knee-jerking

As I'm taunted by current events, the following by James K.A. Smith serves as a great reminder:

“there is a deep sense in which the church is a people called to resist the presentism embedded in the tyranny of the contemporary. We are called to be a people of memory, who are shaped by a tradition that is millennia older than the last Billboard chart...

We are a stretched people, citizens of a kingdom that is both older and newer than anything offered by “the contemporary”. The practices of Christian worship over the liturgical year form in us something of an “old soul” that is perpetually pointed to a future, longing for a coming kingdom, and seeking to be such a stretched people in the present who are a foretaste of the coming kingdom”

(via)