Come to me
Walk with me
Learn the rhythms of my grace
Come to me
I have all you need
Learn to rest even while you are awake
Are you tired?
Are you worried?
Worn out from the day?
Have you been in a hurry?
I will slow the pace.
Come to me
Walk with me
Learn the rhythms of my grace
“Come to Me” by Rain for Roots featuring Sandra McCracken
These are the lyrics that I often begin my mornings with. Well not exactly begin my mornings with. My mornings begin with nursing a baby, making sure my “big kids” (ages 3 and 4) are dressed, and making sure I am somewhat presentable. Then at 8:30am, we begin our journey to preschool, which starts at 9 and is only a 5-minute drive away, but it takes us that long to all get in the car and get there on time. When we are all finally in the car, I put on a playlist, which I have entitled “Christian Kids.” It includes this song, “Come to Me” by Rain for Roots; sometimes, I intentionally make sure it is the first song we listen to as we pull out of the drive-way because I need reminding - reminding of Jesus’s call for the children to come to Him. I may be a Mom, but first and foremost I am a child of the Living God. I need reminding that His burden is easy and His yoke is light. I need to be lifted out of the metronome ticking of chronos time into the symphony that has been going on since before the dawn of time – the symphony of God’s love and benevolent care for His creation. I need to be drawn into the rhythms of His grace.
What do I mean by rhythms of grace? I mean God’s own presence breaking through into the here-and-now to comfort, guide and bring joy. I don’t just mean getting good things that I don’t deserve; although I am thankful for those gifts, for we know that “every good and perfect gift comes from above – from the Father of the Heavenly Lights” (James 1:17), but what I mean is bigger than that; it is God’s Spirit manifesting Himself unto us and ministering to us. In this article, I would like to explore what some of these rhythms of grace might be. How can we intentionally seek to encounter God – to set ourselves up to experience God’s in-breaking grace? However, before we can talk about these rhythms of grace, we need to address why it is so important for us to tune ourselves to these rhythms. We need to talk about the age in which we find ourselves.
There are many ways or lenses through which we could speak about our present time in history: they include such labels as post-industrial, post-colonial, post-Christendom, the age of anxiety, and so on, but the label or lens I prefer to use in this article is that of ‘secular.’ In the most basic sense, secular is the opposite of sacred; it refers to places or things or professions with no inherently sacred purpose. However the word has come to take on other meanings including this one proposed by James K. Smith in How (Not) to be Secular: secular as “areligious – neutral, un-biased, ‘objective’ – as in a ‘secular’ public square.”[1] This in turn has lead to secularism, “A doctrine …. that pushes for public institutions (schools, government, etc.) to be areligious.”[2] There are many who are skeptical of how “neutral” secularism is; as Stuart Murray says in his book Post-Christendom, secularism can be imperialistic, “imposing its views as powerfully as any religious tradition and intolerant towards any who challenge its assumptions.”[3]
So what has been lost as society has become increasingly secular? And what are some of the philosophical and cultural assumptions that might make courageously practicing rhythms of grace so important in our day and age? We will briefly look at three philosophical/worldview shifts:
1) the shift from “higher” times to flat time in how we regulate our years;
2) the shift from the porous to the buffered self in our view of how we relate to our world;and
3) the shift from a cosmos charged with the grandeur of God to life within the immanent frame.
After this more philosophical section we will return to the theme of rhythms of grace, and I will be giving some very specific examples of how families with young children (ages 0-4) might implement some of these rhythms along with resource suggestions to help them do so.
From Higher Times to Flat Chronos
In the medieval worldview, time was felt and regulated by the 4 seasons and by the Christian calendar. The Christian calendar, sometimes called the liturgical calendar, was filled with feast days as well as times of discipleship, fasting, and waiting (such as Advent and Lent). These rhythms of life gave meaning to the year. Smith, following Charles Taylor’s work, says,
In the premodern understanding, because ‘mundane’ or secular time is transcended by ‘higher’ time, there is an
accounting of time that is not merely linear or chronological. Higher times ‘introduce “warps” and seeming
inconsistencies in profane time-ordering. Events that were far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely
linked … Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of the Crucifixion than mid-summer’s day 1997.’”[4]
In our modern context, however, we have flattened time. Smith again says, “Our ‘encasing’ in secular time has changed this, and so we take our experience of time to be ‘natural’ (i.e., not a construal)… So nothing ‘higher’ impinges upon our calendars – only the tick-tock of chronos, and the self-imposed burdens of our ‘projects.’”[5] Our projects become the main driver of our time – a time that seems to be always ticking away, and there seems to never be enough time to get all the projects done. I know for me it is so easy to get swept away in the tyranny of the urgent and my to-do list, and there is very little in modern society that impinges upon my own chosen tyranny; most holidays are not the communal events they once were and there is not even pressure anymore to attend church on Sunday. We can all decide what we want to do and when we want to do it; there are very few culturally imposed constraints.
It seems, though, that humans cannot stand time to be completely flat and so we create our own new “higher times” in things like birthdays, black-Friday, and national holidays, and our lives predominately revolve around the academic calendar. We have to order our time somehow beyond just the ticking of a clock and the deadlines of our projects. It should be of no surprise that so many young adults struggle in their first “real jobs” because up until that point in their lives, their days and years have been marked by the academic calendar and rhythm of doing life, and then all of a sudden they are thrown into a different way of doing life; it is no wonder it is so unsettling for so many. Nevertheless, the academic calendar and our celebration of birthdays and national holidays hardly seem sufficient to satisfy our longing for purpose and meaning to be given to our years.
From Porous to Buffered
Besides flattening our time, another philosophical shift that impacts all of us is the shift from the porous self to the buffered self. In the medieval worldview, the “human agent was seen as porous … self is essentially vulnerable (and hence also ‘healable’). To be human is to be essentially open to an outside (whether benevolent or malevolent), open to blessing or curse, possession or grace.”[6] So, people used to see themselves as open. This led them to feel and behave as people connected to others, creation, and the Creator.
However, in contrast, the modern self “is a buffered self, insulated and isolated in its interiority, ‘giving its own autonomous order to its life.’”[7] Now we view ourselves as completely independent and freely able to do what we want, limited only by physical restraints and our own vision or talent. This buffered self is safe from spiritual forces (evil or good) and from accountability to a community, and they are above the rest of creation that is viewed as an economic resource to be used for human flourishing, which often translates into the rich getting richer.
This goes along with a shift from finding meaning in the world (the medieval worldview) to finding meaning in our minds. Although John Donne said, “No man is an island,” it seems we are pushed to act as if we are. The buffered self frames us as autonomous minds, who should no longer need to connect to creation, others or to God; we should be self-sufficient thinkers. And yet, it seems this social construct is not true to the reality of what it means to be human. We are embodied beings who are constantly searching for connections to others, to creation, to meaning, and yet, we do not want to admit our needs because there is so much pressure to be a buffered self. In order to participate in the rhythms of grace, we will have to become more porous again, which means leaving the safety and restraints of our autonomy.
From Charged with the Grandeur of God to the Immanent Frame
Lastly, in the medieval world, there were systems and connections that placed a person and gave meaning and purpose. There was the cosmos that reflected the order, glory, and mystery of God. To borrow a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the universe was “charged with the grandeur of God.”[8] Now we live in what is called the “Immanent Frame: A constructed social space that frames our lives entirely within a natural (rather than supernatural) order.”[9] The broader culture is choosing to focus only on what can be seen, touched, tasted, heard, felt, tested and registered; it is focused on the material.
Things are not completely hopeless, though. Smith aptly states the following:
We now inhabit this self-sufficient immanent order, even if we believe in transcendence. Indeed, [Charles]
Taylor emphasizes the ubiquity of the immanent frame: it is ‘common to all of us in the modern West.’ So
the question isn’t whether we inhabit the immanent frame, but how. Some inhabit it as a closed frame with a
brass ceiling; others inhabit it as an open frame with skylights open to transcendence.[10]
This shift in worldview is illustrated well by looking at the contrasting ideas of cosmos verses space or universe. Smith summarizes this shift as “the move of spontaneously imagining our cosmic environment as an ordered, layered, hierarchical, shepherded place to spontaneously imagining our cosmic environment as an infinite, cavernous, anonymous space.”[11] This illustrates the larger philosophical shift that led us away from a world in which a good God is ordering and over all to a purely scientific view of the world.
Sometimes just having words or phrases to define our present age can help us to know if that reality is in line with a Biblical worldview or not. It is easy to be swept up in cultural presumptions; one must take a step outside of them in order to reflect upon them. In looking at the flattening of time, buffered self, and immanent frame, it is clear that in our present age there is little room for the transcendent or Transcendent. These are just some examples of what Taylor labels “Closed World Structures,”[12] and why faith in the modern age can be so difficult. Besides these cultural forces as work, we are also limited to our minds or put another way, we are stuck in reflection. Many Christians I know think that it is enough to think the right things about God, Jesus, and other theological issues, but Jesus did not call people to think the right things, but rather to follow Him. Faith is not so much a work of the mind, but of the action and experience. Soren Keirkegaard called our present age the age of reflection, and he says this about it, “The single individual (however well-intentioned many of them are, however much energy they might have if they could ever come to use it) has not fomented enough passion in himself to tear himself out of the web of reflection and the seductive ambiguity of reflection.”[13]
If we are to live into a Biblical transformative worldview and teach our children the same, then we must tear ourselves away from the web of mere reflection and be intentional about putting in skylights, otherwise we will again and again lose grasp of what is or could be outside the frame. This is why setting our hearts to the rhythms of grace is so important – even vital to faithful existence for Jesus followers today. Rhythms of grace open us up to experience God in the here-and-now. These rhythms include a recovery of the Christian calendar, Sabbath, and daily prayers. Examples of how to implement these practices, especially for families with young children, will be given. (Click here to go to part 2).
[1] James K. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 142.
[2] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 142.
[3] Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World, Second Edition, (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 173.
[4] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 34.
[5] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 34.
[6] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 29.
[7] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 29.
[8] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” accessed December 5, 2019. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur.
[9] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 141.
[10]Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 93.
[11] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 70.
[12] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 140.
[13] Soren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age - A Literary Review, edited and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: PUP, 1978), 69.
What do I mean by rhythms of grace? I mean God’s own presence breaking through into the here-and-now to comfort, guide and bring joy. I don’t just mean getting good things that I don’t deserve; although I am thankful for those gifts, for we know that “every good and perfect gift comes from above – from the Father of the Heavenly Lights” (James 1:17), but what I mean is bigger than that; it is God’s Spirit manifesting Himself unto us and ministering to us. In this article, I would like to explore what some of these rhythms of grace might be. How can we intentionally seek to encounter God – to set ourselves up to experience God’s in-breaking grace? However, before we can talk about these rhythms of grace, we need to address why it is so important for us to tune ourselves to these rhythms. We need to talk about the age in which we find ourselves.
There are many ways or lenses through which we could speak about our present time in history: they include such labels as post-industrial, post-colonial, post-Christendom, the age of anxiety, and so on, but the label or lens I prefer to use in this article is that of ‘secular.’ In the most basic sense, secular is the opposite of sacred; it refers to places or things or professions with no inherently sacred purpose. However the word has come to take on other meanings including this one proposed by James K. Smith in How (Not) to be Secular: secular as “areligious – neutral, un-biased, ‘objective’ – as in a ‘secular’ public square.”[1] This in turn has lead to secularism, “A doctrine …. that pushes for public institutions (schools, government, etc.) to be areligious.”[2] There are many who are skeptical of how “neutral” secularism is; as Stuart Murray says in his book Post-Christendom, secularism can be imperialistic, “imposing its views as powerfully as any religious tradition and intolerant towards any who challenge its assumptions.”[3]
So what has been lost as society has become increasingly secular? And what are some of the philosophical and cultural assumptions that might make courageously practicing rhythms of grace so important in our day and age? We will briefly look at three philosophical/worldview shifts:
1) the shift from “higher” times to flat time in how we regulate our years;
2) the shift from the porous to the buffered self in our view of how we relate to our world;and
3) the shift from a cosmos charged with the grandeur of God to life within the immanent frame.
After this more philosophical section we will return to the theme of rhythms of grace, and I will be giving some very specific examples of how families with young children (ages 0-4) might implement some of these rhythms along with resource suggestions to help them do so.
From Higher Times to Flat Chronos
In the medieval worldview, time was felt and regulated by the 4 seasons and by the Christian calendar. The Christian calendar, sometimes called the liturgical calendar, was filled with feast days as well as times of discipleship, fasting, and waiting (such as Advent and Lent). These rhythms of life gave meaning to the year. Smith, following Charles Taylor’s work, says,
In the premodern understanding, because ‘mundane’ or secular time is transcended by ‘higher’ time, there is an
accounting of time that is not merely linear or chronological. Higher times ‘introduce “warps” and seeming
inconsistencies in profane time-ordering. Events that were far apart in profane time could nevertheless be closely
linked … Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of the Crucifixion than mid-summer’s day 1997.’”[4]
In our modern context, however, we have flattened time. Smith again says, “Our ‘encasing’ in secular time has changed this, and so we take our experience of time to be ‘natural’ (i.e., not a construal)… So nothing ‘higher’ impinges upon our calendars – only the tick-tock of chronos, and the self-imposed burdens of our ‘projects.’”[5] Our projects become the main driver of our time – a time that seems to be always ticking away, and there seems to never be enough time to get all the projects done. I know for me it is so easy to get swept away in the tyranny of the urgent and my to-do list, and there is very little in modern society that impinges upon my own chosen tyranny; most holidays are not the communal events they once were and there is not even pressure anymore to attend church on Sunday. We can all decide what we want to do and when we want to do it; there are very few culturally imposed constraints.
It seems, though, that humans cannot stand time to be completely flat and so we create our own new “higher times” in things like birthdays, black-Friday, and national holidays, and our lives predominately revolve around the academic calendar. We have to order our time somehow beyond just the ticking of a clock and the deadlines of our projects. It should be of no surprise that so many young adults struggle in their first “real jobs” because up until that point in their lives, their days and years have been marked by the academic calendar and rhythm of doing life, and then all of a sudden they are thrown into a different way of doing life; it is no wonder it is so unsettling for so many. Nevertheless, the academic calendar and our celebration of birthdays and national holidays hardly seem sufficient to satisfy our longing for purpose and meaning to be given to our years.
From Porous to Buffered
Besides flattening our time, another philosophical shift that impacts all of us is the shift from the porous self to the buffered self. In the medieval worldview, the “human agent was seen as porous … self is essentially vulnerable (and hence also ‘healable’). To be human is to be essentially open to an outside (whether benevolent or malevolent), open to blessing or curse, possession or grace.”[6] So, people used to see themselves as open. This led them to feel and behave as people connected to others, creation, and the Creator.
However, in contrast, the modern self “is a buffered self, insulated and isolated in its interiority, ‘giving its own autonomous order to its life.’”[7] Now we view ourselves as completely independent and freely able to do what we want, limited only by physical restraints and our own vision or talent. This buffered self is safe from spiritual forces (evil or good) and from accountability to a community, and they are above the rest of creation that is viewed as an economic resource to be used for human flourishing, which often translates into the rich getting richer.
This goes along with a shift from finding meaning in the world (the medieval worldview) to finding meaning in our minds. Although John Donne said, “No man is an island,” it seems we are pushed to act as if we are. The buffered self frames us as autonomous minds, who should no longer need to connect to creation, others or to God; we should be self-sufficient thinkers. And yet, it seems this social construct is not true to the reality of what it means to be human. We are embodied beings who are constantly searching for connections to others, to creation, to meaning, and yet, we do not want to admit our needs because there is so much pressure to be a buffered self. In order to participate in the rhythms of grace, we will have to become more porous again, which means leaving the safety and restraints of our autonomy.
From Charged with the Grandeur of God to the Immanent Frame
Lastly, in the medieval world, there were systems and connections that placed a person and gave meaning and purpose. There was the cosmos that reflected the order, glory, and mystery of God. To borrow a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins, the universe was “charged with the grandeur of God.”[8] Now we live in what is called the “Immanent Frame: A constructed social space that frames our lives entirely within a natural (rather than supernatural) order.”[9] The broader culture is choosing to focus only on what can be seen, touched, tasted, heard, felt, tested and registered; it is focused on the material.
Things are not completely hopeless, though. Smith aptly states the following:
We now inhabit this self-sufficient immanent order, even if we believe in transcendence. Indeed, [Charles]
Taylor emphasizes the ubiquity of the immanent frame: it is ‘common to all of us in the modern West.’ So
the question isn’t whether we inhabit the immanent frame, but how. Some inhabit it as a closed frame with a
brass ceiling; others inhabit it as an open frame with skylights open to transcendence.[10]
This shift in worldview is illustrated well by looking at the contrasting ideas of cosmos verses space or universe. Smith summarizes this shift as “the move of spontaneously imagining our cosmic environment as an ordered, layered, hierarchical, shepherded place to spontaneously imagining our cosmic environment as an infinite, cavernous, anonymous space.”[11] This illustrates the larger philosophical shift that led us away from a world in which a good God is ordering and over all to a purely scientific view of the world.
Sometimes just having words or phrases to define our present age can help us to know if that reality is in line with a Biblical worldview or not. It is easy to be swept up in cultural presumptions; one must take a step outside of them in order to reflect upon them. In looking at the flattening of time, buffered self, and immanent frame, it is clear that in our present age there is little room for the transcendent or Transcendent. These are just some examples of what Taylor labels “Closed World Structures,”[12] and why faith in the modern age can be so difficult. Besides these cultural forces as work, we are also limited to our minds or put another way, we are stuck in reflection. Many Christians I know think that it is enough to think the right things about God, Jesus, and other theological issues, but Jesus did not call people to think the right things, but rather to follow Him. Faith is not so much a work of the mind, but of the action and experience. Soren Keirkegaard called our present age the age of reflection, and he says this about it, “The single individual (however well-intentioned many of them are, however much energy they might have if they could ever come to use it) has not fomented enough passion in himself to tear himself out of the web of reflection and the seductive ambiguity of reflection.”[13]
If we are to live into a Biblical transformative worldview and teach our children the same, then we must tear ourselves away from the web of mere reflection and be intentional about putting in skylights, otherwise we will again and again lose grasp of what is or could be outside the frame. This is why setting our hearts to the rhythms of grace is so important – even vital to faithful existence for Jesus followers today. Rhythms of grace open us up to experience God in the here-and-now. These rhythms include a recovery of the Christian calendar, Sabbath, and daily prayers. Examples of how to implement these practices, especially for families with young children, will be given. (Click here to go to part 2).
[1] James K. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 142.
[2] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 142.
[3] Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World, Second Edition, (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 173.
[4] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 34.
[5] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 34.
[6] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 29.
[7] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 29.
[8] Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” accessed December 5, 2019. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur.
[9] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 141.
[10]Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 93.
[11] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 70.
[12] Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor, 140.
[13] Soren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age - A Literary Review, edited and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: PUP, 1978), 69.
