I love to read, write and teach history. My love of history goes back to when I was about 10 years old. A few months ago a beloved uncle died, one who fed this developing passion by sending me history books in the mail from about that same age. One of the great encouragements of my life came when he, upon hearing in 2014 that I had finished my PhD in the history of Christian-Muslim relations, sent me a note saying ‘Congratulations to a fellow historian’.

But loving and ‘doing’ history is not just about sorting around in the dusty back corners of libraries, always ready for that serendipitous document that no one has yet perused. It is also about taking the past seriously enough to lament the brokenness and humanness of all those who have lived before. It may be in our own family histories that we need to lament, or our nation’s history, or the other side of the world. Certainly to research and write history well, we do need to have a level of detachment to the subject. But that does not mean that, especially as Christian historians, we are not aware of the pain of those that have gone before, but also the redemptive hope represented in their stories.

Last month I had the privilege of spending several weeks in Canberra, Australia, helping lead a seminar in Redemptive History. In the past few years I have helped lead or participated in several seminars and courses in this area both in person and on-line, in East Asia, India, Brazil and now Australia. I will perhaps have more to say in future blog posts about this time in Australia, as it was very rich to hear especially the voices of key Aboriginal elders in our seminar. Like other First Nation communities around the world, the complexity and diversity of their own desires for representation in present day systems of government, and historic reckoning with societal injustice against them for generations, is front and center in Australia right now.

I went to Australia wanting to have a posture of a learner and listener. I had been to the land many times over the past 34 years, but never in this kind of learning space. It was a new kind of bonding to the land for me, like I had never experienced before. Hearing the lament of those who had been stolen from their Aboriginal families in the 1950’s and earlier, and ‘given’ to a white foster family, only to be reunited decades later, was heartbreaking. To hear of fresh commemorations of a few of over 320 massacre sites, (the vast majority still not remembered with any memorial), in the past 200 years also bought a sense of hope in the lament. There is a reckoning going on with the history of Australia, that is not whitewashing and denying the past but facing it. For coming to true hope in the future means facing and lamenting the true history, including the pain and injustice.

During my last week in Australia, I purchased a new book by James K. A. Smith, a writer and thinker who teaches philosophy at Calvin College in Michigan. I had read a couple of his other books, but was not prepared for the depth of reflection tied to history in this latest one. It is titled ‘How to Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now’. I highly recommend this book, especially for those that are interested in not only the lament of limitations of seasons and life, but also the hope of redemption as we inhabit those places.

There are so many quotes in this book worth noting, and perhaps in a future post I will bring more of those. But for me the ‘timing’ of reading this book, coming so soon to my experiences with the history (and future) of Australia, was profound. One of Smith’s major themes is how to be ‘spiritual timekeepers’, aware of the ‘when-ness’ of our lives, the place and hour that we are inhabiting right now. But also the ‘when’ of our lives related to the history that has gone before, the cloud of witnesses that somehow is also involved in our present race. James K.A. Smith laments his own history in a family full of brokenness and limitations, yet also witnesses to how he has found hope in understanding the redeeming possibilities that also inhabit that brokenness.

In the Epilogue, on page 171, (and don’t worry, this won’t be a ‘spoiler’ for those of you who want to read the book), Smith quotes a prayer used after Communion in a church he visited in Washington D.C. Because of the power of this quote and its relevance to my post, I will quote it in full:

‘O God of our ancestors, God of our people, before whose face the human generations pass away: We thank you that in you we are kept safe forever, and that the broken fragments of our history are gathered up in the redeeming act of your dear Son, remembered in this holy sacrament of bread and wine. Help us to walk daily in the Communion of Saints, declaring our faith for the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body. Now send us out in the power of your Holy Spirit to live and work for your praise and glory. Amen.’

This prayer comes originally from Kenya in the 1980’s, forged in the context of lament for ‘broken fragments’ in their own context and history. It was written connecting the celebration of the Lord’s supper with the lament and yet hope of a present and future in the East African church. As the liturgy reads, ‘The broken fragments of our history are gathered up in the redeeming act of your dear Son.’ As those who lament the past, the missed opportunities, the deaths around us of those beloved, we also rest in the hope that Christ redeems. He gathers these broken fragments of our lives, our histories, our relationships, and unites them for all eternity with His own scars of the Cross.

Hope and lament belong together. They are both part of what it means to be a historian, someone who loves and cares about the past because we love people and nations, however much that love also leads us sometimes to hideous pain.