A Traveler’s Guide to the Journey through the Space that is Time
A Review of James K.A. Smith’s How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now
by Emily Chambers Sharpe
208 pp., hardcover, $24.99
September 2022
Brazos Press
ISBN: 9781587435232
I read James K.A. Smith’s latest work in a season of many transitions. My family moved into a new house, a new school year started for my children and my husband who teaches, and I faced an upcoming change in my role at work. Those transitions were just the surface waters of an ocean of interpersonal, spiritual, and emotional ecosystems. I did not expect the Calvin University philosopher’s How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now to resonate so clearly with me.
It helps that Smith’s style is so inviting. To read this book is to step into philosophy through vignettes in Smith’s own life, and to consider ideas tied to Christian scripture and Americana music lyrics. Smith invites us to inhabit time, and maps an accessible route to immense concepts. In fact, his opening prose brings a reader close to his own experience with this:
When I didn’t know where else to turn; when the cloud of depression had enveloped me and my loved ones; when all I seemed to do was rage, my shouts like some misguided attempt at sonar location from the fog; when the thoughts of ending it all became too frequent—then, finally, humbled if not humiliated, I entered the counselor’s office. I didn’t know what to ask.
He then describes drawing a map of his childhood home, a therapeutic exercise. He relates space and time and diagnoses a disorientation, particularly for Christians, of being “no when.” Throughout the book, he offers ways of spiritual timekeeping, being both of and within the flow of time, instead of seeing ourselves as “wholly governed by timeless principles, unchanging convictions, expressing an idealism that assumes (we) are wholly governed by eternal ideas untainted by history.”
[Smith] offers ways of spiritual timekeeping, being both of and within the flow of time.
To punctuate the ideas and philosophies in this map of spiritual timekeeping, Smith includes three meditations from Ecclesiastes. These meditations shift voice and tone. Smith moves from informal, TED-talk style teaching into homily. This structural choice beckons the reader to reorient within the pages, at one point as someone reading, thinking, and learning, and then as a worshiper in a pew.
These shifts of writer and reader underscore Smith’s ideas about seasonality and discernment, which Smith calls “an effort at orientation.” Smith leads us to understand that “time is not flat (so) God doesn’t always sound the same.” We experience time and God through seasons. In different seasons, we can orient ourselves afresh, and experience depth and new perspective on God.
In the transitions I faced as summer turned to fall, I needed a reminder to see God, to dare to hope that in busy-ness and messiness, there might be an unrushed moment, and in that moment, I might see what and who God is. Smith’s craft is evident in the creative ways that he weaves philosophy, theology, and personal stories. To let myself read philosophy and be “unhurried” as Smith says, felt like a discipline of hope in a chaotic moment. That hope is a worthy pursuit, and this book a recommended map for the journey.
Vita Poetica Interviews Editor Emily Chambers Sharpe lives in Charlotte, NC, with her husband, three young sons, and the best dog in the world. Through her day job, she supports global health projects to consider the ways that gender and social norms are a driver and a barrier to improved health. Emily processes big ideas, feelings, revelation, and connections to God, nature, and others through writing, music, and sometimes other forms of art. She particularly enjoys connecting with creative communities locally and online.
