Space Enough, and Time

One of the reasons I am drawn to a consideration of moving “from one world to the next” is because I spend a good deal of time talking with students who are making their own transition from one world to the next.  Just this week I was able to check in with many students who were making final and major decisions about what schools they will attend in the fall.  And so, to borrow a phrase, I get to stand at a kind of “thin space” between two parts of life.  Their stories are a reminder that I stand in my own space between worlds.  The question, of course, is what we will carry with us.

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A couple of days ago I found myself praying with my students about the provisions of God.  “Provisions” is an odd word, really.  One we often have a sense of without thinking too much about.  It’s also a word that Wendell Berry takes some time to unpack in “The Thought of Limits in a Prodigal Age.”  As he speaks of what it means to consider living a “limited” life while the world around us blindly expects something limitless, Berry asserts that provision is “being attentively and responsibly present in the present.”  He goes on to say that

We do not, for example, love our children because of their potential to become well-trained workers in a future economy.  We love them because we are alive to them in this present moment, which is the only time when we and they are alive.  This love implicates in a present need to provide: to be living a responsible life, which is to say a responsible economic life.

Which doesn’t sound very Romantic, for sure.  But part of what Berry seems to argue for regularly is an attention to what is right in front of you while remaining mindful of a greater, divine horizon.  Berry continues:

Provision, I think, is never more than caring properly for the good that you have, including your own life.  As it relates to the future, provision does only what our oldest, longest experience tells us to do.  We must continuously attend to our need for food, clothing, and shelter.  We must care for the land, care for the forest, plant trees, plant gardens and crops, see that brood animals are bred, keep the house and the household intact.  We must teach the children.  But provision does not foresee, predict, project, or theorize about the future.  Provision instructs us to renew the roof of our house, not to shelter us when we are old– we may die or the world may end before we are old– but so we may live under a sound roof now.  Provision merely accepts the chances we must take with the weather, mortality, fallibility.  Perhaps the wisest of the old sayings is “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”  Provision accepts, next, the important of diversity.  Perhaps the next-wisest saying is “Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.”  When the bad, worse, or worst possibility presents itself, provision only continues to take the best possible care of what we have, or of what we have left.

This is a kind of living that we do just below our level of consciousness, often.  And yet it is something that maybe we aren’t learning to do all that well anymore.  One reason might be because of our obsessional with disposable living.  With that might be a twisted version of the second wise saying: our multiple baskets exists as ways of “hedging our bets” in ways that actually work against what is good and true.

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Why the picture of lembas from The Lord of the Rings?  I guess because it is the perfect example of a provisional gift.  It is something simple: bread.  And it is something profound: bread that will last a long while and strengthen you well for your journey.  And it requires care and economy, because once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Also, if it hadn’t been lembas, it would have been some depressing screenshot from the cinematic version of The Road, a story all about provision.

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Perhaps we would do well at this time in the Story to remember the connection between provision and Providence.

(image from the University of Leicester)

At the begin of Paul Auster’s apocalyptic In the Country of Last Things, the narrator makes a significant observation:

That is perhaps the greatest problem of all.  Life as we know it has ended, and yet no one is able to grasp what has taken its place.  Those of us who were brought up somewhere else, or who are old enough to remember a world different from this one, find it an enormous struggle just to keep up from one day to the next.  I am not talking only of hardships.  Faced with the most ordinary occurrence, you no longer know how to act, and because you cannot act, you find yourself unable to think.  The brain is a muddle.  All around you one change follows another, each day produces a new upheaval, the old assumptions are so much air and emptiness.  That is the dilemma.  On the one hand, you want to survive, to adapt, to make the best of things as they are.  But, on the other hand, to accomplish seems to entail killing off all those things that once made you think of yourself as human.

A few pages later, the narrator concludes:

What you must do, then, is to be prepared for anything.

The story, of course, gets more difficult from there.

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In his grossly under-appreciated work, The End of Absence, journalist Michael Harris asserts something similar, perhaps a tad bit less apocalyptic, but nonetheless revealing.  As he reflects on advances in technology, Harris is mindful that people of a certain again are able to recall both life before and after the digital divide of the last twenty years.  After reminding the reader of the 20th century techno-cultural prophet Marshall McLuhan, Harris writes of a “profound wreckage” that our new “medium” has wrought.  He continues:

As we embrace a technology’s gifts, we usually fail to consider what they ask from us in return– the subtle, hardly noticeable payments we make in exchange for their marvelous service.  We don’t notice, for example, that the gaps in our schedules have disappeared because we’re too busy delighting in the amusements that fill them . . . Why would we bother to register the end of solitude, of ignorance, of lack?  Why would we care than an absence has disappeared?

Harris’s wreckage is more hopeful than Auster’s narrator.  He continues:

. . . if we work hard enough to understand this massive game changer, and the name the parts of the new game we want to go along with and the parts we don’t, can we then pack along some critical aspect of our earlier lives that these technologies would otherwise strip from us?  Or will we forget forever the value of that lack and instead see only a collection of gains?  It’s hard to remember what we loved about absence; we never ask for our deprivation back . . .

If we’re the last people in history to know life before the Internet, we are also the only ones who will ever speak, as it were, both languages.

Because of this, Harris asserts that we should ask two key questions moving forward into whatever is next:  what will we carry forward? and what worthy things might we thoughtlessly leave behind?

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One thing I remember from some of my “philosophy of religion” studies in seminary was a quote from Anthony Thiselton that has long been lodged in my brain.  If I remember it correctly, Thiselton one time asserted that “history reminds us of what is possible; fiction reminds us of what is essential.”  I remember thinking the saying odd, like he had gotten the two things confused.  But I think the statement is true.  And now, as much or more than ever, we are living at a time where fiction and history, where what is possible and what is essential, are inextricably linked.

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Perhaps there are three kinds of people living today: those who have not heard of the Benedict Option, those who find the Benedict Option an utter necessity, and those who think that the Benedict Option is utter hogwash.  It can be an interesting Rorschach test.  The Benedict Option as articulated by Rod Dreher, of course, is often misconstrued as an over-reaction to our current historical moment, as a call to “head for the hills” because Christians have lost their say in what is vital to our culture.  You don’t have to ascribe to this Option (or any of the myriad others named after whatever philosopher or thinker strikes your fancy) to realize, to understand that things have changed/are changing.  you can see it in Kinneman and Lyon’s Good Faith or in Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed.  Every end of the political spectrum feels like everything is in danger right now.  And every end of the spectrum is, in some way, correct.

The question is, how do we move through this?  I’ve been asking myself that for some time, most recently in my reflections around Radner’s A Time to Keep.  I would like to think that mine is a particularly Christian seeking and asking (though I sometimes find glimmers of hope and despair in other places, too).  A lot of my reading has been about trying to find some way through, knowing that around has never really been an option.  This has been brought to mind again recently because of life circumstance as well as the books I continue to read and the conversations I continue to long for.

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So I thought I’d start a thread for this.  Whether it’s Wendell Berry or Henri Nouwen, Alan Jacobs or James K. A. Smith, Tolkien or Lewis or Chesterton, my students or my family or my friends, they all connect somehow to this thread for things found and lost and found again.

How do you “prepare for anything” in a world that’s been changing for longer than you’ve known it?  And how do you hold on to and articulate unchanging truth in a world moving so quickly that the passing shadows end up chasing one another?  How do you, as Harris asserts, know what to carry forward without leaving worthy things accidentally behind?

(image from rottentomatoes.com, because Edgar Wright’s The World’s End is brilliant and deserves mention every time possible)