When I look back at things I have written, I realize that I have a preoccupation (healthy, I think) with the themes of time, memory, and place. That's why it's pleasing when I discover someone who is thinking in a similar vein.

This happened today with Jill Carattini's "People With a Past," today's devotional from Ravi Zacharias Ministries. She points to the danger of presentism, a word coined by Richard Weaver to refer to the "cultural fixation with the current moment." Such a preoccupation with the present moment and its incident historical amnesia is a dangerous thing. If we forget yesterday we will be doomed to repeat yesterday's mistakes today. We have no context within which to root and test all the information we are bombarded with every day.

Even more shattering for me as a consequence of presentism would be the loss of connection to the past, a personal and cultural history that has shaped who I am. It is a past that can anchor me in the relentless cultural and personal drift that swirls around me. Recently I was trying to remember what it was like not to have a cell phone, a PDA, high-speed internet (for that matter, even a computer), and email. When I began work in my present position about 23 years ago, no attorney had a PC at his or her desk. Briefs were written or dictated. (If you have in mind a secretary perched on the edge of my desk, pen and steno pad in hand, hanging on my every word, scribbling shorthand -- think again. That was before my time!) There was no email. There was no internet (at least not for non-geeks). What in the world did you do with the time, some might say? Well, I recall a great deal more discussion, more collegiality, more lunches out with colleagues, and a generally slower pace existence. And yet it's difficult to put myself psychologically in that place today, to feel what it must have been like. The best approximation is the rare ocassion when there is a natural event, a hurricane, say, that knocks out power, creating a wealth of people time which would have otherwise have been filled with TV, internet, phone calls, and email. For a moment we are forced by circumstances to make do, and we rediscover a feeling we may have forgotten. We realize that things have changed significantly, and yet we don't remember.

All this to say that remembering the past is useful in the present: it may lead us to create and allow space in our lives for silence, conversation, and thoughtfulness. It may also help us not to let the present --- with all its currency --- be a tyrant over our lives. We don't have to heed the call of the present. I think sometimes we forget that.

As Carattini concludes, "For the Christian, history is all the more a sense of hallowed ground, for it is ground where God has walked and our faith is kept. We believe that history resides in the able hands of the one who made us to live within time. We believe that who we are today has everything to do with events we have not seen. And we live as a people called both to remember and to be ready, for we look to the author of the entire story, who was and is and is to come." Be wary of presentism, what C.S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery." Let the past inform the present and make it richer. Be critical of the "new," testing it to discern its value. As Scripture says, "Test everything. Hold on to the good" (1 Th 5:21).