Tara Troxel

“One might sometimes experience seasons of intense emotional connection, a kind of exuberance of the Spirit, shared in community, in which joy is the dominant note. But then one might enter a season, perhaps surprising, where God is experienced in, and as, stillness, a contemplative season in which God’s covenant faithfulness is a steady state of enduring. If the person from the exuberant season could see the “you” in that contemplative season, it might look like a kind of distance or coolness from the outside. But that exuberant “you” doesn’t yet have the capacity to comprehend the unspeakable comfort found in that contemplation to come. God’s nearness looks and feels different depending on the season you’re in.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly might be a virtue.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

“While the past is lost for ever, everything that didn’t happen in it is doubly lost. This creates a particular kind of feeling of loss, the melancholy of an unrealized past.”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now

“There is a sort of fascination with the past that is an act of deliberate forgetting: it’s called “nostalgia.” Religious communities are particularly prone to this. Faith is “handed down,” a matter of traditio, and hence faithfulness can be confused with preserving the past rather than having gratitude for a legacy meant to propel us forward. The most significant problem with nostalgia is not that it remembers but what it forgets. “So much of the trouble of this world is caused by memories,” wrote Apsley Cherry-Garrard, “for we only remember half.”19 The “past” that is pined for is always selected, edited, preserved in amber, and thus decontextualized, even if this past is invoked as marching orders for restoration and recovery.20 Whenever the past is invoked as a template for the present, the first question we should always ask is, Whose past? Whose version of the past? And what does this invoked past ignore, override, and actively forget? Which half is recalled? Whose half is forgotten?”
― James K.A. Smith, How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now