Image Source: Scott Galloway

The Cruciformity of Conversion: The nowness of who I want to be after Covid-19

I stole this blockquote from Snakes and Ladders, the blog of Alan Jacobs:

The present does not, however, become urgent here due to scarcity. One has everything one needs — more than one needs — to turn one’s life around: the grace provided in Christ. In marked contrast to the efficiency-inducing scarcities of finance-dominated capitalism, it is the very fulsomeness of the provisions for conversion that makes the present an urgent matter, an opportunity to be seized with alacrity and put to good use. There is no point in looking longingly to any past or future with the capacity to make things easier: the time is ripe for action right now and never has been or will be any better. Delaying a present decision to turn one’s life around, and neglecting to make the best of what is currently on offer out of a distracted sense of what was or might be, suggest one is simply never likely to turn one’s life around, no matter how many times one is offered the opportunity to do so in the future. Any such distraction from the present moment is always available as an excuse in the future, so as to produce thereby a never-ending deferral of decision. The present is urgent here not because the opportunities of the moment might be lost but because they are just so good, so perfectly suited to the predicament one is in and the needs one has, because of their not-to-be-passed-up character, so to speak. Instead of being here today and gone tomorrow, what allows one to turn one’s life around in the present — the grace of Christ — is permanently on offer. It has no fleeting character. What prompts one to seize it right away is not the fear of missed opportunity, then, but the immediate, overwhelming attractiveness of the offer…. No failings in the past or present can disrupt the efficacy of a grace designed specifically to save sinners…. There is thus no point in harping on the past or worrying about the future — the present is one’s only concern. Not because one cannot do anything about past mistakes or about an uncertain future — because neither is under one’s control — but because one can let go of the past without consequence — one’s sins are forgiven — and because the future will never be any more threatening than the present is. Contrary to the Stoic-inflected temporal sensibility of financial players, the present is no more under one’s control than the past was or the future will be: at every moment in time, one is enabled to turn oneself to God only by God’s grace and not by one’s own power.

— Kathryn Tanner, *Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism*

The powerlessness of trust is our surrender to make. I can’t help but think of E.R. Hussey's Cross. Life is the art of waiting — body-soul — in the present moment in order to encounter the real. The poet George Herbert once said of his writings, “They are a picture of spiritual conflicts between God and my soul before I could subject my will to Jesus, my Master.”

But seldom do we go gentle to the cross, which is the place where we subject our will into faith. As we trust Jesus in death & life, we come to learn that death unites us to Christ and in him the triune life of God. At the cross, we finally learn what it means to live free, bound only by love of God and others. As for the fear that would keep us from coming, in the end, we find it too small for the awful (full of awe) power that we meet in Jesus. At the cross, Death is a domesticated dog — a pet of the almighty that pees on the floor when given a fright. “Today if you hear his voice…”