I know, it’s been a while.¹

Today is a special day, though, because it has now been a half decade since the day I purchased the JakeBouma.com domain name for the purpose of blogging. This post from the third birthday has a fun little history (for serious JakeBouma.comophiles only).

But seriously, why the lack of posting?

Aside from the gravitational pull of sites like Twitter and Posterous (mostly Twitter), there’s the fact that I’ve been slowly working on a book proposal.² That means two things: 1) Much of my free time is spent reading, researching, and writing stuff that has to do with the proposal, and 2) A great portion of the stuff I would blog about — especially around topics like youth ministry, theology, social theory, and philosophy — I feel the need to keep “secret” until I know whether or not it will ever actually materialize in book form.³

So although I haven’t been around this here blog much, I have doing blog-worthy things. Which kind of sucks for you, I guess. Sorry. But the good news is that I just renewed JakeBouma.com for two more years. Which is kind of awesome for you, I guess.

Hey, while I’ve got you — you should check out a few things.

In late January I was a guest on Tim Schmoyer’s Live YM Talk, discussing “The need for theological questioning in youth ministry”. It’s runs about 50 minutes, and you can check it out here.

And earlier this week I was a guest on Andy Root’s online radio show talking about his new book The Promise of Despair (which I have said should be a top priority read if you’re invested in the future of the church). This one’s only 15 minutes long, and you can listen here. I’ve been told that I may receive a $10 Olive Garden gift card if my episode has the most listens, so…

Long story short: I miss you, and I’m told (some of) you miss me. Hang in there.

In closing, here’s a picture of Philip Clayton.

1. For the record, the “someone I’ve never met” was Mitch McGinnis. Mitch — If you’re reading this, sorry for blocking you on Twitter.
2. And, no, the title isn’t The Speed of Light: Intergalactic Space Travel in Youth Ministry.
3. This doesn’t mean I haven’t dropped a few juicy hints here and there.

My library grows faster than my stack of completed books, a “problem” that I attempted to remedy once with the 30 pages per day project. I doubt I averaged 30 pages per day, but I knocked plenty of books off the list in 2009. Here they are:

I’m currently reading Frederich Buechner’s Godric, which I hope to finish before the year is out. I should also mention that I’m 130 pages into Ched Myers’ momentous Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus for a weekly personal study with @bmick. At ten pages/week, we should finish it before the end of 2010.¹

1. Pronounced “twenty ten”, FYI.

The Advent Community and the Emergence of God’s Dream for Creation by Troy Bronsink. “I have observed four theologies that are undergoing reimagination by emergent congregations: ecclesiology, eschatology, missiology, and incarnation. From the vantage point of these emergent theologies, I want to illuminate four metaphors from these texts that reimage preaching in Advent: an ecclesiology of the unfinished way, an eschatology of trade in seeds that will find future purchase in God’s coming dreams, a missiology in which language and symbols are reconceived by the Holy Spirit, and an incarnational theology of ordinary watching and witnessing.” (HT: Soupiset)

Chapter two of Schweizer’s On Waiting uses as its framework one of philosopher Henri Bergson’s experiments to begin building a philosophy of waiting.

Bergson, “in order to demonstrate the existence of a time other than abstract, mathematical time,”¹ performs the following thought experiment:

If I want to mix a glass of sugar and water, I must, willy-nilly, wait until the sugar melts. This little fact is big with meaning. For here the time I have to wait is not that mathematical time which would apply equally well to the entire history of the material world, even if that history were spread out instantaneously in space. It coincides with my impatience, that is to say, with a certain portion of my own duration, which I cannot protract or contract as I like. It is no longer something thought, it is something lived. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.

Let me first say that it is nearly impossible to convey the eloquence of Schweizer’s prose and the brilliance of his insights without quoting the whole chapter. He is a skilled wordsmith, to be sure. That being said, I want to briefly explore two concepts that Schweizer begins to develop in this chapter.

The first is the dichotomy between time and duration. In the sugar/water experiment, Bergson makes the claim that the time waiting for the sugar to dissolve is not time in the mathematical sense (tick… tock… 1… 2…), but rather duration, over which one has no control. In waiting, time is not something we stand in relationship to, but something that we embody. “In waiting,” Schweizer says,

time no longer seems to serve as a transparent medium or instrument, it is no longer something external to which the waiter could refer, from which he would be separate, of which he could avail himself, through which he could pass to accomplish something, as when one takes a leisurely hour to have lunch. In waiting, the hour cannot be turned into lunch; the waiter must live the hour, feel it, embody it.²

It is important to understand what Schweizer is doing here, because there is this thing we call waiting which is not really waiting at all. We wait for our oil change to be done. We wait for the nurse to call us out of the waiting room. We wait for packages to arrive in the mail. We wait for. And when we wait for, time is simply an object, a relation. But when we wait outside of “that mathematical time” we experience time as duration — we experience time absolutely. As Bergson says, “It is we who are passing when we say time passes.”³

Which brings us to the second point. When time is experienced as duration, a whole new world is opened to us — a new world which makes us decidedly uncomfortable. Schweizer makes the argument that time as duration exposes us to our own duration, our mortality: “The waiter’s momentary intuition of her own duration — as this occurs, for example, when we suddenly, but always only intermittently, hear our heartbeat — is accompanied by a certain uncanny discomfort…. She would rather think than feel time.”⁴

Waiting is hellish precisely because it forces us to confront our own death, not because there are simply more ticks and tocks left to do their ticking and tocking.

And so in Advent, we wait. We confront our own death and the death of all and cry out to God, asking to be saved from our enduring hell. We cry “O Come, Emmanuel!” because waiting, confronting our seemingly inevitable demise, is unbearable.

We are not waiting for the time to pass until Christ is born and the herald angels begin their song and the whole blessed celebration begins. We are not waiting for. We are enduring. It is no longer a relation, it is an absolute.

1. Schweizer, Harold. On Waiting. New York: Routledge, 2008. 15. The “abstract, mathematical time” is a reference to Isaac Newton’s idea of time.
2. Ibid., 17.
3. Interesting side note: In 1913 Bergson was denounced by the Pope. His philosophy was considered “false,” “destructive,” and “poisonous” because it was “sugar-coated, subtle, and seductive in nature.” I’ll know I’ve made it when I’m denounced by the Pope.
4. Ibid., 21.

During this season of Advent I have been blessed by a fantastic book titled Watch For The Light: Readings For Advent And Christmas. It contains 45 pithy devotional reflections arranged in daily readings (from Nov. 24 — January 7) from some of Christianity’s all-time best thinkers. Perhaps you recognize some of these names: Henri Nouwen, Meister Eckhart, Dorothy Day, John Howard Yoder, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Annie Dillard, Jürgen Moltmann, Brennan Manning… the list goes on.

Anyway, in the spirit of giving, I would like to give two of these books away. Want to win one? Here’s what you need to do:

That’s it.

A couple of rules: The contest ends at 12:00pm (Central Time) on Thursday, December 17. You may only enter once, and winners will be chosen randomly by means of random.org. And in light of Wess’ recent post, both books will be purchased from Powell’s instead of Amazon.

Happy Advent!

Is Advent Biblical? “But I’m not concerned merely with whether Advent is not disallowed in Scripture. I want to know if observing Advent is consistent with biblical themes and priorities. Is Advent biblical in this grander sense? Could the observance of Advent help one to grow in faith in a way that aligns with biblical faith?”

When I set out to do a personal study of Advent, I immediately performed a cursory Google search for “philosophy of waiting” hoping to find an essay or something to catalyze my thoughts on the topic. The search led me to Harold Schweizer’s On Waiting, a brilliant book from the Thinking In Action series from Routledge. It was, in an almost eerie sense, the exact thing I was looking for. So I placed an order.

I am now slowly making my way through the book, and the plan is this: To post blog reflections on a chapter-by-chapter basis during the next couple of weeks.

On Waiting’s back cover promises that Schweizer’s work “examines this ever-present yet overlooked phenomenon [of waiting] from diverse angles and in fascinating style,” and chapter one — “Nobody Likes to Wait” — wastes no time in fulfilling this assertion. Schweizer sets the stage thusly:

Although waiting rooms, train stations, airports, or hotel lobbies are merely to be passed through, I shall argue… that waiting is not simply a passage of time to be traversed… In waiting, time is slow and thick. Waiting is more than merely an inconvenient delay. It is more than a matter of time. Waiting has its rewards, as I want to argue here… And yet, we might think of waiting also as a temporary liberation from the economics of time-is-money, as a brief respite from the haste of modern life, as a meditative temporal space in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights.¹