My friend once said to me: I think living faithfully would be easy if we could only perceive what is faithful. That is, to discern the correct path is a harder task than to walk it. Knowing which way to go and what to do is more challenging than the going and the doing.
Jesus knew what was required of Him to walk faithfully. He perceived rightly. Yet His life was incredibly hard. It was, in the end, excruciating. In this fallen world, to live obediently, even for one who sees perfectly, is painful. Indeed, what we find in Jesus is that the clearer one’s perception—the better we know what is required of us—the harder it is to respond in kind. I am the way, the truth, and the life: Take up your cross and follow Me.
Clarity ≠ Comfort.
Thus, my friend had it wrong. Things would not be easier if we could just see things as they are. Still, he was on to something: perceiving what is good, and true, and beautiful is sometimes very hard. It’s difficult to see through a glass darkly.1 Sin has clouded our vision, and thus, conviction must be tempered by humility. But perceiving rightly, if partially, is key to the Christian life, because perceiving wrongly also results in pain and suffering, but it doesn’t function redemptively. Even though right perception doesn’t exempt us from suffering, such discernment and faithful response draw us into Christ’s salvific work. When we suffer for the right reasons, that is, we share in His glory.
How, then, might we articulate a Christian phenomenology? How do persons sense, discern, and abide the world as it is presented to them? How do Christians know if we’re suffering “for the right reasons?” How can we perceive and partake in the life of grace?
There are many learned folks who say very good and insightful things about phenomenology in academic journals and philosophical treatises. I’m grateful for them and engage their work elsewhere. But God sometimes distills truth in less auspicious places. Recently, I was looking through one of my mom’s old prayer journals that she’d gifted me years ago. One of the entries reads:
Dear Jesus,
I want the faith of a little child. I remember praying to you, Jesus, when I was around 7 or 8, and asking for daddy not to be angry with us for messing up his checkers box. I remember looking up at daddy and his sweet smile was so serene. I knew you had heard me, Jesus. That is really my first remembrance of prayer. Help me to trust you for my next step, to walk in your ways and to make you proud of me. But you died for me, so I know you have a plan for me. I want to be a usable vessel for you, Jesus. I want to walk, talk, think, and be Christlike. Please.
We often think of memory as a reservoir of past experiences—a repository of static images, or impressions, that we recall as objective “rememberers” of what has been. The truth is that memory is always a remembrance: an active re-imagining of the past that is made present to us in its sensed reality. This isn’t to say that the past is imaginary, or that memories are false; rather, it means that our remembrance is phenomenologically constitutive here and now. In the act of remembering, our present, embodied, sensed experience is made real. Without our memories, we cannot perceive—either the world, or God’s spirit manifest in the world.
As my mother put it in her journal, “I remember praying to you […] I knew you had heard me, Jesus. That is really my first remembrance of prayer” (emphasis mine). She didn’t merely recall a self-contained memory—didn’t simply retrieve a siloed bundle of neural data—but rather brought to bear the real past in the living, enfleshed now. As such, her memory of her father’s grace, in response to prayer, was transfigured such that her next recorded thought was an appeal for grace in the present moment: “Help me to trust you for my next step, to walk in your ways and to make you proud of me.”
In other words, my mother’s remembrance of the temporal past attuned her present perception to eternal grace. This process, what the Greeks called anamnesis, is a re-membering: an embodied-spiritual renewal that draws sustenance from things gone by—yet brought forward. In this sense, remembrance is eucharistic. In prayerful memory, we perceive God’s gracious heart, broken and given for us across time and space. St. Augustine knew this, writing in his Confessions: “The vast court of memory […] there I meet myself.”2
But this isn’t the whole (Christian) picture. We don’t just look back at what’s gone; nor do we experience the present moment with no reference to the future. We also look forward to the world’s consummation and redemption in the fullness of time. We “remember the future” in our hopes, prayers, and imagination.
Just as our imagining of the past, in remembrance, functions phenomenologically to reorient us presently, our imagining of the future—our “memory” of God’s promise, in Christ—draws us ever into revelation by enfolding us into the life of grace. The eschatological imagination, then, isn’t merely anticipatory, but, like memory, is phenomenologically constitutive. We perceive what’s happening now according to what we believe (and hope) will come. Further, it’s not as if our promised end is something alien to us—a foreign reality completely detached from our present experience. Rather, the hopeful imagination, to which grace tends, re-members the present in a continuous process of eschatological perception. The end to which God brings us, in Christ, is revealed in the graced embodiment of what is: the created world’s truth, goodness, and beauty.
To put it another way: What was (our “imagined” memory of the past) and what will be (our “imagined” hope for the future) come together in the eternal imaging of the divine Love. All of life, conscious and subconscious, unfolds in perpetual remembrance: the concurrent imagining, and imaging, of memories we hold and futures we hope for. Per Augustine: the present of things past (memory), the present of things present (attention), and the present of things future (expectation) all work in tandem in the constitution of one’s soul.3 Thus, our capacity to see in media res—to faithfully discern and navigate the temporal fray—is made manifest as we learn to “pray without ceasing.” And we can only do that, as Mom put it, “be a usable vessel for you, Jesus,” as we recognize and live into the grace by which we’re made.
The properly attuned eschatological imagination acknowledges the hurt we’ve experienced in the world; it feels the angst of the present moment; and it knows tomorrow’s worries; yet it abides, prayerfully, in the security of Christ’s salvation. Philosopher Judith Wolfe speaks to this tension in a recorded talk for Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, in which she discusses her recent book, The Theological Imagination:
God exceeds our imagining in the world: Other people and we ourselves have depths and complexities which remain forever hidden in God. To believe in God demands a commitment to not reducing the complexity of the datapoints before us, even at the cost of not being able to fully make sense of the world. Such a commitment rests on a trust beyond any order we can impose on the world imaginatively, that it is and will be held together by God.
Wolfe is articulating, in academic terms, the kind of faithful posture that my mother’s prayer is expressive of. When we place our trust in God to comfort our fearful hearts—as we remember and hope in Christ—we are afforded the grace to see. Such perception is wrought at the foot of the Cross: “[…] you died for me, so I know you have a plan for me.” Knowing this doesn’t make faith easy, but it does make it possible. It is the phenomenology of grace.
As I write this, Mom’s 73rd birthday is coming up. Happy birthday, Mama. I’m proud of you—for perceiving and partaking in Christ’s suffering, and for sharing that grace with me. You’ve inscribed your heart in my memory, and, I trust, in glory yet revealed.
