"The times wherein I live"

And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon’s reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the Lord - 1 Kings 6:1.

So began the first lesson at Mattins on Monday past.  One of the joys of the methodical, ordered reading of Scripture in the daily office is encountering a small detail which can particularly capture our attention.  So it was with the 480 years of 1 Kings 6:1.

For 480 years after the Exodus, Israel had no temple.  Yes, there was the Tabernacle and there was Shiloh, but neither of these had quite the same meaning and significance as Solomon's Temple:

But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded? Yet have thou respect unto the prayer of thy servant, and to his supplication, O Lord my God, to hearken unto the cry and to the prayer, which thy servant prayeth before thee to day: That thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day, even toward the place of which thou hast said, My name shall be there: that thou mayest hearken unto the prayer which thy servant shall make toward this place.

Thinking of those 480 years brought to mind Tara Isabella Burton's recent article 'Bad Traditionalism'.  There is much in the article with which I profoundly disagree, particularly the 'grace destroys nature' emphasis typical of much 'Weird Christian' discourse.  The rejection of the 'given' is disturbing, a hyper-spiritual, near neo-Gnostic, refusal to affirm that 'God the Father Almighty' is 'Maker of heaven and earth'.  That said, the article's critique of a particular form of nostalgia is worth heeding.  It is true, as Burton states, that "there is something to be said for looking to what we have lost":

But there is a danger, too, in fetishizing its opposite: a nostalgia that mistakes the Medieval era, or postwar America, for the New Jerusalem.

It is a popular neo-traditionalist past time: the identification of superior eras, free of the evils and idols of modernity.  This has a tendency, of course, to overlook and excuse (or, in the worst cases, celebrate) the evils and idols of past eras.  What it says about the present, however, is my particular concern: in Burton's words, "the notion that our only way out is back".  To put it another way, perhaps Providence is calling us to live in an age akin to the 480 years that Israel was without a Temple.

In his now iconic Lament For A Nation, George Grant concludes:

But lamentation falls easily into the vice of self-pity.  To live with courage is a virtue, whatever one may think of the dominant assumptions of one's age.  Multitudes of human beings through the course of history have had to live when their only political allegiance was irretreivably lost ... Beyond courage, it is also possible to live in the ancient faith, which asserts that changes in the world, even if they be recognized more as a loss than a gain, take place within an eternal order that is not affected by their taking place.

Even amidst his lament, Grant counsels that wise discernment is necessary precisely because discerning losses and gains is not always a straightforward exercise.  Neo-traditionalist nostalgia too easily becomes self-pity, a militant rejection of the present that is not courage but despair, a failure to recognize Providence placing us in this time.

The 480 years were years in which God did not will a Temple for Israel.  As the prophet Nathan relayed to David:

Whereas I have not dwelt in any house since the time that I brought up the children of Israel out of Egypt, even to this day, but have walked in a tent and in a tabernacle.  In all the places wherein I have walked with all the children of Israel spake I a word with any of the tribes of Israel, whom I commanded to feed my people Israel, saying, Why build ye not me an house of cedar?

Yet during those years - centuries - the God of Israel was invoked; prophets spoke; the story of the Exodus recalled; grace was known.  And so, after hearing of God's will that a Temple should not be built in his time, David prayed:

And what one nation in the earth is like thy people, even like Israel, whom God went to redeem for a people to himself, and to make him a name, and to do for you great things and terrible, for thy land, before thy people, which thou redeemedst to thee from Egypt, from the nations and their gods? For thou hast confirmed to thyself thy people Israel to be a people unto thee for ever.

This is echoed in the collect of the Fifth Sunday after Trinity being prayed during our time:

Grant, O Lord, we beseech thee, that the course of this world may be so peaceably ordered by thy governance, that thy Church may joyfully serve thee in all godly quietness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The 'course of this world' is not somehow apart from God's gracious and good Providence.  This age 'may be so peaceably ordered' for the Church's good.  A nostalgia for past orders - often "irretrievably lost" - can hinder us from seeking to discern Providence's purposes in placing us in this present order.

Over recent months, and with all the caveats one would expect from a good Laudian, I have had a growing affection for the Cambridge Platonists.  W.C. De Pauley began his 1937 study of this school of thought with words of one of their number, Benjamin Whichcote:

The times, wherein I live, are more to me than any else: the works of God in them, which I am to discern, direct in me both principle affection and action.

This is what it means to pray the words of the General Thanksgiving:

We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life ...

Such thanksgiving seems rather incompatible with despair at this age.  And it is in this time that we know grace:

but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory.

In other words, any critique of the current age must be first be grounded in thanksgiving for creation and redemption experienced and known in "the times where I live".  It cannot be a vain seeking after an "irretreviably lost" order, nor a militant rejection of the present, as if the words of the General Thanksgiving cannot be uttered in this age, as if the order of this age cannot be sanctified without being conformed to a past order (whether ecclesial, constitutional, or social).  Nor, however, can it be what Burton urges, an "immanentizing [of] the eschaton", creating "a body that transcends our understanding of flesh", as if we can be now what will be then, "as are the angels which are in heaven" (Mark 12:25).  For this too is an attempt to escape the particularities of the present, in a manner at least as militant and sectarian as the reactionaries.  

Which brings me back to Israel's 480 years without the Temple.  If such is our time, the time in which Providence has placed us, we are not to seek escape to imagined pasts or in spiritual experiences transcending our bodies and the created order.  It is now, in the times wherein we live, that we are called to be conformed to Christ, gathering up the institutions, thought, and mores, of this present order into Christ. 

For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.