We have before us the Al-Ghazali conundrum. The 12th century Persian philosopher asks us to imagine a man coming out of the desert. He trusts his camel to lead him to water and now he sees that his trust was not misplaced. Palm trees beacon him to come closer and he can almost hear the oasis singing in the heat of the day. But when he arrives, he encounters a challenge the likes of which he has seldom faced. Two identical dates are before him and both are perfect in every way. He has a strong desire for both of them, but only one can be taken. The other must be left behind. It is not fate. They are identical twin sisters and to go out with one, puts the other off limits (QED in duplicate). But how do you choose which one will be your date? Reason won’t help. They are identical. Emotion won’t help. You feel the same about both of them. A flip of a coin won’t help. You can’t leave such a choice to chance! The best thing our camel-riding friend can do is to simply ride on and think about what might have been. 

Today, I must choose one book to end this series. The first four were easy to choose, but three of them were chosen without consideration that other people might actually want to join me on this reading adventure (some have even purchased the first two books!). I don’t care what you may choose to read in private, but when you invite others to join you, you cannot suggest books like Mounce’s Morphology of Biblical Greek (no one would “read along with Dane” if Dane was reading that!). But where’s the line between what I would enjoy (and will enjoy) reading in private and what ought to be announced as part of this series? I fear Clare Carlisle’s Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard is over the line. I also fear Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West may also be a bridge too far (But it shouldn’t be! Who wouldn’t enjoy a profound cultural and historical analysis? Who wouldn’t want to know how 1776 made us WEIRDER and how we are who we are today because of those events in 1776? If I had one more question to put in this parenthesis, I would talk myself into making this our last book!). I also fear Denis Alexander and Alister McGrath’s Coming to Faith Through Dawkins: 22 Essays on the Pathway from New Atheism to Christianity might be a no-sell for many people (but who wouldn’t want to hear how people once entrenched in Dawkins’ camp abandoned it to become followers of Jesus? I certainly do, hence the reason I also have Kelly James Clark’s Philosophers Who Believe; but it may also be a reason why I haven’t actually read it yet). You may actually love Michael Frost’s Mission Is the Shape of Water: Learning from the Past to Inform Our Role in the World Today. Frost is always brilliant and his books have shaped much of my thinking about how we ought to do ministry and the church in our world today. You would love this book (on the back cover, David Fitch said this book “made me want to sell everything, follow Jesus, and serve his mission all over again.”). See what I mean, you would love this book, and this would be a great book on my list if it was twenty years ago, but this is not a book I want to read right now. It is a timing issue. You now see the conundrum. There are so many great and worthy books, and it is hard for me to choose just one more to recommend to you that you might actually see as engaging. 

If there is any solace here, there is another philosophical parable about a starving donkey who finds itself between two identical bales of hay. Since it is equidistant from each and since there is no difference between the two, the donkey cannot decide and. as a result, starves to death in its indecision. The point, I think, of the parable is that being torn between two lovers is a terrible way to go. 

I’ve narrowed it down to two suggestions. You ponder these great quotes, and I will ponder which one I want to suggest. 

  • “Outside of a dog a book is man’s best friend. Inside a dog it’s too dark to read.” — Groucho Marx
  • “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.” – J. Lahiri
  • “We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: We need books, time, and silence. ‘Thou shalt not’ is soon forgotten, but ‘once upon a time’ lasts forever.” – Philip Pullman
  • “If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” — Franz Kafka

I have decided, but before we set off on today’s journey, let’s begin with a good kick-off quote:

“No two persons ever read the same book.”
(Edmund Wilson)

Book Five:
How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now
James K.A. Smith (Brazos Press, Grand Rapids, 2022)

I know, it’s philosophy and written by a philosopher and that may cross the line for some of you, but I want to encourage you to give this book some of your time.

 

The author: James KA Smith is professor of philosophy at Calvin University. He was originally trained in philosophical theology and contemporary French philosophy (for instance, see Smith’s book, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism where he takes Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to church. You can see it, but if you are like me, you won’t understand it). Today, his work is focused more on a Christian analysis of western culture and embodying an authentic spirituality. And yes, there are times when Smith goes way over my head, but when he speaks to me, he pierces my heart. His encouragement in the preface is worth mentioning here:

“Philosophy matters only if it teaches us how to live, how to be human. The philosophers you’ll meet in the pages that follow are catalysts for such reflection. Don’t worry if philosophy doesn’t come easily to you. The difficulty is the point (‘a feature, not a bug’ as they say). Sometimes we need the difficulty to get us to slow down and look at ourselves.”


The Book’s Big Idea: This book asks great questions. What does it mean to live faithfully in light of our past, our present and our future? What does it mean to live in light of our death and in light of eternity? What does it mean to live as creatures in time and worship a God who is out of time? And this book gives us lots of dramatic thoughts. For instance, “Knowing when we are can change everything. Knowing whether it is dawn or dusk changes how you live the next moment.” And this book wrestles with Ecclesiastes. That alone should entice you. But the chapter headings tell me everything I need to know.

  • Creatures of Time: How to Face Our Forgetting
  • How to Learn from Ghosts
  • How (Not) to Be Contemporary
  • How to Love What You’ll Lose
  • How to Inhabit Your Now
  • On Not Living Ahead of Time: How to Sing Maranatha!

Our time is changing, and my time is slipping away. I wish I could do it all over again, but that is not possible. The best I can do is to be faithful, be wise and be loving with the time I have left. If this book can give me even a little assistance in doing that, then it will be an engaging and meaningful read.

 

Some Quotes from the Book:

  • “Wisdom is the unhurried fruit of time served as a mortal.”
  • “This is why you can’t go home again because the you that arrives is not the you that left, and the home you left is not the home to which you return.”
  • “This doesn’t mean the future is set or completely decided in advance. It’s more like concrete in its liquid state: it has been poured into a frame, but you can still make an imprint by your decisions.”
  • “It’s the body with scars that is resurrected; it’s the me with a history that is redeemed, forgiven, graced, liberated.”
  • “I am the carrier of desires that outstrip this mortal frame.”
  • “We might imagine spiritual timekeeping as an expansion of the spiritual discipline of memento mori, the disciplined habit of keeping death before us. In the spirit of memento mori, consider this book an invitation to the discipline of what we might call memento tempori. Remember, you are temporal. Keep your history daily before you. Remember, there is a future after the sand runs out, and that future is already bleeding into your present.”


Two Great Editorial Reviews from Charles Marsh and Fred Bahnson

“In this arresting and elegant book, Jamie Smith gives us a profound and beguiling meditation on time (and therefore, death), on embodiment (and therefore, love), on creaturehood (and therefore, our orientation toward God). Philosophically rigorous and creatively daring, this original and provocative exploration summons each of us to diligent thinking and unflinching honesty, to (in Smith’s own phrase) ‘shared vulnerability’ and deep prayer.” –Charles Marsh 

“James K. A. Smith shows us that time is a gift waiting to be redeemed, and a central conviction of this book is that ‘the Lord of the star fields’ is intimately attuned to our haunted, beautiful histories. Dwelling with these lucid, winsome meditations on ‘spiritual timekeeping’ was like listening in on a lively conversation between St. Augustine, Gustavo Gutiérrez, James Baldwin, and Marilynne Robinson, while Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon played in the background.” –Fred Bahnson


Why You Should Read this Book with Me: Some books we read, and some books read us. How to Inhabit Time reads us. It roots us in God’s story of time and God’s forgiveness and God’s hope. It frees us from our past by having us enter into it. It gives us a vision for the future, but doesn’t allow us to abandon “now” in order to live “then.” We only have so much time, but we rarely think about the time we are given. This book orients us so that we can live each day in awareness of the times and the seasons and the hope of eternity. This is a book, I think, that I will come back to time and time again.

 

If you’re not into How to Inhabit Time, what else can I recommend?

I have two great recommendations, both by Jamie Smith.

You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit—From the back cover: “You are what you love, but you might not love what you think. Smith helps us recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practice.”

  • “Christian worship, we should recognize, is essentially a counter-formation to those rival liturgies we are often immersed in, cultural practices that covertly capture our loves and longings, miscalibrating them, orienting us to rival versions of the good life.”
  • “‘Liturgy,’ as I’m using the word, is a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with an ultimate story about who we are and what we’re for. They carry within them a kind of ultimate orientation.”
  • “Christian worship should tell a story that makes us want to set sail for the immense sea that is the Triune God, birthing in us a longing for “a better country—a heavenly one’ that is kingdom come (Heb. 11:16).”
  • “Worship that restores us is worship that restories us.”

(You could also read the more academic, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation). 


On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for restless Hearts—From the Introduction: “This is not a biography. This is not a book about Augustine. In a way, it’s a book Augustine has written about you. It’s a journey with Augustine as a guide into oneself. It’s a travelogue of the heart. It’s a road trip with a prodigal who’s already been where you think you need to go.” 

  • “The reason Augustine tells his story is that he thinks it is simply an example of the human story—that we are all prodigals—and he wants us to ask ourselves a question: ‘What if I went home?’” 
  • “We try to cover up not knowing who we are by letting everyone else sell us an identity.”
  • “The Christian gospel, for Augustine, wasn’t just the answer to an intellectual question (though it was that); it was more like a shelter in a storm, a port for a wayward soul, nourishment for a prodigal who was famished, whose own heart had become, he said, ‘a famished land.’”
  • “For Augustine, psychology is cartography: to understand oneself is a matter of mapping our penchant to look for love in all the wrong places.”
  • “Our idolatries are less like conscious decisions to believe a falsehood and more like learned dispositions to hope in what will disappoint. Our idolatries are not intellectual; they are affective—instances of disordered love and devotion. Idolatry is caught more than it is taught. We practice our way into idolatries, absorb them from the water in which we swim. Hence, our idolatries often reflect the ethos of our environments.”


Last Words: Jo and I are stepping into a new season of our lives. A new day, a new time has come. Our time in this new season will be shorter than the days we’ve had in our past. I need to think more deeply about how we are to live in this “new time,” and how we are to live memento mori (live in light of our deaths) so that we make the most of our days. What was it Tolkien said? “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” I want to make sure I use the time we have left well. And while this book promises to help me think through what it means to be faithful in the time that we have, I wish I had read it years ago. So, what am I going to do with my time now that we are retired? I am still not sure all that I am going to do, but I do know that I am going to spend some precious time reading several good books with several good friends. And that will make this time very, very special.

This is my last blog post. I can’t thank you enough for reading and for joining me on this blogging expedition. Perhaps I’ll write more in the future somewhere. If so, I hope you will join me for that. I believe Jason will pick up these blogs in September. But for now, let me say what a joy it is to write with friends beside you and in your heart. 

Blessings and peace and good reading –
dane