Living in God’s Tense: Mercy for Yesterday, Love for Today, Providence for Tomorrow
There is a sentence that sounds like something Augustine might have said over a late coffee with a tired parish priest who had seen far too many funerals in one week. It is the simple counsel that the past belongs to mercy, the future to providence, and the present to love. The longer a Christian lives with that line, the more it stops being a slogan and starts becoming a map.¹
A Christian life is not one conversion but three, and they are all about time. The past must be converted from a museum of grievances into a field hospital for memory where mercy is allowed to practice its quiet craft. The present must be converted from a waiting room into a sacrament, the place where God’s love actually touches the skin and bone of a particular afternoon. The future must be converted from a spreadsheet of worries into the open horizon of providence where trust, not control, has the last word.
The strange thing is that these conversions happen at once and yet must be chosen again each day, like brushing teeth or forgiving relatives. The good news is that there are spiritual guides who have walked this territory with more honesty than fame, and they did the hard thinking for us in Latin and French and German so that the rest of us could try to live it in English while looking for matching socks.
Most people treat the past the way some people treat their basements. They do not go down there unless they have to, and when they do they come back up with webs in their hair and something they wish they had not found. Garrigou Lagrange worries about that basement of the soul because he knows that memory is not neutral. In his work on the “three ages” of the interior life, he describes how the Holy Spirit gradually purifies the inner life, including the imagination and memory, not by erasing what happened but by changing the way it is held.² Instead of replaying old scenes as accusations, grace slowly teaches the soul to see them under the light of the cross, where sin is real yet not final.
He explains that growth in hope involves a kind of night in which old supports are taken away and the soul is weaned from relying on its own perfectionism.³ This includes spiritual regret, the special hobby of pious people who feel guilty about feeling guilty. In that purification, memory is detached from self-trust and anchored instead in God’s steady will to save, which is a polite way of saying that God is more stubborn in mercy than we are in self-condemnation.
Adrienne von Speyr goes further and insists that Christian memory is not only healed but drawn into Christ’s own remembrance of the Father. In her commentaries on the Gospel of John and her meditations on confession, she describes how the believer, by sharing in the mission and suffering of Christ, learns to hand over even the most painful layers of the past into his filial obedience.⁴ Memory becomes not a private archive but a place of participation where Christ carries the believer’s history into his own prayer to the Father. In that sense, the past is not primarily our story about ourselves but the material Christ is already presenting in his intercession. Oooof. That is a good thought.
When mercy gets that kind of access, the past changes flavor. The sins do not vanish, the wounds do not magically stop aching, but their meaning shifts. Regret becomes intercession rather than self-fixation. Spiritually mature Christians are the ones who can speak of their worst choices in a voice that is not proud and not crushed, because the center of gravity has moved from “what I did” to “what God did with what I did.”
If the past is entrusted to mercy, then the present is no longer paralyzed by constant editing of what has already happened. Fr Jean Pierre de Caussade, who probably did not intend to become a modern classic for anxious lay people, gives the present moment a promotion. His teaching on “the duty of the present moment” and abandonment to divine providence boils sanctity down to fidelity in what is actually in front of us.⁵ In his letters, he describes abandonment as a trusting, peaceful surrender to God’s will in every circumstance, which means that the most ordinary tasks become the exact place where God’s will is accepted or resisted.
For de Caussade, there are two movements that keep circling each other like neighbors who share a fence. There is the active accomplishment of the divine will in the little duties of the day, and there is the passive acceptance of what God permits, from traffic to illness to those meetings that could have been emails. Holiness, in his very practical view, is not first of all about special experiences but about saying yes to both halves at once, doing what one must and receiving what one has not chosen.⁵ The present stops being an empty hallway between past and future and becomes a sacrament of God’s action, the point where grace is actually offered.
Mother Mary Francis, the Poor Clare abbess who spent most of her life within the walls of an enclosure, writes as if the present moment is made of glass and one must learn to see through it instead of staring only at its smudges. In her reflections on community life she treats interruptions, small humiliations, and kitchen work as sites where God’s love can be consented to with a very practical cheerfulness.⁶ She resists the temptation to escape into a fantasy future religious life, insisting that the nun’s true vocation is always located in the particular now that God gives, including all its limitations.
Her insistence on the sacramentality of the present means that love is not a mood but a way of inhabiting time. The Christian who lives this way does not chase spiritual experiences like a tourist chasing better views. Instead, there is a quiet insistence that this phone call, this spreadsheet, this crying child, this parish committee is the place where divine love wants to do something. An age trained by screens to treat the present as disposable content might find this maddening. It is, however, the only way to live a Christian life that is more than a concept.
St Elizabeth of the Trinity adds a contemplative depth to this very practical program. In her letters and retreat notes, she anchors the present moment in the indwelling of the Trinity, speaking of the soul as a heaven where God dwells and urging Christians to live “as already in heaven with the Three.”⁷ Her concern is not to escape outward circumstances but to help the believer live them from inside this awareness that God is present in the depths. She describes holiness as letting every action, no matter how small, flow from this interior communion.
In that light the present is not merely the stage on which we perform obedience. It becomes the interior meeting place where God’s love is received, sometimes wordlessly, so that external actions are the overflow of a hidden life. A Christian who lives the present this way is less frantic about outcomes and more attentive to the Person who is already here. Time stops feeling like a commodity to be managed and more like a gift that comes in small wrapped minutes.
Once the past stops shouting and the present is no longer merely tolerated, the future has a chance to be something other than an enemy. For many people, the future is either a fantasy retirement advertisement or an invisible fog of dread. Romano Guardini approaches the question of future and providence by speaking of Christian maturity as “acceptance of self in God.” In his work on Christian existence and freedom, he explains that real acceptance of self includes accepting one’s concrete life situation as the place assigned by God, which includes all of its uncertainty.⁸
In his meditations on the Lord and in essays on conscience, Guardini emphasizes that providence is not fatalism. The believer is not excused from thinking, planning, or acting. Rather, trust in God’s providence shapes the way those tasks are carried out, without clinging or despair. Christian hope here is not a vague optimism that things will probably work out nor a refusal to face possible suffering. It is the assurance, born of the cross and resurrection, that nothing lies ahead that can fall outside the wise and sometimes baffling will of the Father.⁸
Dom Hubert van Zeller speaks to this with a blunt kindness that feels almost like spiritual sarcasm, except that he clearly likes the people he corrects. In his books on prayer and suffering, he warns against religious self-deception, the tendency to baptize our own plans and fears and call them God’s. He describes how spiritual people can live “in the flesh” when they allow ambition, image, and the hunger for control to dictate their choices, while “living in the spirit” means leaving the disposal of life to God and referring decisions to the Gospel.⁹
This leaving of the disposal of life to God is his way of naming providence as a discipline. It requires the unpleasant surrender of the one thing we would prefer to keep for ourselves. Christian hope, in his account, is therefore costly. It is not an inspirational poster but a repeated decision to let God be God of the future while we stick to the humble business of fidelity in the present. That is why he can say that even when life appears to go wrong by every human measure, the person who prays and trusts is not ultimately disappointed, while the one who refuses this surrender will remain restless even if everything seems to go well.⁹
When mercy, love, and providence are allowed to shape past, present, and future at the same time, something surprising happens to a disciple’s sense of self. The person who once thought of identity mainly as a personality type or a career discovers that identity is now more like a relationship spread out over time. The past is held in God’s merciful remembrance, the present is inhabited as a conversation with God’s love, and the future is carried in God’s wise intention. The self is less a solitary project and more a shared work.
Guardini’s acceptance of self in God, Elizabeth’s life in the indwelling Trinity, de Caussade’s abandonment in the present, Garrigou Lagrange’s purified memory, von Speyr’s participation in Christ’s mission, van Zeller’s blunt call to trust, all converge here. They describe different angles of the same conversion in time, where the Christian no longer relates to life as a scattered set of disconnected episodes but as one story told by God and lived by a very imperfect but very loved protagonist.
Such a life stands out in an age that is neurotically nostalgic, chronically distracted, and professionally afraid. Nostalgia wants to curate an idealized past and ignore its sins. Mercy refuses that and insists on truth plus forgiveness. Distraction wants to skip the present in favor of constant scrolling into someone else’s life. Love refuses and insists that God is only met where we actually are. Fear wants to rehearse every disaster and call it being realistic. Providence refuses and insists that the future is God’s to govern. In that refusal and insistence, the Christian does not escape time but finally learns how to live in it.
In the end the threefold temporal conversion is not a clever framework but the slow work of grace teaching a person to say three things and mean them. About the past: “Lord, have mercy.” About the present: “Here I am.” About the future: “Into your hands.” And if those sound familiar, it is because Christ has already prayed them first.
See, for example, Rowan Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), for a concise account of Augustine’s view of time and memory.
Reginald Garrigou Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life, vol 2 (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1989), on the purification of memory within the growth of theological hope.
Garrigou Lagrange, Three Ages, vol 2, on passive purifications or “nights” that detach the soul from self reliance.
Adrienne von Speyr, Confession (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), and The Johannine Writings (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985).
Jean Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence (various editions), especially his teaching on “the duty of the present moment.”
Mother Mary Francis, P C C, A Right to Be Merry (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1973), and related essays on enclosed community life.
Elizabeth of the Trinity, Heaven in Faith and Last Retreat, in Elizabeth of the Trinity: Complete Works, vol 1 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1984).
Romano Guardini, The Lord (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1954), and The Virtues: On Forms of Moral Life (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967).
Hubert van Zeller, We Live with Our Eyes Open (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1954), and Suffering: The Cross of Christ and Its Meaning for You (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1997).
