Watch commercials on television for ten minutes: we in America are addicted to immediacy (I’m reminded of the aesthete in Either/Or vol. 1). And we want faith the same way we want our burgers and fries: now! Fast food is cheap, and you usually get what you pay for. We want a spiritual experience or conversion or sign from God right this instant. It seems then we easily forget or perhaps ignore that faith is learned. To learn the faith, we are to walk in the footsteps of those who have walked before us; we are to listen to their words and begin to see their conceptual world of language. Faith is a habituation, and fluency takes time. Being addicted to immediacy, do we Americans have the patience and perseverance required for faith?
For me the arbitrary need for development has always posed a serious threat to God's putative goodness. Why slow instead of fast where fast results in the same thing? I think there are psychological answers to this: that is to say, it may be of the essence of redemption that it take time to unravel the result of the fall. God, in other words, cannot repair certain states of things quickly because it is of their essence that they be time "redeemed" as well. And that answer i can live with. I can also live with chronological sequences of events which were part of the original schema of human phenomenological (and perhaps physical) experience, and thus in order to be redeemed to them we must be redeemed in and over time. idk. It took me about a year to develop this (inchoate) little thought. But it has proved helpful to me--even at 4 in the morning, like it is right now.
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