Sunset over the Marshes (c. 1890–1904) by Martin Johnson Heade:
Houses at L’Estaque (1908) by Georges Braque:
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The Viaduct at L’Estaque (1907) by Georges Braque:
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Finished reading: How to Inhabit Time by James K. A. Smith 📚
Disjointed and uneven in some ways, but overall a fascinating exploration of time and what Smith calls the practice of “spiritual timekeeping.” I think he’s exactly right that living faithfully in the present requires some awareness and even reckoning with the past, both individually and corporately. Also, his criticisms of certain “atemporal” forms of Christianity were on the money.
Currently reading: After Emmaus by Brian J. Tabb 📚
There are lots of religious people for whom their faith amounts to a leap into a nostalgic past or an escapist future, but the present bedevils them: awkward and unsettled, they stumble and waver. They know how to be faithful anywhere but now…. To know how to dance in divine time and walk like a human being is a marvel.
God’s sanctifying presence in my life doesn’t erase what’s gone before. Indeed, what God has prepared for me depends on what has gone before. My personal history isn’t something to regret; it is something God can deploy in ways I never could have imagined. […]
Shame teaches me to look at my past and see something hideous that makes me regret my existence. In grace, God looks at my past and sees the sketch of a work of art that he wants to finish painting and show the world. […]
Shame wants us to regret our thrownness; grace wants us to see it as thrown possibility. Nostalgia wants to undo time, walk it all back, as if this were some sort of recovery. Grace wants to unleash our history for a future with God that could only be ours—living into the version of ourselves that the world needs.
Such nostalgia parades itself as recovery. But it is, in fact, a recipe for loss. The hidden price of getting what nostalgia wants is losing what has been given to you. […]
To walk back a life is to lose it; to get what nostalgia craves is loss. To have your life back would be to lose everything that unfolded and that God wants to use.
Shame—what I’m calling “nostalgia in negative”—keeps looking back, too, but in a way that paralyzes, crushes, disheartens. If nostalgia romanticizes the past as bliss, shame can’t imagine a future for our past. […]
God does not want to undo our pasts; nor does he want us to nostalgically dwell in our pasts; God’s grace goes back to fetch our pasts for the sake of the future.