The sensory recollection of childhood memories can be vivid. I remember my grandparents house in Leamington, Ontario. Their house was a place of comfort and safety in a childhood marked with familial strife. Whenever I smell bacon cooking to this day I am brought back to my Nana’s kitchen, to the smell of bacon and zwieback (buns, Mennonite traditional).
I recently read James K. A. Smith’s wonderful new book “How to Inhabit Time”. As I did there were multiple times when my thoughts were brought back to my grandparents, to their faith, to that house, and to the brevity of life and the span of generations. Smith’s book, to me, was pastoral. It is a book that talks about important ideas and concepts. It is a book that requires some thinking, some thoughtful consideration. In other words, important things are being said. Jamie Smith is talking about faith and the church and hope in our lives. He does so in the context of how we live in and perceive time. He argues that much of what passes for Christianity these days is able to live in any time except now. People are fixated on the past, thinking that faith was so much stronger years ago, longing for some bygone time that actually never existed. People are fearful and argumentative about the future, largely driven by angst or by a self-focused inability to see that the world and faith and life are bigger than any one of us. Jamie Smith calls us to be eschatological people, people who are guided by a hopeful sense of the future to live lives of goodness and beauty in the moments and days that we are actually blessed to live.
I interviewed Jamie for the final episode of Rector’s Cupboard podcast. We mentioned the new Arcade Fire album in the discussion. As I think about the failure to inhabit the time in which we live a lyric from the album comes to mind:
“It’s not half-bad. Spend half your life being sad.”
I feel the line not as some accusatory judgment about sorrow, but as a reminder that we can fail to see the beauty and grace of the day that we are living because we are weighed down by nostalgia for the past or fear of the future.
In the book, Jamie Smith quotes a memoir by writer Margaret Wrenkl. Her book is called “Late Migrations” and it includes a reflection on the migration of monarch butterflies. I loved the illustration for multiple reasons, one of them being that one of the places from which monarch butterflies migrated was Point Pelee in Southern Ontario. During the interview we looked up what a group of butterflies is called, neither of us knew or could recall. It turns out that the term is perfect. It’s a Kaleidoscope of Butterflies.
My grandparents lived a few miles from the national park where thousands of these beautiful butterflies would be en route to Mexico 3,000 miles away. Renkl points out that the migration takes place each year (it takes two or three months), but that the time of the migration makes up four generations for the monarch butterflies. One migration, four generations.
There is something consoling in that. My life is part of something bigger. The days that I live now are connected to the days that my grandparents lived before me. I am blessed to live these days, and even as I seek to work out a vocational call, even as I seek to lead a meaningful life, I can be freed from fear and haste.
The 90th Psalm includes the familiar refrain in a prayer,
“Teach us to number our days, that we may have hearts of wisdom.”
This is not a fearful warning of some impending apocalypse, it is a call and invitation to inhabit time. This prayer, can be a door to freedom and peace.
I don’t know what your day has brought. I don’t know what it is that is making you concerned or afraid or angry. I don’t know what you are looking forward to with anticipation. I don’t know if you tend to be weighed down by emotional nostalgia. I do know, however, that there is much beauty and love in this world and that you are likely to see some of that today. It’s easy to miss if we fail to inhabit the time which we are actually given, the time with which we are blessed.
“Teach me to number my days, that I may have a heart of wisdom.”