I want to return to the trajectory of some of that, and explore some ideas about "time travel".
Bringing up the question of "time travel" immediately will put some of my readers onto the path of Doctor Who and the TARDIS. As tempting as it may be, that's not where I'm headed.
While "time travel" is a phrase that may evoke the image of the TARDIS or Marty McFly and Doc Brown, those sorts of (to the uninitiated, at least) "outlandish" ideas of moving through space is accompanied by outlandish characters in outlandish modes of transport are most certainly not what I want to talk about.
The cultural niche known as steampunk, where depictions of technology, culture and society is combined with Victorian-era inflections, is one case study that betrays something in a small though nonetheless considerable proportion of the populace. It's the sense that, somehow, the mantra of "being in the now" is more observed in the breach than the observance. Things, however present they are before us in the present, seem to have a bad habit of catapulting us to times past or even to dreams of a future life. Moreover, this occurs even when one is fully engaged in the things or people of the present.
This has been driven home to me lately in observing how people handle the death of a loved one.
Sure, I know how much we protest to being philosophically materialist fundamentalists -- the idea that things here and now matter more than things from then and there. But I don't believe we really believe it.
Witness the ability of things to transport us to a different place and time in the past -- whether it is to a moment or a particular experience. A thing, however mundane, is not merely a concrete signifier of the present moment. The mere sight of certain objects (but especially the touch of them) can catapult us back to other moments in the past, whether it be an event, encounter or person long buried in the recesses of our memory.
This is why we hang on to objects of loved ones after they die. It's why those objects mean so much to us, and why the absence of those objects makes us feel cut off from the past and from the people we have lost. I know this personally to be true, because it's why I have certain objects from my great-grandparents' home. In particular, I hold very dear a prized clock that I remember my grandfather winding and rewinding every week. I remember its chimes (even though Kendra finds them way too eerie) and I'm taken back in time just by seeing it.
I wonder what those objects will be to generations that come after us.
The smartphone has become the sacrament (James KA Smith calls it the "liturgical instrument") of the postmodern city. More specifically, it is the one concrete site where one has a concentrated experience of the forces circulating through contemporary urban life. But the smartphone is so very hostile to memory. Indeed, all of our life in the postmodern context seems to be violent toward memory. Looking at my email list on my iPhone, I realize that only certain kinds of conversations are stored -- details of even the most-recent past are lost nearly as soon as they appear. "Now" is a time that seems cutoff from anything that has come before it. "Now" is a slave-driver that destroys "then", and nowhere is this more evident than in our social networking. Make no doubt about it, the Web is decaying. While we might expect that our smartphones and our social networking sites would be the perfect storehouse of every present "now", there's good reason to believe that what they actually do is lose information, even as recently as a year after the event -- whether its through our own manual deletion of that event (I did that just last night) or though some other means.
When all of life is disposable, what's left for memory? When we've so commodified time that we "live in the moment", what does that make for our past?
We presume that this rendering of life into manageable micro-units along a "timeline" helps us live life the way we want to live it, in the here and now, in way that liberates us from the domination of traditional communal belongings. And while I get it -- Psalm 92 says that memories are marked by "emptiness and pain" and even Shakespeare knew a thing or two about "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" -- I see the never-ending production of something new as the enslavement of time that claims to "take our minds off" that pain. When in reality the pain is only intensified because it loses the context in which that pain is given its meaning.
I wonder whether the reason we're not sure how to think theologically about time is because we've lost the vocabulary of "beauty". Pope John Paul II, in his 1999 Letter to Artists, said that the universal of Beauty, that most material and experiential of universals, is something that, once experienced, could also stir a dreaming of a future and a nostalgia for God.
This inability to find beauty in every moment in life -- even those of pain that we would love to delete from our timelines -- is at its heart a moment of discipleship. On the one hand, this restlessness at the point of encounter can be a sign that one has crossed paths with Beauty, a universal which the Christian tradition has taken to be one of the signposts towards God. At the same time, however, the risk of this nostalgia or dreaming taking one away from the present can be a moment for the demon of acedia to operate.
There's an element of "homesickness" to every experience of the past. One of my favorite paintings is that of Rene Margritte, "Homesickness":
There are those times and places that so stir our hearts that we keep looking backward for them, in this wistful way of recapturing the past. Its a very visceral yearning, one in which we're kept safe about by the Lion. In moments when we re-experience the past, we know that "home" isn't where we are. It's someplace else. That "someplace else" we Christians have come to narrate in a particular way: "We are are seeking the city that is to come" (Hebrews 13.14). Our hearts really are restless, and they know only one rest: In God (Augustine's Confessions rightly end with a deep meditation on time for just that reason).
But how many of us, in our re-creation that is the past, experience something less than holy? How many of us find ourselves paralyzed at this sense of longing -- particularly of the vice of acedia? As RJ Snell wrote in his Acedia and Its Discontents, this longing for another place can a vice-ridden restlessness when it becomes a longing for a utopia, and a neglect of where we are now. Those who have lived in that time and place that they long for may protest that the longing is anything but utopic, but as Michel de Certeau reminds us in his Practice of Everyday Life, our worlds always shift to such an extent that the place we thought was there never really remains. Thus, even when we have had a real contact with that other place and time, that longing can nonetheless still be the result of the vice of acedia, whispering to us to abandon all we have and where we are.
This is why I think any Christian theology of time begins at that time and place where heaven and earth meet again in Jesus Christ: At the eucharistic table. At that table, we learn what it means to long for that time and place that gives grounding to our current longings. At that table, we learn to gather (to-gether) as a people who long for a Kingdom in which every tear for every ache is wiped away. Without that eschaton, there is no chronos. The vice of acedia is only resisted in the incarnational experience of life with Jesus.
The ultimate orientation of the present, then, is not simply toward reexperiencing the past. It is toward remembering the future. The extent to which we experience Beauty in the objects of the world -- in things like clocks passed down to us from those who have gone before -- is the extent to which our homesickness finds its meaning in things like bread and wine. Only in a deeper engagement with the time that we call "now" by grounding it in the time that we call "then", can we overcome the vices of acedia and the lack of memory that names postmodern time.