The ruling and forming power of time is central to life in modernity. We value and desire efficiency, productivity, and speed, all of which derive from our conception of time. On the surface, there may not appear to be any issues with these central goods of modernity. Why would we not want to do as much possible with the time we are given? The more we can do, the more good we can do, which must certainly be a value good citizens ought to pursue.  The problem with equating goods like efficiency, productivity, and speed with Christian values is that it inherently relegates the role of a particular group people in society. That group is people with disabilities.

One does not have to look far to see how people with disabilities fail to live up to the values derived from modernity’s conception of time. Whether one’s disabilities manifest as physical or intellectual impairments, disability is inherently an affront against modernity’s desire for tasks to be done quickly and efficiently. When confronted with this reality, we must ask ourselves where the problem really lies. Is it in people with disabilities, or in modernity’s values?

Despite all of the advances in disability rights and advocacy movements, modernity’s citizens ultimately believe that the problem lies in the people with disabilities themselves. While it may be uncommon to confess that belief explicitly, a quick evaluation of both policy and practices allow us to see how in the end, much of the way we treat people with disabilities comes as an attempt to cure perceived deficiencies.¹ Often this cure is an attempt to introduce any combination of efficiency, productivity, or speed into the disabled person’s life.

If the problem does not lie inherently in people with disabilities, it must be in the way that we value time. While I do not want to be perceived as relinquishing any benefit that modernity may bring—I am happy when things get done quickly and easily so I can spend more time doing things I enjoy—Christians must be sure to not let these values become first order goods. There may be a time where any combination of efficiency, productivity, or speed may be beneficial, but there are other times where this certainly is not the case. While there may be a time and place for efficiency, productivity, and speed, perhaps an appeal to them should not be our default position. If this is true, how then ought we to conceive time?

In his book Becoming Friends of Time: Disability, Timefullness, and Gentle Discipleship, John Swinton wrestles with exactly this question. In it, Swinton “seeks to offer a theological reimagining of the nature and purpose of time and in so doing offer some pointers for faithful living and the development of genuine communities of belonging.”²  By focusing on people with disabilities and their place in society, Swinton aims to wrestle with modern conceptions of time to come to a Christian understanding of time that takes seriously the experience and reality of people with disabilities. While, in my opinion, the entire book is well worth the read, in this short piece I want to reflect briefly only on Swinton’s first moves in the book, which sets the stage for everything which follows: Swinton appeals to Christians to cease living primarily under clock time, and rather, to begin living into God’s time.

Swinton’s first chapter is entitled “Thinking about Time: The Tyranny of the Clock,” and in it he narrates a history in which Westerners came to understand time primarily through their clocks. According to Swinton, the first clocks were developed in the Middle Ages by Benedictine monks as a way to mark the hours of the day.³ However, these clocks were not developed in an effort to mark the work day, to see when the next coffee break was, or track how much sleep one was getting. Rather, clocks were developed in order to schedule various spiritual activities throughout the day. “These clocks were used by the Benedictines to ensure conformity to their daily spiritual practices.”⁴ Therefore, according to Swinton, the original purpose of clocks was to help people to structure their lives in a way that conformed to what they believed. Thus, “monks were not expected to be punctual; they were expected to be faithful.”⁵

However, the clock did not stay in the church’s hands, and soon secular society began to see the benefit of clocks. Rather than alerting monks of spiritual practices, clocks in the secular realms came to order the work day, measuring productivity and the capacity for labour. Removed from the monastery, clock time began to take on a life of its own, free from the ordered Christian spirituality that it was invented to inspire. According to Swinton, clock time “separates and compartmentalizes the various aspects of our past, present, and future lives. This mode of time creates the impression that time is fragmented: we have family time, leisure time, market time, study time, prayer time, quiet time, and devotional time. Time is created as a series of dislocated fragmented moments held together by the transient necessities of human desire.” 6  In a very real way, this fragmented understanding of time has come to dominate how people today conceive time.

At first glance, one may not see how such a fragmented understanding of time can negatively affect people with disabilities. Indeed, for many people with disabilities, fragmented time can develop into a routine which provides security and stability in one’s navigation of the world. Where the problem lies is when fragmented time becomes the primary mode of understanding time. The purpose of fragmented time in modern societies is often not security and stability, but productivity. In acutely ordering and arranging one’s schedule, the modern citizen attempts to control time in order to maximize the amount of productive output they can attain each day.

Swinton notes the particularly dehumanizing effect that such an understanding of time can have on people with disabilities. Drawing particularly on the experience of people with dementia, Swinton narrates the horrifying attitude that many have towards people with dementia by drawing on an example from the Presbyterian Church of Scotland’s magazine Life and Work. In a 2008 interview with British philosopher and ethicist Baroness Mary Warnock, the church magazine published the following: “If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives—your family’s lives—and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service.”⁷  Perhaps unsurprisingly, Warnock’s proposed solution to the “problem” of dementia is euthanasia. In this interview, Warnock’s logic is clear: people with dementia should be encouraged to kill themselves because their lives are a waste of time.

Warnock’s logic about people with dementia stands as a stark representative of what can happen when values the values of temporal productivity stand as the primary marker of what it means to be a good citizen in modernity. In cases such as Warnock’s, Swinton notes that “those deemed incapable of using their time productively are denied any inherent right to live. Why? Because they are an economic burden on the state, a social and relational burden on their families, and a burden on the time of lay and professional health-care workers.”⁸ If people with dementia in particular, and people with disabilities in general, are a burden to society, this burden is the way that they cut into our productive use of time. People with disabilities challenge the way that we order and structure our lives. They challenge where our priorities lie, where our hidden gods dwell. Again commenting on Warnock’s logic, this valuation leads Swinton to conclude that “in this understanding our ultimate value and indeed our personhood relates very closely to the ways in which we are assumed to be able to inhabit and use time.”⁹ People with disabilities not only challenge our conceptions of time, they challenge the very ways in which we personally inhabit time.

Where do we go from here? If modernity’s fragmented valuation of time is inherently oppressive for people with disabilities, where do we turn to craft our conceptions of time? We certainly cannot operate without or outside of time, as time is a created good by God that, understood properly, has the potential to worshipfully order our lives. The solution, therefore, is not to get rid of time—as if we could get rid of the rising and setting of the sun, or the changing of the seasons—but rather to re-evaluate our conception of time in light first of the Word made flesh, and then, for our purposes, in light of people with disabilities.

The important move that Swinton makes in Becoming Friends of Time is his attempt to get Christians to move from understanding time primarily through the clock and rather through God’s time. But this move is not straightforward. It involves a rewiring of our thought processes, a reorientation of the way that we see the world. What then does it mean to move from clock time to God’s time?

Drawing on Book XI of Augustine’s Confessions, Swinton begins to narrate his understanding of God’s time by noting that, for Augustine, time is a creature, that is, it is something which is created. “Time is not simply something that has always been there and into which God slips creation like a foot into a slipper. There was a time when time was not and a time when time was. Time is something that came into existence simultaneously with creation. It is a dimension of creation.”¹⁰ If time is a creature, and not an eternal entity in which God has always operated, it means that time comes from God. In creating time, God created a purpose and telos for time. So what is the purpose of time?

Swinton continues: “Time is not an impersonal, free-floating commodity intended for the satiation of human desire. It is an aspect of God’s relationship with the world, a gift from a loving Creator. Time is best conceived as an aspect of God’s love for the world.”¹¹ Time is the way that God relates to the world. It is the way that God is able to show God’s love for the world. We see this most notably in the incarnation, when the eternal God who is outside of created time enters into this very creation as a man among other humans.

If time is from God, and God has come to inhabit time, it means that the fullness of time is not found in busyness, productivity, or jamming one’s schedule as full as possible but exactly in the way that God relates to the world. To live in God’s time means living in the recognition that we cannot do anything to control or manipulate time. Time is given, and only God is in control of that. However, our response to the gift of time need not be to use it as efficiently or productively as possible. Rather, to simply be and live in the wonder of God’s time is already an appropriate response to the God who has lived and ordered and fulfilled time.

For Swinton, living in God’s time involves slowing down. Drawing on Kosuke Koyama’s book Three Mile an Hour God, Swinton suggests that love has a speed, and that speed is three miles an hour. “Koyama points to the fact that the average speed at which a human being walks is three miles per hour. Jesus walked at three miles an hour. Jesus walked slowly.”¹² According to Swinton, love must move slowly if we are to love, know, and truly be with an other. This has profound implications for people with disabilities who often are not able to move at the quick speed of others. Love requires slowing down some of the time. However, I want to move beyond Swinton—or perhaps not move as far as Swinton has—and suggest that while love requires slowing down, to simply slow down is not to love. Rather, the place which we must situate ourselves in relation to God’s time is simply in the fact that as God has come in Christ to inhabit the world of time, we can live in the recognition that God has sanctified time, and to be attuned to God-in-time is to begin to conceive time properly.

To live in God’s time means that speed ought not to be the primary category by which we mark time. Time is fulfilled by living life in the Spirit, and the speed by which that occurs is at best a second-order priority. To conceive of life in God’s time means removing ourselves from the fragmented valuations of time central to modernity, as noted by Swinton above, and developing new categories by which to understand time. Thus, it is my suggestion that it is patience, not speed, which can function as a better category for understanding time.

It is my contention that moving our focus from speed to patience involves a shift in focus from the pace at which we move through the world to an attentiveness to the ways in which God moves in the world. Following the work of Paul Doerksen in his essay “The Politics of Moral Patience,” I want to contend that patience can function as a lens for discerning what it means for Christians to not only live as disciples of Jesus Christ (as Doerksen suggests), but also to live into an understanding of God’s time. For Doerksen, we begin to understand patience as we understand God’s action towards the world. God has chosen and continues to choose to love humanity in freedom, and this means that, despite humanity’s inherently sinful nature, humanity is allowed to live and grow and develop as creatures in God’s love.

Because God is patient with us—and indeed is the true and perfect source of all patience—humanity too is granted the capacity to live patiently in God’s time. For Doerksen, it is exactly because God has acted patiently towards us that we can live released from the dominating power of self-reliance. We can rest assured that our problems are not our own to solve, but that God will walk with us through our struggles. To live free from this dominating power means that we are free from fragmented understandings of clock time that rely on a personal ordering and filling of one’s schedule. To live free from this dominating power means that productivity and efficiency no longer reign, because someone else is in control of our lives. Ultimately, for Doerksen, to live free of this dominating power “is not some misguided notion that we know the future and how things might unfold, or that we can control the shape of that unfolding. Rather, the future remains open precisely because it is the arena of God’s activity, which Christians are able to understand to some degree — not in terms of apocalyptic timelines or calendars or some such speculative activity—but in terms of the shape that we have seen in Christ by the power of the Spirit.”¹³ 

To live into God’s time means to live in the reliance that just as God has acted in the world on humanity’s behalf, so too will God continue to act in the world on our behalf today. To live into God’s time allows us to release ourselves from the notion that we have to fill our schedules as much as possible, that we have to do as much as possible, in order to be good citizens, or even good disciples. To live into God’s time allows us to begin to see that something like disability or dementia does not cause one to lose their personhood, that caring for them is not a waste of time, but that in God’s time we can entrust God to continue to provide for each and every person regardless of what society deems to be an ability or disability.

To live in God’s time allows us to be present in each moment, for each moment is in time created by God. This means that the perceived mundane tasks of caring for an individual with disabilities such as feeding, bathing, and administering medication are just as much tasks we should praise God for as celebrating birthdays, going for walks, or singing songs together. Each and every aspect of care, whether done with speedily or slowly, ought to be conceived as an act done in God’s time. Furthermore, we need not to hasten people with disabilities through tasks which we could perform quicker on our own, for perhaps they are showing us a way to live into God’s time.

Understanding the constraints that clock time has put on people with disabilities is a way to recognize the debilitating nature that modern conceptions of time can have on a particular group of people, but the conclusions that reconceiving time have led us to are valuable for all people, regardless of how one understands disability. To move from living under the constraints of clock time to living in God’s time means that we must reconceive nearly everything that we do, for regardless of our new lens of viewing time, we remain citizens under time’s constraints.

It is for this reason that we must conclude with some sort of practical advice, some way to begin into God’s time, so that we are not left with a theory of God’s time yet remaining under the domain of clock time. For this, I suggest that the Red Pastor of Safenwil can provide us with a place to begin. According to Karl Barth, in a sermon preached to prisoners in Switzerland in the mid-twentieth century,

God always gives us strength for one leg of the journey at a time. At each stage we are promised that he will continue to provide additional and greater strength as needed on our way into the future. The powers we receive each time somehow enable us to do the very things we had been incapable of doing so far. God does not distribute the full ration all at once. He apportions it from one day to the next. You will not be a rock of strength overnight. Neither will you remain a weakling, worth nothing but writhing, throwing up your hands in despair and falling on your face (that will happen often enough!). God gives you strength and power to become [hu]man, modestly yet determinedly, who goes his way, humbly yet courageously, and is strong and grateful: strong because it is God’s almighty grace for which he is grateful.¹⁴ 

Barth encourages his listeners to be present to the movement of the Spirit in each moment. When living patiently in God’s time, each person is given the strength to accomplish the task which God has set forth in front of them. These tasks will likely be what the world of conceives as small things, lacking the flash and flair of the plethora of self-help programs that we put our hope in.

Living in patient reliance on the Spirit allows us to look beyond the categories of ability and disability and towards how the Spirit is at work in the lives of particular people. It shows us that despite modernity’s values of efficiency, productivity and speed that an alternative way of conceiving time is possible. Finally, living in patient reliance on the Spirit offers a model for discipleship that properly orders our conception of time and thus how we live and move in the world God has created.

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