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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how Christians in spaces of despair cultivate gratitude in the “specious present” (James 1890). My interlocutors embrace a theology and practice of “active abiding” and thus imitate their atemporal God. Hope is not limited to the future, but also reorients the past and present.

Paper long abstract

This paper is based on ongoing multi-year fieldwork with Christian organisations in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. It explores how these multi-denominational organisations cultivate hope in spaces of despair. During this research, it has become apparent that hope it not limited to the ‘not yet’ (Bloch 1986) future for my interlocutors. In their daily lives, there was little talk of the eschaton, the afterlife or the second coming. Instead, hope as epistemological tool reoriented the past, future, and the present. In this paper particularly, I will focus on the work this hope does in the “specious present”. In his theory of consciousness, William James imagined the specious present as ‘no knife-edge, but a saddle-back with a certain breadth of its own on which we sit perched, and from which we look in two directions into time’ (James 1981[1890]:574). I will unwind my interlocutor’s theology of “active abiding” on this “saddle-back”. At its core, this “active abiding” incorporated gratitude into daily life and faith. This cultivated gratitude was a great source of hope in the present, as well as a tool to reorient the past. The meditative action of “active abiding” centred my interlocutors in their present, and in their relationship to their atemporal God, who was perceived as constantly existing in a state of ‘the present’ in his atemporality. To “actively abide” was to consciously seek and express gratitude for God’s actions, but also to abide in the divine mindset.