Christchurch Parish News, February 2019
As we prepare for a later Lent, I ask what it means for us to live faithfully in the here and now.
This year, Easter is almost as late as it can be. Falling at the end of April, we have to wait until the second Sunday in March for Lent to begin. So what to make of this unusually extended period of what we might call ‘in-between time’ that will last for all of February and into early March?
The liturgical calendar chooses to hurry us forward spiritually, referring to each Sunday as being the X Sunday before Lent. In doing so, however, it risks encouraging us to adopt further the habit of always looking to the horizon, rather than focussing on the here and now.
Being present
We all know, being present in the moment is one of the hardest things in life—our minds are always wandering off, not just to different places but also to different times—it’s as if there’s a deep-seated aversion within us to being actually where we find ourselves. We’re always wanting to be elsewhere, anywhere but right here, right now.
For example, when we’re at school, in any given term, we’re always looking back to the holidays just past or to the holidays to come. The start and end dates bookend the term, marking the limits of what lies between. Or think of work. Whilst we don’t normally speak about being ‘in-between’ the start and the end of a particular period of employment, when we lose our job and before we find another, we describe ourselves as being ‘in-between jobs’. With both education and employment, it’s what lies either side which defines the limits, the beginning and end, of the period in-between.
Living in-between
With this as our springboard, to what degree can we think of the whole of our lives as being lived ‘in-between’ in some way? In some senses, the atheist would find this the more natural way to think, believing that we live in-between two moments of nothingness, and that our lives are but a brief period of consciousness with no before or after.
But from a Christian perspective, can we we view our lives as being lived ‘in-between’? And if so, how? The Bible speaks of God knowing Jeremiah before he was created: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you’ (Jer 1:5). In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul speaks of God choosing ‘us in Christ before the foundation of the world’ (Eph 1:4). There are many such passages in the Scriptures, which, taken together, raises some interesting questions. Is the Bible saying that in the eyes of God, we have some form of identity that pre-exists our conception? Or are they deliberate, rhetorical exaggerations, chosen in order to express something, which, whilst logically impossible, nonetheless stresses God’s sovereignty and His unstinting, steadfast love?
These are difficult questions to answer and not surprisingly both Scripture and tradition prove to be on more confident ground when talking about the period after we die. Whilst there is far from consensus as to its exact nature and sequence, the idea of there being a period after the end of our lives—when having died, we are both known and enter into the presence of our loving God—is one of the core hopes of our faith rooted in Jesus Christ.
Nevertheless, it’s not entirely obvious as to how to keep this in mind on a day-to-day basis. So it’s worth asking what can help us reframe this period—lying in-between the moment of our conception and the moment we die—as being, at its most fundamental level, the time in-between when we are first known by God and when we enter fully into his presence.
The church calendar tries its hardest to help but it doesn’t always succeed, especially during these periods of Ordinary Time, such as the one we have this month. Such periods tend to be overlooked in our temptation to either look back or rush ahead. But this in-between period is the place and time that we have right now to live our lives.
Given this, I want to draw our attention to two particular narratives from the Bible and one overarching one which are very helpful in shaping our imaginations when it comes to living in-between.
The wilderness years
Firstly, the Wilderness. After 400 years in Egypt, Moses leads the Israelites across the Red Sea to freedom in the Promised Land. Only, it doesn’t quite happen like that. There is a period of some 40 years in-between their dramatic departure and eventual arrival—40 years of being in-between slavery and freedom as they journey through the wilderness.
And not everybody makes it. Many don’t, in fact. The reason for this that the story gives is that they did not trust God, displaying this mistrust in a variety of ways: asking for food and water, for example, and being afraid of what awaited them when they entered the Promised Land. All very human responses to the uncertainties of the in-between. They even find themselves looking back longingly to how things were in Egypt, when they had cucumbers to eat!
Often, God’s response to their lack of trust seems very harsh. It’s as if the importance of holiness, which can only be lived in the here and now, is so high that the cost has to be likewise. Even Moses, who leads them all the way through the wilderness, is not destined to set foot in the Promised Land, dying just before the Israelites’ entry. By contrast, Joshua’s bravery and confidence, however, means that he does get to enter.
As such, one of the key points this story teaches us is how our actions and behaviour during the in-between period can affect the period that follows. And this is so often true. It’s how we conduct ourselves when we are in extremis, in a period that is exceptional and of relatively short duration when compared to what follows, that shapes the period that comes afterwards, in ways that are hard to identify at the time but which become clearer in retrospect. It’s one of the reasons why living in the moment is so important. It can be of great consequence long-term.
But the in-between period can often be emotionally very intense and physically demanding, often because it can be a highly disorientating time. This was certainly the case for the Israelites. In Egypt, slavery, for all its ills, offered at least some certainty. But on their road to freedom through the wilderness, they were literally disorientated, often going round and round in circles. Living in-between can often feel like this, as we’re unclear as to how this will all come to a conclusion. Amidst the disorientating flux, we yearn for certainty. Even if that means wanting to return to what has previously enslaved us.
A second story of disorientating in-betweenness from the Bible is that of the Exile in the 6th century BC, when, as the story goes, the LORD sent the people of God into Babylon as a consequence for their behaviour. The time spent in a foreign land was a disorientating, upsetting experience. Psalm 137 is one the most famous articulations of this anguish. It begins, ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion’.
Eventually, the in-between experience of exile was brought to an end by King Cyrus of Persia and the Israelites were allowed to return to Israel. But this in-between time of exile proved to be defining for the generations that followed—it is thought that much of what we call our Old Testament was given its current shape around this time. And it continued to have a hold on the imagination of the people of God right up to the time of Jesus.
In our own time, too, some are noting that the experience of exile is an increasingly common one. Many feel today that we have entered a period in which we no longer feel at home. But interpreting our time as a kind of exile, as an in-between time in other words, reminds us that we’re to trust that this time will eventually be brought to an end and that one day we will be able to return ‘home’. In this, the story of the exile reassures us that under the sovereignty of God, in-between times don’t last forever.
Between the lines
Which brings us to the overarching narrative that the Bible tells, one which further encourages us to think of our lives as being a period that is characterised by in-betweenness. The biblical story starts and ends with garden images. It begins in the Garden of Eden (Genesis) and ends with the New Jerusalem, a garden city, which has come down to earth (Revelation). This symbolically represents the re-fusion of our plane of existence with God’s—something Paul talks about, too, at the beginning of the letter to the Ephesians. From the throne of God and of the Lamb (Jesus) that lies at the heart of the New Jerusalem comes the river which flows in-between (!) the tree of life that stands on its banks, the leaves of which are born forth on the water of life ‘for the healing of the nations’ (Rev 22:1-2).
By beginning and ending in this way, the Bible tells an ‘in-between’ story. Whilst it may be unfamiliar to speak of our own lives as being lived in-between, the story told by the Bible is an overarching one, with a period both before and after, with the latter extending into a future without limit.
An invitation
As such, the Bible is inviting us to understand our lives as being lived in-between: that we and all of creation begin our story united to God (the Garden of Eden); we turn away and pursue our own path (eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil); we make a mess of our freedom (the story of the twelve tribes of Israel); we can’t save ourselves for the mess is too big and so God responds out of love (Jesus’ incarnation); He redeems us (Jesus’ death on the cross); the new creation begins (Jesus’ resurrection); and finally when we die, we return to being united with God (heaven), where we await the fulfilment of the new creation when all will be brought into union with the resurrection of the cosmos (the new heavens and the new earth).
There are many bumps in the road that this story speaks of, of course. But keeping an eye on the big picture helps because if we fall into the trap of thinking that our now is not an in-between moment but all that there is, it can overwhelm us and we can start to live in ways that are distractedly short-term in character. By contrast, holiness usually involves some form of sacrifice. As such, when we think that the ‘now’ of any given period of time is all that there is and all that there ever will be, we can end up living by different criteria—ones that are usually self-centred and far from conducive to our spiritual flourishing.
The power of the present
So, life during in-between times calls us to attend to how we live in the here and now. Not simply so that we are present in the moment, but also so that we become shaped to become the kind of people who will be at home in the age that awaits us.
One of the key ways we can learn to do this is by reading the stories of our tradition that speak of Wilderness and Exile. These stories teach us that we’re facing nothing new. They show us how our forebears lived in-between, in times of uncertainty and instability, both when they got it right and when they got it wrong. We can learn from these stories and allow them to shape us in the present.
As we do, we increasingly come to understand that all of our lives are lived ‘in-between’ and that our union with God, which in some mysterious way predates our creation, is what awaits us when we die. For now, we simply live in-between.