James K. A. Smith - How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

This book is an invitation to the spiritual adventure we call time. If it promises guidance on how to inhabit time, please dont expect formulas or methods or tips for managing your day planner. Instead, the hope of this book is to occasion an awakening, a dawning awareness of what it means to be the sorts of creatures who dwell in the flux of times flow, who swim in the river of history. Knowing when we are can change everything. Knowing whether its dawn or dusk changes how you live the next moment.

The aim of this book is to encourage a sort of recognition that is the fruit of contemplation . We emerge from the hard, quiet work of contemplation with a new recognition of ourselves, our world, and our relation to the God who encounters us in the fullness of time. As the philosopher Charles Taylor puts it, to recognize ones connection with the Spirit in history is to change oneself and the way one acts. Its like living amid the cacophony of the modern world and finally discerning the beat of the Spirit in history and knowing how to dance in time.

But recognition of the Spirits drumbeat requires careful attention, pausing to become attuned to the world in a new way. Such discernment is the fruit of reflection, rumination, contemplation. This book, you might say, is an exercise in such attunement, an invitation to ruminate on questions we perhaps havent asked. The wager is that such reflection, as Taylor says, changes us and thus changes how we live, even if I cant prescribe exactly what it looks like for you to answer the Spirits call on your life.

You can feel this connection between contemplation and action, reflection and transformation, in Rainer Maria Rilkes poem Archaic Torso of Apollo. The poet encounters the truncated beauty of an ancient statue that, even without the glare of eyes, makes him feel seen. Standing mesmerized before the stone that seems alive, the narrator beholds himself anew. The encounter is a recognition that yields the stark conclusion of the poem: You must change your life.

This book hopes for such self-recognition. But this recognition is more like an awareness that dawns than an argument that can be grasped or a formula that can be repeated. A word of encouragement before you enter: dont come so much to learn as to dwell . This book is something other than a package of information between two covers. We will begin to understand our place and calling in the spiritual adventure of history only if we find a way to hit the pause button on our frenetic absorption in the everyday and resist the tyranny of the urgent. Thats precisely why this book is a blend of philosophy and poetry, memoir and theology.