Space Enough, and Time

“Too Wise to Woo Peaceably”

Posted on February 11, 2021 by awtraughber

This popped up on my YouTube screen this evening and thought it worth sharing, really apropos of nothing other than it is good to see these two together again. Plus: Shakespeare. Brilliant Benedick and Beatrice.

The week has been a full one. A good one, but a full one nonetheless. We were able to do a kind of day-camp with our sophomores yesterday in place of their usual weekend camp. It went well, I think. And now we are all ready for a slightly longer weekend. Just need to get through Friday first.

It is interesting to think about how busy weeks move you: not just through time but also through a certain amount of headspace. On one level, you turn down some of the interior monologue as a way of plowing through the day. On another level, though, that monologue continues (and can be of great help). In the past, I’ve found myself planning for the future in the midst of the current moment (that’s almost always been true of school events for me). That’s definitely been at play this last week, though not with the edge that it often has during busy times. Truth be told, this last week has been lighter than usual on the mental stress. Not sure if I’ll pay for that later, but it has been a nice change for these last few days. We’ll see if I can carry it with me into the weekend.

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Tradition and Traditionalism

Posted on February 10, 2021 by awtraughber

From Common Objects of Love by Oliver O’Donovan:

The word “tradition,” like koinonia, refers both to an action and a possession. In the first sense it is the activity by which one shares in the community, receiving and contributing. In the second sense it is the reserve of practices and communicative patterns received from the past– but only those which continue to command recognition, that is, which have been effectively communicated down to the present time. The essential thing about tradition is that it creates social continuity. It binds the communal action of the present moment to the communal actions of past moments. What we often call “traditionalism,” the revival of lapsed traditions, is, properly speaking, a kind of innovation, making a new beginning out of an old model. This may or may not be sensible in any given instance, but it is not tradition. The claim of tradition is not the claim of the past over the present, but the claim of the present to that continuity with the past which enables common action to be conceived and executed.

This is a good but challenging distinction. Can changing traditions, moving from one line to another, be a kind of innovation in itself? How far back can you trace a thread of your tradition until the connection becomes too tenuous? I’m not sure it’s an “either-or,” but the conversation around the topic could be longer than anticipated. The idea of innovation, of course, is key to Root’s argument in Congregations in a Secular Age. What of acts of retrieval or ressourcement? And what is a culture to do when it has lost all sense of tradition?

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Prepackaged, Unbundled

Posted on February 9, 2021 by awtraughber

Yesterday I wrote about some questions and issues that I’ve been having with time, particularly as it might connect to some of the dastardly advice from The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis.

I think a lot of the questions and issues of time and work today has to do with strengths and weaknesses, habits and routines, and what you can do when you know better. For instance, I’m a morning person. By the early afternoon, I don’t have much left (which is why an energetic G period is always a positive lift). So getting to bed at a decent time is important. I can’t always make that happen (particularly when community is involved), but it is a good and noble goal.

As I’ve been reflecting over these last few weeks looking for ways to ameliorate some of my everyday frustrations, I’ve noticed a couple of interesting knots with things. The first is the persistent need to prepackage things. Prepackaging is a part of our culture, has been since at least the dawn of the frozen dinner. It’s obviously a food trend. It’s also become a trend in work for me. Part of it is the move to online content sharing, which requires you to work ahead (and creates a weird but pleasant lag time between your work and the actual finished product). And part of it is the realization that if I don’t get things done on Monday, I might not get to it again until Thursday or Friday, which is totally unacceptable. Even when I’ve done my best to get things prepared, I find things left undone. Granted, there are big prep cycles and smaller ones, but still. These last few years have moved me in this direction, but this last year even more so.

The other, more frustrating, trend for my management of time has been the bundling that has been happening. On some basic level, I try to live as simple a life as possible. It’s not about laziness, I hope. It is about having space and time enough to breathe. A lot of my worst moments these last years have been from trying to take care of too many things simultaneously. That’s definitely been even more the case this last year, where every trip for one reason became a trip for two. It’s probably a small thing, really, but it’s been something that has nibbled at some of my joy. And so I’ve been thinking over the last couple of weeks on how to “correct” it. That’s the thing about times like these, where stuff gets jabbed and jumbled together: you have to be careful of how things land because getting “locked in” to bad habits or practices can be disastrous.

I’m hopeful that one day the world of the prepackaged and the over-bundled will come to an end. It will at least have some ebb and flow. But I’m convinced that a better way forward will have at least a little less of both.

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Time Enough?

Posted on February 8, 2021 by awtraughber

Screwtape Letters One of the more personally frustrating letters from Screwtape to Wormwood is missive #21, which has something to do with using “the claims of life” against the patient. Screwtape writes:

Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned at having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him . . . Now he is not yet so uncharitable or slothful that these small demands on his courtesy are in themselves too much for it. They anger him because he regards his time as his own and feels that it is being stolen.

From there he continues:

You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption that “My time is my own.” Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

I’ve been thinking a lot about time recently, partly because the almost-constant refrain of how time seems to be moving during Our Current Moment (both too fast and so slow) and partly because it’s a major (the major?) thread in Root’s Congregation in a Secular Age.

I’ve also been thinking about it because timing has been out of sync for me for almost four years. For the last four years (give or take a quarter), I’ve been almost consistently double-booked at worked. And for the last year, work has remained overly-busy (most of the time) while non-work time has been empty because of a lack of places to go and things to do. It’s created a real disconnect for me. And then trying to connect with others often means (for me as a single guy) adopting or adapting to the schedules of others (like staying up later than usual or getting up earlier to make up for other time given). It’s an interesting conundrum.

What do you do with the time that you have? And what do you do with the time that is allotted to you by others? How do you steward it well, all the while knowing that it is not your own? And how do you steward your time well when the time-zones of others overlap your all the time? How do you balance what you are responsible for with who you are potentially responsible to?

“What’s mine is ours,” I suppose. Though none of it is quite that simple, especially when conversations about what we all hold in common aren’t all that, well, common.

(image from cslewis.com)

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Fighting for Home

Posted on February 6, 2021 by awtraughber

Well, it’s obviously been a comics-and-preview kind of week here at Space Enough, and Time. While it hasn’t been the craziest of weeks, it has had its moments. Today has been a mostly normal Saturday, just no movie theater. Hopefully a properly productive day tomorrow.

Here’s one more trailer for WandaVision from Marvel and Disney+. It’s great that the story is now moving forward in significant ways (that more easily connect it to the broader MCU narrative). Not sure what to make of the big reveal at the end of this week’s episode, but it definitely puts an unexpected twist on things. Here’s the “trailer” for the remaining four episodes of the season.

On some level, this feels like a proper, full-fledged cinematic trailer: nods to the whole story of Wanda and the Vision with major hints of what is next. It would never have worked as the initial preview, mind you, but it’s good to have it now.

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Nearing a Season’s End

Posted on February 5, 2021 by awtraughber

We’re inching closer and closer to the end of the first season of All Creatures Great and Small. Here’s the trailer for this coming episode.

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(Winter) Soldiering On

Posted on February 4, 2021 by awtraughber

The Super Bowl is almost upon us. And while things feel at least a little bit muted from a broad cultural perspective (which is not the case if your a fan of a playing team), there’s still the promise of some interesting commercials and trailers. Which is why we get a trailer for a trailer like this one:

WandaVision has definitely whetted people’s appetite for more Marvel, I think. It really is interesting that they are building their television shows around more secondary/side-characters. It’s a nice way of adding both depth and some breadth to the universe. The real test will be when the movies pick back up with these characters- seeing who or what comes with them from the small screen. It will also be interesting to see these particular characters in the hands of creators that are not the Russo brothers, who have shepherded these characters through their last four movies.

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“Just a Case of the Mondays”

Posted on February 2, 2021 by awtraughber

Lots on my mind today as I think about classes and meetings and next week’s chapel. I’m almost done with Root’s Congregation in a Secular Age. I have to admit, this trilogy is right up their with Smith’s Kingdom trilogy and O’Donovan’s Ethics as Theology trilogy. It affirms things for me while pushing me on to think differently about some key sociological things. There has been some real points of connection with the job that I love as well as the job that I’ve sort of inherited. And the implications for church are pretty spot-on, too, I think.

I got the first dose of the Moderna vaccine yesterday. The state recently opened it up to teachers. On one level, I’m a little surprised that I jumped at it as quickly as I did. But it’s been over a year since I’ve been to Tennessee (let alone Canada or Scotland, which will likely remain closed to travel for a while yet). Once in the system, things ran quite smoothly. I got back in four weeks for round two.

+ + + SPOILERS + + +

WandaVision on Disney+ finally kicked it up a notch this last week. Don’t get me wrong: I really enjoyed how well the leads played things in the style of old sitcoms. But the necessary first reveal (with many more to come) was made, and it’s enough to make you speculate even more. Rumor has it that things continue to get kicked up a notch with this week’s episode. Disney+ released a trailer, which is interesting to me as it definitely gives some things away (and yet, does it really?).

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Run to March

Posted on February 1, 2021 by awtraughber

Well, we’re now a month away from the season seven premiere of The Flash on the CW. Thanks to Our Current Moment, we’re actually getting the last few episodes of season six first. And that’s pretty much the ground that this trailer covers, I assume. Looks good. The current storyline really needs to end.

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The Demonic and The Divine

Posted on January 28, 2021 by awtraughber

I’m always impressed with how well C. S. Lewis can articulate truths about the human condition. It’s uncanny to me. I think it’s one big reason why I revisit his work, some of it often. And he does it without cluttering things up, which is a great gift for a writer to have. Consider his thoughts on human nature from “Letter 8″ in The Screwtape Letters”:

Humans are amphibians– half spirit and half animal . . . As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change.

This, he asserts, ties into what he calls the “Law of Undulation,” the “repeated return to a level of from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.” This law is at play, the master demon asserts, with “his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites…” Screwtape is convinced that the secret to their infernal success would be how to make use of this reality. It is here that he relates the key difference in the demonic view of humanity and the divine.

One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself– creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over.

A wonderful description of the nature of humanity (and therefore the nature of God Himself. And near the letter’s end we get one of Lewis’s best lines. When speaking of God, Screwtape says: “He cannot ravish, He can only woo.”