Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how conversion to Christianity affects the experience of time among Pentecostal converts in Nepal. The miracles happening in their lives merge their present with the timeless reality of the Bible, inviting us to ponder what it might mean to ‘live in a book’.

Paper long abstract:

Pentecostal Christians in Sinja, Nepal, radically reinterpret fortuitous events in their lives as ‘miracles’. ‘A miracle’, I will argue, is not really ‘an event’ in itself, but a hermeneutic process in and through which the past is radically re-experienced differently in the present tense of the conversion narrative, allowing the coming into being of an alternative future. In so doing, miracles transfigure the world in a manifestation of the Word conveyed in the Bible. This allows Pentecostals to partake in the imaginary reality of the sacred text as real actors. Approaching miracles as specific technologies of the imagination that support the existential search of a better life, this presentation illustrates how the Bible acts upon Nepali Pentecostals, significantly reorienting the chrono-logics that structure their lifeworlds after conversion. Miracles actualise a hermeneutic fusion of horizons between the converts’ present here-and-now and the narrative reality of the scriptures. This interlacing of narrative elements of the Bible with everyday life poses a fundamental question about the relation between lived experience, narrative, and time. Grafting upon the eternal becoming of Hindu time, the temporal map of the Bible dissolves this narrative timeframe into the timeless time of a finite written plot which, at the same time, keeps happening here-and-now in the lives of Sinjali Christians. So, actualising in the world the timeless potential of a promise that has already been fulfilled in an ever-present scriptural ‘past’, Pentecostal miracles in Sinja invite us to ponder what it might mean to ‘live in a book’.