Abstract
How to Inhabit Time: A Précis
James K. A. Smith
How to Inhabit Time is the third volume in what I see as a kind of “invisible” trilogy on spiritual formation that (in my mind, at least!) begins with the argument about “the spiritual power of habit” articulated in You Are What You Love (2016). 1 Echoing the seminal work of Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, as well as my colleague Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, You Are What You Love focuses on spiritual formation as the habituation of love and desire. What was perhaps unique in my contribution was a more communal and ecclesial focus on liturgy and collective worship rituals as integral to spiritual formation.
In On the Road with Saint Augustine (Brazos, 2019) I tried to articulate what I described as Augustine’s “real world spirituality” which recognizes the ongoing dynamics of struggle that characterize the Christian life, eschewing any perfectionism or illusion of purity. We are always on the way; the Christian life is a “refugee spirituality” because we are longing for a home we’ve never been to. This includes an importantly eschatological element to spiritual formation—the need to recognize when we are. By God’s grace, we know where home is, but we’re not there yet.
How to Inhabit Time grows out of a fundamental conviction that was assumed but undeveloped in those earlier books: A spirituality for creatures must be a spirituality attentive to the vicissitudes of time and history. To be human is to be conditioned by time, shaped by history. We don’t float above the flux. We are those unique creatures who are shaped by history even as we shape it.
In this sense, I see How to Inhabit Time as one more instalment of an argument that I’ve been trying to make since my very first book, The Fall of Interpretation (First edition was InterVarsity Press, 2000; second, revised edition is Baker Academic, 2012): We ought not to conflate finitude with fallenness; or, more positively, to affirm the goodness of creation is to affirm the goodness of finitude. And to affirm the goodness of finitude is to affirm the goodness of embodiment, including our locatedness in time and space. The promise of new creation and resurrection is not redemption from embodiment but redemption of embodiment. That redemption begins here and now, in the “already” of the kingdom that is among us. So we need a spirituality—and a theology of spiritual formation—that recognizes the goodness of creaturehood and thus affirms and recognizes the significance of time and history.
However, just as some people act as if they have a “God’s eye view” of things—a “view from nowhere”—so I think too many Christians and forms of Christianity imagine they have a “view from nowhen.” We subtly imagine that because we stand in the truth we are somehow above or immune to history. This leads to all kind of illusions and self-deception, both individually and collectively. More significantly, such “nowhen” Christianities have no way to imagine how and why God gives us time and history as a gift.
To counter such “nowhen” Christianities, How to Inhabit Time tries to sketch a vision for what I call spiritual timekeeping. This is not about “what to do spiritually with your time” or some kind of spiritualized time management. Rather spiritual timekeeping is a renewed temporal awareness that is attuned to the texture of our histories, the vicissitudes of life, and the tempo of the Spirit.
How to Inhabit Time is intended as a wake-up call to the significance of one’s own temporality but also the significance of our temporality. It is both a matter of awakening to the way history lives in me and, at the same time, the way we inhabit history and history lives in us—as well as the way futurity pulls us and shapes us. It’s not as simple as seeing the spiritual significance of your calendar but rather discerning the spiritual repercussions of a history that precedes you, lives in you, and shapes the future to which you are called.
The pulse of the book has three beats: reckoning, discernment, hope. We need to reckon with our (personal and collective) histories so that we can discern how the Spirit is afoot in the present and thus hear the future to which God is calling us. In this respect, How to Inhabit Time does not offer formulas, or even specific disciplines—though it does try to articulate the formative significance of the liturgical calendar from a new angle. Instead, the book is an invitation to a posture of contemplation. I try to commend modes of becoming aware of our temporality in order to occasion new intentionality about how we inhabit time. This includes, for example, appreciating how the seasonality of a human life is significant for spiritual formation (chapter 5); or why contentment is found in learning to love what we’ll lose (chapter 5); or the importance of tempering political expectations in order to learn how to properly hope.
In some ways, the key question of the book is: What does it mean to be “faithful” if we are creatures of history and conditioned by time?
In “nowhen” forms of Christianity, the watchword is “preservation;” faithfulness is understood as the prolongation and preservation of what has been. 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. The goal of spiritual confrontation with our past is precisely to rid us of our delusions and idolatries so that we can finally hear what God is calling us to in the present.
The great Latino theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez once wrote: “To hope in Christ is at the same time to believe in the adventure of history.” How to Inhabit Time is meant to be an invitation to recognize we’re already in that adventure and provide a roadmap for the way.