Reclaiming Time

Spring was my favorite season until I moved to New England. As I type, in mid-April, it is snowing outside my window. While I have come to expect the temperamental mood swings of this so-called “spring” over the past eighteen years, it still unmoors me. I watch the newly sprouted purple crocuses get completely covered in white, incremental markers of growth buried. 

I place myself in time because every day for the past 15 months (and, to be honest, the last 6 years) I’ve felt like a pinball, rocketing forward, spun haphazardly, and frequently dumped straight down into the gutter. No discernible, rational trajectory, no amount of skill that can outmaneuver the chaos. Any new life killed by harsh regression.

This feeling about our particular moment in time can seem unique – held captive as we are by a recency bias that is nearly impossible to shake. Here, however, is where my teachers enter. As a Catholic theological ethicist in the liberative tradition, I am irrevocably shaped by thinkers such as Gustavo Gutiérrez (d. 2024) and Johann Baptist Metz (d. 2019). Deeply faithful men from opposite sides of the world who sought to reclaim time for the concrete liberation of the poor. 

Theological time is often given short shrift in eras when the world’s pressing demands are all too real. Yet it is only in this frame that I find any sort of scrappy, gritty, propulsive hope – a “hope at work in the dark,” as Austin Channing Brown puts it. In liberation theology, time is a tangible marker of God’s irruption into history, into the materiality of fleshy, flawed, and flourishing bodies.

A sudden bursting in from without, Gutiérrez reminds us, “To the eyes of Christians the incarnation is the irruption of God into human history: an incarnation into littleness and service in the midst of overbearing power exercised by the mighty of this world; an irruption that smells of the stable.” God does not come to vanquish, sword in hand, but instead with simple gifts to serve – to feed the many from limited resources, to wash the feet of those who may ultimately betray us, to offer healing touch to the suffering before us, and to sacrifice all for the love of our friends and our world.

“History is no longer as it was for the Greeks, an anamnesis, a remembrance. It is rather a thrust into the future.”[1]
– Gustavo Gutiérrez, OP 

It is here that the enfleshed God gets to work: in a time, in a body, with particular people. As created in God’s image, we too are “thrust into the future” – a future where late-stage capitalism has seemingly reached its nadir in omnipresent AI bots, where powerlessness is pervasive, and oppression in its insidious forms accelerates daily. To reject such forces feels impossible. Yet within theological time, I can see God at work among God’s people, taking action toward a new society yet to be built, as Gutiérrez puts it. Not in an amorphous hope for a distant, inaccessible future, but in small, consistent, creative, resistant, and relational acts in the here and now. 

“But there is another way to remember: dangerous memories, memories that challenge. These are memories in which earlier experiences flare up and unleash new dangerous insights for the present.”[2]
– Johann Baptist Metz 

Reclaiming time in this way also reclaims our shared history, our ancestors, and our ultimate power. Within the “dangerous memory” of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, Metz reminds us that we are not condemned to an anonymous, mechanized, unrooted, bourgeois future, but rather destined for a radically different end. Our memories, rooted in time and history, have a character of justice and embodied hope yet to be ultimately fulfilled but already present and active.

In The End of Theological Education, Ted A. Smith warns that our institutions have forgotten these Gospel lessons and that, in our current moment of internal, disciplinary crisis and myriad external pressures, they are apt to “run out of meaning before they run out of money.”[3] As such, reclaiming theological time is not a solo act. It is mandatory that our leading formational sites understand their role not as cultivating an eschatological promise but as co-actors in concrete, Jesus-led kenotic service. When unmoored from time, our institutions fail to meet this call. They misplace social responsibility outside their doors, cede power before being challenged, and silence their prophetic voice at the altar of the endowment. Reclaiming time may indeed be “dangerous” to what exists, but what is lost when we are already unable (or unwilling) to meet this moment?

As I finish this writing, it is the end of May. The first blooms have come and gone; the lilacs have peaked, and new shoots of neon green sprout every day. I stand, rooted in the fresh, fecund earth, and with Metz, “I somehow breathe air that blows from the end of time.”

Adelante.

[1] Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation, Chapter 11.

[2] Metz, Faith in History and Society, 105.

[3] Ted A. Smith, The End of Theological Education (Series: Theological Education between the Times), 96.