Chronogeography

A couple weeks ago I wrote a paper on medieval cartography.

It's more exciting than it sounds, believe me.

On medieval maps, time and space were portrayed as interconnected: the here and now, the there and then, etc. Past, present, and future, too, were all interrelated and intertwined.

It really is a beautiful view of time, and one that I think we'd do well to incorporate more into our everyday thinking.

Because I'm not really sure we're built for the here/now. In our worries we attempt to exercise control over the future. We revisit the past and think of what could have been, over and over, though we know we're chipping at a stone that cannot be broken.

I think part of it might stem from a type of inferiority complex - we love fighting with eternity because it makes us feel the slightest bit more infinite.

But i think our preoccupation with the future/past (the 'there') denotes an intense detachment from the here/now. In thinking of what we could have done or will do better or differently, we ignore the present and forget that the only things that give us some amount of control over the future are our choices here and now. We try to get there without starting here.

And the problem is that it's really hard for us just to be - in the here and now. The present is, to borrow a term from Derrida that I don't actually understand all that well, 'always/already.' We view the present in retrospect, and in that sense the present for us is ephemeral. I think this 'impossibility' of attaining the present spurs us to live in the past and the future, because it's easier that way.

But I don't actually think it's impossible to live in the present, it just requires giving up our false sense of control.

When God said 'I am', it meant that he dwells in the ever-present. We were and will be but God is.

That, to me, signals that the only way we'll really ever be is in God, because our 'human condition' by itself doesn't really allow that.

Something Paul Young wrote in The Shack (which I finally read this weekend) explains it much better:

'When I dwell with you, I do so in the present - I live in the present. Not the past, although much can be remembered and learned by looking back, but only for a visit, not an extended stay. And for sure, I do not dwell in the future you visualize or imagine...do you realize that your imagination of the future, which is almost always dictated by fear of some kind, rarely, if ever, pictures me there with you?' (142)

He goes on to flesh out what our preoccupations mean in respect to how we view God,

'The person who lives by their fears will not find freedom in my love...To the degree that those fears have a place in your life, you neither believe that I am good nor know deep in your heart that I love you' (142)

Our detachment from the present is thus a detachment from God.

And if I look back in my life, I see that the times I've really felt present, really felt here, are when I gave up my regrets about the past and my false sense of control over the future and simply trusted.

Because in reality, that's all we have the power to do.