The Second

A good friend of mine has found occasion to quote Kierkegaard on almost every occasion.  On account of this friend, an utterly decent man, I filed an item in the back of my mind to pick up something of Kierkegaard and meet him for myself.  Of course I had two unspoken, but prominent, impressions of Kierkegaard also in the back of my mind, and these date back many years.  The first brings a fear of dense prose and compact ideas stretched into long threads of meandering exploration.  Such imagery came through a certain tone of voice, a subtle turning of eye brows and lowing of posture, all of which shaded the few, or fewer, words, something like, “whoa.  Kierkegaard.”  But the second impression comes from similar nonverbal cues, of near-contempt and even ridicule for a thing called “Existentialism,” a category I somehow knew held claim on Kierkegaard.  And so, by means of these two impressions, both phantoms, years passed without my having met him....

I am, at present, reading a book called Time and Despondency , by Nicole Roccas, and before this I had read Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing , by Søren Kierkegaard.   About both of these I intend to write future commentary.   But for now, both have me contemplating the proper—for Christians—meaning and experience of “being present.”   Such clarification recalls me to my latent ambivalence to this term, which properly warns against the universal modern sickness of constant distractedness, but which also strikes a dismissive note toward purpose and meaning.   So I thought I’d sketch, briefly,  what it is to take each moment as it comes, to be fully part of it, then to let it go and move fully into the next moment . And that  is the domesticated dog.  A friend once observed that every day— every day—when he came home his dog would light up, happy to see him.   He’d then get a dog bone, and his dog would be so excited.   Every time. ...