Consciousness, he says, is both “retentional” and “apprehensive”: we retain a past and we anticipate a future, which is precisely why my own consciousness eludes me.

What we need to counter spiritual dyschronometria and the fiction of nowhen Christianities is a renewed temporal awareness, a spiritual timekeeping that is attuned to the texture of history, the vicissitudes of life, and the tempo of the Spirit.

The visual metaphor is not neutral. The image of time as a line is an interpretation. The line is a measure of progress, leaving behind ignorance and naivete to achieve enlightenment and mastery. Onward and upward. The timeline, Daniel Rosenberg observes, “amplified conceptions of historical progress that were becoming popular at the time,” despite

The incarnation is the nexus of history and eternity.

If you want to transcend time, build friendships across generations. Though you can’t stand outside your season, you can hear from those who’ve lived through such seasons.

I’m thinking of a kind of temporal disorientation that is unrecognized because it’s buried and hidden by the illusion of being above the fray, immune to history, surfing time rather than being immersed and battered by its waves.

Appeals to God’s actions in history are not invoked in a spirit of “golden-age-ism”; Eden is never celebrated as our destination. Our pilgrimage is not an Odyssean return. We are pulled toward a home we’ve never visited.10 We are oriented to what is coming, not what has been.

In the feast of Christ the King we are reminded that the crucified God ascended to a throne while bearing his scars.

Daniel Weidner has said, speaking about the theologian Paul Tillich, kairos means “every moment might be the small gate through which the messiah will enter.”18