Love of What is Timeless as a Response to Chaotic Times
How clinging to timeless things can help us flourish even as chaos fills our timelines
I want to argue that particularly as our culture seems to be spinning apart and the newscycle grows shorter and shorter and our anxiety increases, there is a greater need for us to cling to timeless works, particularly the Bible and works of art: poems, novels, songs, paintings, etc. But I want you to understand how I came to this insight.
Yesterday the news broke that former and future President Trump has selected Matt Gaetz to be his Attorney General. Of course, he still has to get through Congress, and some pundits think he doesn’t stand a chance, but who knows. As I’ve said before, I’ve given up making predictions. It’s a bad business to be in. When I saw this news, as well as some of Trump’s other picks (some, like Rubio I was pleasantly surprised by!), I caught myself being pulled into the same cycle of infotainment and anxiety that gripped me for much of 2016-2020. It was a kind of political news fever driven by the belief that I had to Be Informed or else I was Being Irresponsible. The feeling that Something Big was Happening and I had to have an Opinion and Make My Voice Heard. It’s not a good feeling, but it’s not entirely a bad feeling either. It certainly hits the ol’ dopamine receptors.
But this political news fever is a physically and psychically draining activity. It sucks away all your imagination. Your creative energy is spent imagining the potential outcomes of (legitimately) awful political decisions which are entirely out of your control. It causes you to hope in ridiculous conspiracy theories which come to nothing. Then it dashes your hopes with some new headline predicting doom for the nation so that you are left in anxiety and despair about the future. You are frenzied, frantic, and feverish. Always posting, always scrolling, always secretly hoping for some new piece of terrible news about the administration to confirm your priors1.
Lots of evangelicals I know were sick with this fever, and I myself struggled with it off and on for years until I finally realized what a horrible, disordered way to live this is. A part of me knew I was falling into the sin of curiositas, but as with many sins, my sinful heart denied it. I justified my curiositas by conflating it with studiositas, the desire to rightly know the truth of things. My hope was that by being informed I could advocate for justice, another virtue! I hid my vice behind virtues. I don’t think I’m alone in that. I think many people fighting for justice hide their viciousness behind a veil of virtue.
To complicate matters, I think sometimes as I engaged with the newscycle during those four years, I really was pursuing justice and rightly pursuing knowledge. But the temptation to venture into curiositas was always very strong because of technology and my weak flesh. There’s always more to learn, always another person to engage, always another angle to take, always more to read. This is the information age, and everything is available to me. The lesson here is that to pursue knowledge and justice in this media environment requires great personal vigilance and the virtue of temperance to know when to refrain from engaging, reading, watching, scrolling, etc.
So as I read this news of the appointment of Matt Gaetz to Attorney General, a position I believe he is completely and utterly unfit for, I found myself once again feeling that familiar tug to keep checking Twitter for more news of other appointments that would disappointment (a failure on my part to hope all things!). I stopped myself and prayed that Trump would make good appointments that would honor God. Rather than think about all the potential damage to this country Gaetz could cause as AG, I felt a distance from the “event” of his appointment. A healthy distance. It was not indifference, after all, I still prayed, but an acceptance that this was not something I could immediately do something about, and that frantically scrolling to read everyone’s hot takes on how bad this appointment was would solve nothing. I attribute that distance to four things:
Reading my Bible and praying in the morning.
Listening to T.S. Eliot read the entire Four Quartets on the drive to work.
Teaching Their Eyes Were Watching God to my students.
Meditating on the virtues as I write this new book, Re-Collecting Your Life.
What all four of these things have in common is that the are engagements with timeless works. The Bible, the Four Quartets, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the virtues—all of these are timeless truths worth meditating on. Obviously, the Bible is infinitely superior to the others, but they have value, too. Part of their value is that they ground us in a time out of our time. They remind us that the concerns of today will not be the concerns of tomorrow. They convict us that the human heart is terribly wicked and has always been and yet God has endured our wickedness in longsuffering and provided a way of redemption. They remind us, as Eliot does in “East Coker,” that “Houses live and die,” and so do parties, administrations, and even nations. All in God’s time.
The foundation for this practice is reading our Bible. For in it we find the cosmic scope of God’s redemptive history put into perspective, which shrinks down our current political history into a tiny pin-prick of a moment (without ever denying that real injustice is occurring and must be opposed, but with temperance!). We learn here about the importance of living peaceful lives, honoring our rulers, and praying for them (1 Timothy 2:1-2).
What the Bible and literature and all great art can also do for us is cause us to attend to something with our imagination, something meaningful—which is exactly the opposite of what the political news fever demands of us. The fever demands all of our imagination and it wants our attention to be scattered across many ephemeral items. But as I was carefully listening to Eliot read Four Quartets on the way to work yesterday, I was practicing attention. I had to carefully study and imagine each image and its significance. I had to meditate on the overarching meaning. I had to slow my thinking down. Rather than frenzied, frantic, and feverish, I felt myself become calm, attentive, and contemplative. This kind of deep reading ought to mark our engagements with the Bible, with good music, great film, and so on.
These four activities of engaging with timeless works, chief among them the Bible, gave me perspective to step back from the edge of frantic worry and doomscrolling. My encouragement to you during the next four years is to spend less time on social media and more time engaged with things that are timeless. Exercise the virtue of temperance. I’m not advocating for a spirit of quietism that denies injustice; please be aware of injustice and do what you can in your sphere of influence to advocate for justice. But also, do so temperately, knowing that it is not up to you to save the nation. And doomscrolling and hanging on every negative headline will not redeem our nation. Instead, remember Paul’s words in Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”
There are a lot of truly excellent things in the world to think about. It’s a pity that we squander our attention on such nonsense. And the nonsense doesn’t even bring us happiness! It only makes us more anxious. Cling to timeless, excellent things. You will find them giving you hope and peace in a despairing and anxious world.
Some call this “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” but that’s misleading, because the exact same behavior happens among some on the right toward Biden or Harris and their administration. I don’t think it’s about the person; I think it has more to do with the technology and the news ecosystems we operate in.
Such a good word, Alan. Thank you.
Thank you. I deeply, deeply needed this.