Howard
Time is, in a very real sense, a trap.
Contrary to constant proclamations and reminders about the need to stay “in the moment” or to “live in the present,” reality stubbornly presents us with no real alternative.
We are always here. We are always in the now and for good or ill there is no escape from this context.
In his book Eating the Dinosaur Chuck Klosterman includes an essay about time travel. As part of his exploration into this narrative conceit he discusses his own metaphor for the way time operates. He describes time as a train with one person hanging off the front and another hanging off the back. The person hanging off the front is constantly laying down the piece of track to be used in the next moment, while the person hanging off the back is picking up the track that's just been used.
Both past and future exist only as mental constructs. Presents gone and presents still to come.
And that constant movement, that constant shift from moment to moment, from now to now, it pulls a trick on us all.
If you ever want an object lesson on why predicting the future is a stupid endeavor just listen to political podcasts from two years ago. Or a year ago. Or even six months ago.
There is no hilarity like a full-throated and certain prediction of an impending Mitt Romney presidency. Nor is there anything as cringe-worthy as a haughty assurance that Congress would never force a government shutdown or hearing it described as almost inevitable that President Obama will pass gun control legislation, or at the very least, immigration reform.
Of course it's not the fault of the pundits. They are working on a deadline and they get neither the aid of hindsight or enough time for reflection before they're asked to explain what all this “means” and tell a waiting public how everything will work out. It is their job to know the future before it happens. And it's a job that's beyond us all.
It's not fair to judge the words of the past in the reality of the present. Time is a trap.
Last week World Vision USA announced it would hire employees in same-sex marriages. Support flooded the internet, but outrage flooded it even more. Eventually money spoke and the decision was reversed. The narrative has been repeated ad nauseum.
Many people have written about the reasons for these decisions and what symbolic meaning we can take both from the policy change and its subsequent reversal. You should read them, they are interesting and instructive. This essay is not about those decisions or that symbolic meaning.
This essay is about why you will forget it.
They say time heals all wounds. This is true. This is true, sort of.
As time moves on, our memories blur. Hurts become less painful and joys become less pleasurable. And while we can say that time is healing these hurts, these cuts and bumps and bruises, it's not entirely accurate. It's rather that we assimilate them. They become a part of us and change us ever so slightly. The jagged edge of immediacy is smoothed out and we are left with a new configuration of ourselves, but one we have already become familiarized with during the slow healing process. We change, but we do not realize we are changing.
In one month, two months, six months, a year, no one will recall the World Vision controversy into which we've invested so much over the last two weeks. It will be little more than an anecdote, a footnote to the debate over gay marriage and the culture war raging within Christianity.
It will have entirely lost its symbolic place as either the death knell of evangelicalism (or its resurgence depending on your perspective). I invite you to revisit these blogs and tweets and Facebook posts a year from now; they will seem myopic and over-blown. It will feel like they exist in a different world.
This is not to say that it meant nothing. The fights were real and so was the hurt. The betrayal was true. But in time the wounds will no longer be as fresh, they may even “heal,” but they will leave slightly different people in their wake.
And this is the real trauma. It's not the death of a movement or the mass exodus of millennials. It's only slightly about gay marriage and equal rights.
The real trauma is that this will exist as one more jagged little paper cut. One more scarred-over battle-wound leaving us increasingly desensitized, increasingly prepared for combat, increasingly on the lookout for enemies from without and within.
In time, this will be yet another moment that affects us and changes us ever so slightly. So slightly that we don't even realize it as we become hard and cynical, as we begin once again to view “other” as synonymous with “enemy.”
Look out, it's a trap.
Ben
Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual
living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop
Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can
follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87.
You might also like:
by Lyndsey Graves
On a retreat this weekend, my mind wandered the way it can amidst the sudden freedom of escaping the city: I don’t have any idea what time it is, and it doesn’t even matter. It is “afternoon.” When you’re not so busy, it really seems ludicrous to measure and divide time the way we do in America.
And we’re so proprietary about it. ‘He wasted fifteen minutes of MY time’. Like he stole something from me; like I would’ve cured cancer in that fifteen minutes if I had it back.
We build our lives around this belief in the scarcity of time.
But we’ve never wasted God’s time. Even when we miss our appointments with Her.
Grace is waiting.
This thought sprung out of my half-formed mental wanderings, and now, like some kind of fantastical companion animal, it’s been following me around for two days: grace is waiting.
I am an American and a problem-solver, a strategizer and planner, and I am a graduate student in Boston; all of which means I believe my time is extraordinarily important. I have a mental schedule for work and homework and exercise. I am ashamed to admit it, but I’m often that person in the long drugstore line making huffy noises about employees I suspect could be opening another register. I make calculating decisions about whether I have time for conversations with housemates.
I have no idea how to wait for anything. I can’t “be still” unless I’ve penciled it my planner. I can’t enjoy someone’s story unless I know the point of the story is coming soon. Grocery store lines remind me of my lack of control, and give me nothing but anxiety. Though I could be watching things unfold; taking in the process; reflecting on my day; connecting with another person; or thinking of a favor to do for a friend, instead I’m just stewing in a stew of irritability. And it hardly ever occurs to me to just be, simply a person standing in a line or listening to a story and letting events carry me along for a few minutes.
The real problem here, though, is not just that I need to change some habits and attitudes. The real problem is that, if I have definite ideas for how grocery stores should and should not be run, then obviously I believe that I know best how things should come to pass in churches. We all have our opinions and expectations for where the church is going, where it should be going, how it should get there, how it should not get there, what language should be used to describe it. And a little too often, I think, our perception of ourselves as correct or “forward-thinking” leads us to label our personal hopes and plans as the Movement Of The Holy Spirit, who is going to leave everybody else behind if they don’t Get On Board. Especially if we like to think of ourselves as Revolutionaries, then we expect other people to immediately grasp The Problem and The Solution, to drop everything and embrace our cause, because we are So Obviously Right. If they don’t, they are backwards, ignorant, uncompassionate, or grasping after power or traditions that are already dead, and we dismiss them as enemies.
Of course, most people wouldn’t describe their hopes and work for the future of the church that way, but it seems to seep into so many of our actions. If we are going to avoid this attitude, I think we need to remember – grace is waiting.
How many times in my life have I been unable to see my own sin? How many times have I been able to see it clearly, and still found myself desperately unable to cross the gap between what is and what should be? How many times have I known I was doing wrong, and taken advantage of God’s grace by choosing not to face Him?
Seventy times seven times, God has walked with me through a slow, halting, wandering path of change while I remained willful, dense, pride-filled, self-absorbed, and childish; all the while nudging me gently into a better Way with the whisper: I love you. I am. I am here.
However exegetically correct and culturally astute I may believe myself to be, maybe this is a true test of whether I am Spirit-led – whether I can walk this path with others, without compromising the vision for a better future, but not grasping for control by proclaiming that The Future is Now when, in fact, the future is in the future. The future is unfolding of God’s accord, not being summoned of my will; and people are always learning, not springing forward another evolutionary step by next Wednesday. We are journeying together one step at a time, creating together one stroke at a time, and I believe that even the missteps and clashing colors will one day be resolved by One who sees better than I do.
And for as long as the days and the stories are still turning themselves over like a sunrise, grace will still be waiting.
Lyndsey
lives in Boston, MA where she is pursuing her Master's in Theological
Studies at Boston University. She enjoys Community, Mad Men and Beauty
and the Beast and her spirit animal is a sloth. She would like to know
if this is some kind of interactive theater art piece. You can follow her on Twitter @lyndseygraves and you can find more of her writing at her blog To Be Honest.
You might also like:
by Lyndsey Graves
In the Western liturgical calendar, there are two periods called “ordinary time.” They’re so named because the weeks are numbered “ordinally,” but the reason they’re only numbers is because there’s nothing else going on. It’s not Advent or Pentecost or any other season; we’re all just counting along, and everything church-wise is ordinary.
The summer stretch is the longer of the two, and in the past I have found it pretty boring. There’s no pizzazz, no big event, just the same old green and the same old services, week after week. Often, I haven’t liked for life to be ordinary; I want to jump into the next big thing. I want dazzling. Memorable. New.
In fact, I used to be afraid of ordinary. “Settling” for ordinary seemed like the sure way to develop the kind of terminal mediocrity that plagues the suburbs where I grew up. I liked Advent and Lent, when there was stuff to do and prepare for and celebrate; I thought that church and my life, in order to be growing, needed to be all spectacular, all the time. But after a year of very non-ordinary circumstances, the sort that left the people around me with little to say but, “At least it was a learning experience; at least you grew a lot!” – I am thankful, but I am done. The spurt is over.
There is a reason green is the customary color for ordinary time. It recalls all the green growing miraculous things outside, and reminds us that a lull in the festivities does not doom us to stagnation. A lull in the festivities might mean we’re forced to stop distracting ourselves from the tedious but necessary work of slow, steady growth - even if it just looks like waiting.
For me, it’s been a long while since I wasn’t rising to some kind of occasion, and a season with no adrenaline rush (except the visit to Six Flags with my brother) has been a re-centering. Some people get exhausted by that rush, some people get addicted to it, but we all need to detox. Let these long hazy days blur into one another; do the laundry again; take a walk; pull some weeds; have a drink on the porch. Be.
The feasts and fasts and holidays of the church are meant to focus us on specific stories, specific aspects of the Christian life. But this year I need a little bit of unfocused, a little slow, unstructured. It’s brilliant that I don’t have to be a certain way or concentrate on a certain thing. Ordinary time is about the basics, and the basics are not only what I need, but also what I’ve been longing for unknowingly. Love. Grace. Faith. They’re not new, but they’re just as dazzling as the trees, reaching green, a fraction taller today in their ordinary worship of God.
Lyndsey
lives and works in Syracuse, NY. She majored in theology at Lee
University, which is like eating cake or listening to thunderstorms -
too enjoyable to be called work. Also, no one will pay you to do it. You can follow her on Twitter @lyndseygraves and you can find more of her writing at her blog To Be Honest.
You can follow On Pop Theology on Twitter @OnPopTheology or like us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/OnPopTheology.
You might also like:
