Being There (Chapter 1 of The Haunted Moment)
Everyone wants to master the art of being present. From mindfulness routines to guided meditation, the art of being there is something of an elusive discipline. It is a fine point on which one desires to stand and the cliffs on either side are steep. The worthwhile pursuit of it is, first and foremost, based on the fact that Christ has commanded it; for this reason, now is always the ideal time for being human. Living in this moment is experienced rightly when two things occur: the future and the past are properly placed under house arrest, allowed to visit the present only if they abide by its terms . . . and . . . the human’s present tense experience is lived out from, to, and through the Living God.
These principles are summarized in the following verses:
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. - Matthew 6:34
Say not thou, “What is the cause that the former days were better than these?” For thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this. - Ecclesiastes 7:10
See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. - Ephesians 5:15-16
Notice the way in which the warnings in the first two verses pair. In order to live in a Godly fashion as a human being, one must abide in the present. To wander into either the future or the past is cautioned against by naming the dragons that be there. Jesus relates a proper form of abiding in the moment with goodness by showing that not doing so is linked with evil. The temptation to allow the mind and the will to migrate into the future is to blatantly invite evil into the present. This why people obsessed with hypotheticals and fears about the future often can’t handle it. Their present tense is collapsing beneath the weight of the future tense. There is not enough room in the present to import the future. Collapse is inevitable.
Solomon, in parallel fashion, compares abiding in the present moment with wisdom and turning backward in order to long for the past, like Lot’s wife, with foolishness. The person who is constantly yearning for what is behind them is hemorrhaging the life that ought to abound in the present tense.
Notice what the Apostle Paul does in the third verse: he marries the two motifs and introduces the concept of redeeming the time as being both the good way to live and the wise way to live. The temptation to forsake the call to redeem the time is to invite in, not only the foolishness of disjointed time but also its evil properties.
Whereas the first two verses address the issue of forsaking what we will call time travel (inappropriately dwelling on either the future or the past), the third verse unifies the principles around the concept of redeeming the time. So, what then does it mean to redeem the time? Does this simply mean getting more boxes checked on my to-do list in a day than I previously thought was possible? Yes and no. Firstly, we need to understand what is meant by time.
When the Apostle Paul commands us to redeem the time, it is crucial that we understand that which is to be redeemed is kairos, not chronos. The former is related to occasions, meaningful moments, seasons, rhythms of being, etc; while the latter is related to sequence. The former, kairos, could be understood as qualitative while the latter, chronos, is dealing with the quantitative.
Isocrates was a Greek rhetorician who died in the fourth century BC. In his view, the goal of all education was to make people capable of redeeming kairos. This would look something like human beings who are able to rise to the occasion, regardless of the occasion. Wisdom, the Godly acquisition and use of knowledge, redeems the time, by making men and women not only discerning and cunning but also courageous and efficacious. When the future and the past are not allowed to occupy the limited nature of the now, the human then has the opportunity to fill the limited frame well.
Chronological time, however, should not be thought of as the mere off-scouring of kairos. Both concepts of time are eternal and meaningful. The old hymn that borrows the line from Revelation 10 about time being no more has led to much confusion about this.
And sware by him that liveth forever and ever, who created heaven, and the things that therein are, and the earth, and the things that therein are, and the sea, and the things which are therein, that there should be time no longer: - Revelation 10:6
Initially, the wording suggests some sort of cessation of sequence in the vein of a nunc stans, the likes of which Thomas Hobbes depicts in Leviathan.
For the meaning of eternity, they will not have it to be an endless succession of time; for then they should not be able to render a reason how God's will and pre-ordaining of things to come should not be before His prescience of the same, as the efficient cause before the effect, or agent before the action; nor of many other their bold opinions concerning the incomprehensible nature of God. But they will teach us that eternity is the standing still of the present time, a nunc-stans, as the Schools call it; which neither they nor any else understand, no more than they would a hic-stans for an infinite greatness of place.
It is in this way that people tend to imagine the union of Heaven and Earth as a future space in which there is no time. The perpetual standing still is the perfect canvas for docile angels on slow clouds playing quiet harps. Of course, the image can only tolerate one constant note since varied notes would be sequential and sequence is chronological, meaning a derivative of chronos. And it is this unending drone that often makes normal people a bit disinclined towards getting to the afterlife as soon as possible. The hymn that rejoices in that moment “when the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more” is misleading for two reasons: Firstly, Revelation 10:16 does not seem to be saying that all time shall cease, but rather the waiting for the judgment shall cease. Nearly every major translation other than the King James does not render this verse as “time shall be no more” but “there shall be no more delay.” Secondly, the rest of the Bible is replete with passages that show us life on New Earth as being filled with sequence. It is not entirely other. It is human life on earth only glorified. There is going to be eating and drinking which necessitates moments before eating and moments after drinking. There will be movement between glorified country and glorified city. In short, there will be sequence, which is chronos, which is time.
Thus, we see that concepts of time, chronos and kairos, are to be redeemed; but it is kairos that we are commanded to redeem in Ephesians. Most likely, this is because kairos has the capacity to house both meaningful moments and their sequential delineations.
This concept is difficult for us to grasp, in part, because our chronometric era is one in which clocks are not only universal but ubiquitous. The symbol has become so powerful that it functions as the anti-type to which life itself is the type. Death itself is thought of as the declaration that our time is up. We say of the young, They are just getting started. Listen to Lewis Mumford:
At that time [14th century], the bell towers did not yet have a dial and no pointers, which convert the temporal into a spatial movement. So they struck to all events the hour with the bell. The clouds that blocked the sundial were no longer an obstacle. The striking of the bell brought a new regularity into the life of the craftsman and the merchant. The measurement of time became the timing of everyday activities, the temporal control of work activity and the rationing of time. In the course of this development, eternity lost more and more its function as the measure and centre of man's actions.
In relation to keeping the past and the future behind their respective fences, it may be helpful to think of the present as a mountain peak. Both the nearside face (the one we are constantly finishing scaling) and the far-side face (the one we have yet to descend) are places in which all of the inhabitants are phantasmic. They have a kind of visibility and therefore a kind of presence but they are lacking in mass. Only the dwellers of the now have mass, unless, that is, we give it away to ghosts from either realm. Obviously, the past and the future are involved in shaping the tangible landscape of the present, but the Bible has much to say about what the landscaping should look like.
It is hard to be fully present and to truly believe that the momentary is as important as the past and the future. It’s been said that history is only written because it is over. We dissect dead things, not living ones. Because the past has been permanently burned into the film, we are able to judge it. It is locked in place and will not move on us. To study history is the closest thing we have to fortune telling. It is the inhabitants of the present looking outside of their own context in order to fill their own moment with imported wares from another time. God does not condemn being historical; He requires it. He is a remembering God and a memorializing God. His people are commanded to not forget and so they are given the practice of covenant renewal in order to remember God as a remembering God. The present is truly a richer place when the past is rightly ordered and preserved within its walls by shaping our momentary environment.
Why then is it so hard to see the moment within which we are constantly living as being more valuable than those moments on either side? It has something to do with the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle, based on misappropriations of the Law of the Excluded Middle. In the fallacy, extreme alternatives are offered as the only options when, in fact, something closer to the middle is the correct answer. Humans are binocular creatures, both eyes outward-oriented. It’s hard for us to believe that something here and now could be of equal value as something there.
This broken response mechanism that keeps us constantly in doubt of the present moment’s value was acquired in the Fall. Knowledge gained through disobedience gives the knower a false sense of accomplishment. Our first father and mother were offered a hypothetical view of the future and the past. They saw in both ghost realms the viability of their having been lied to by God in the past and their ability to futuristically do something in their own strength to rectify it. Those ephemeral realms, but especially the future, have shapes that are incapable of being interpreted by creatures with a design feature of living in the now.
The microscope allows us to see the profound intricacy of the operations of the world, deep inside the fabric. We become witnesses to everything from birthing events, to infrastructures collapsing, to the death of the ancient. We are moved in a similar fashion when our eye switches over to the telescope. We see birth, collapse, and the death of the ancient. We see wonders that move us in unique ways because they are alien to us. The wonders of our own moment, for some reason, seem less wonderful. Of course, that’s part of the misunderstanding brought in by the acquisition of knowledge through disobedience. The birth of a baby is not less wonderful than the birth of a star or the birth of a cell. In deed, since humans are the crown of creation and the only creature given dominion, the birth of a baby is more wonderful. But we only have two eyes and one tends to be on the microscope while the other is on the telescope. We often miss out on the wonder in all of this middle world choreography.
Our relationship with time functions similarly. When we read Aesop, Bede, or Shakespeare, we may feel as though we’ve been born too late. The days that housed the things we admire are long gone. They are somewhere behind us and we think we should have been back there with them. Our time, then, doesn’t seem to fit. In the same way, we may pine for things which have not yet arrived in such a way as to entirely miss out on valuing the things we do have. Future things are far more amorphous and so the likelihood of misinterpreting is far greater than it is when examining the past.
Being there is an art that requires both a proper understanding of how the human is to relate to the past and the future and a knowledge of how God has designed life to issue forth from Himself, to be lived through Him, and to be offered up unto Him. With the counsel of God’s Word, humans have the potential to order their lives in such a way as to redeem the time. It is for lack of ordering that so many people feel victimized by time. Like a child in the kitchen with all the ingredients for cake on the counter before him, the end result requires not only an amalgamation of ingredients but a proper ordering of them in a meaningful manner. It’s not cake if you cook the eggs before mixing them. The goal is cake, not mixing. In like manner, God has made the human to not only be a chronological creature, but a liturgical one. Liturgy redeems kairos. As the human moves from sequence to liturgy, the redemption of time results. Liturgical creatures not only know what the time is but why the time is. They are able to overcome the indecisiveness and decision-paralysis of time out of joint. Just as the sun, moon, and stars were placed in the sky not only for signs but for seasons as well, seconds, minutes, hours, and seasons become central to experiencing life in a way that is both good and wise. Time, for the believer, who is uniquely made and remade in the image of God, is truly on our side.
