Catholics need to avoid ‘nowhen’ Christian faith and practice.
Perhaps no season of the liturgical year is more intentionally focused on time than Advent. A period of anticipation – and preparation for something in the future – Advent is a tempor-ally specific season. While one could make similar claims about Lent, Advent is unique not simply because of its characteristic as a time of waiting, but also by its very place in the liturgical calendar: one week after the end of one liturgical year in the Feast of Christ the King and, of course, the beginning of a new liturgical year. One cannot define or describe Advent without recourse to temporal language, metaphor, or image. It is the interval in which we conscientiously await “the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:4). Temporality is of the essence of Advent.
Thus, Advent compels us to think about the “when” of Christian faith and practice. We start the year over. We enter a new time. Or, to use the title of James KA Smith’s fascinating new book, Advent is the season when we reflect most acutely about How to Inhabit Time. Smith, a professor of philosophy at Calvin University in Michigan, challenges us to contemplate how contingency and temporality condition the way we situate our moral, spiritual and religious lives. Incorporating a broad range of resources from academic philosophy, theology and popular musicians, artists and novelists, he forces us to ask ourselves not just “where” we are in our moral journeys, but “when” we are. He rightly criticises a brand of Christian faith which presumes to be “nowhen” – to act as though eternity does not enter time through creation. This “nowhen” faith is consistent neither with the contingencies that claim as temporal beings nor (and most importantly) with the incarnational nature of our salvation.
Smith reminds us that Christian faith is inherently anchored to considerations of time: reflecting on the past, living in the present and forming our lives by a hope for the future are all necessary elements of Christian faith. “It’s not just that Christians keep a different calendar,” he notes; “Christians keep time differently because we are citizens of a kingdom that will arrive from the future.” But this hope (the signal virtue of temporal beings) for the future kingdom should orientate our present lives. We do not consider the eschaton merely as some future horizon, but rather as the point toward which we order present reality. “An eschatological orientation isn’t only about future expectation,” Smith explains, “but also a recalibration of our present.” Eschatological faith shows us “when” we are, namely in that time between time in which the present stands on the past and is ordered by the future.
This way of thinking has important practical implications. From my perspective, the most important of those is the affirmation that contingency is an integral part of our shared faith as well as our individual moral lives. Contingency scares us because we like assurance. We like timeless absolutes by which we can construct predictable and transcendent principles to guide our lives. To be sure, to believe in the one God who created all things implies a givenness to creation that transcends time. But we do not. And, in God becoming Man, he demonstrated that contingency is not to be avoided but embraced. The incarnation shows us that contingency and temporality are essential components of our very salvation. In his incarnation Christ did not abolish time. He redeemed it. In doing so, he tells us that “nowhen” brands of Christian faith fail to embrace both the fullness of the incarnation and, thus, the temporality of our own moral lives.
“Nowhen” Christianity “effectively nullifies history as an arena of God’s action”, contends Smith. “In this seemingly pious outlook, history is profane; eternity is holy.” These “nowhen forms of piety … fetishise an atemporal eternity”.
This brings us back to Advent. While Catholic Christians are perhaps less susceptible to the disease of nowhen Christianity, we are not altogether immune. Even if merely implicit in our practices, we often act as if the past is a hurdle cleared and the future an obstacle to be overcome. Of course, this makes us “nowhen” people, forgetting who we have been, disinterested in what we will become and, thus, not knowing who we are. Advent, properly considered and practised, jars us out of these errors. It causes us to focus precisely on the temporality of our lives because of the temporality of the Man who is to be born in time to redeem us. The liturgical calendar doesn’t just tell us when the fullness of time comes, but how to inhabit that time when it does. We live in the contingency of the moment, hoping for what has not yet come, but ordering our lives toward it. The “peculiar time-dwelling, and hence timekeeping, of the body of Christ sets us at odds with other dominant modes of inhabiting time”, Smith concludes.
As an aid to inhabiting Advent – or any time in the Christian calendar – I very highly recommend his spiritually perceptive book, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now.
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