We Thrown: Unto God

The last two posts (here and here) on thrownness have explored the way in which our being in a world marked by history and contingency is not an unhappy accident of life. Far from being deterministic, our being thrown into a history not of our making actually brings into focus certain possibilities in life that we may not have been aware of had we simply “kept our options open”. We also indicated that thrownness can bring into view our vocation in the history that we live in, if only we remain properly attuned to both the history we live in and to the promptings of God.

There is another, more profound, sense in which thrownness can also bring into focus our own relationship with God.

I only became aware of this sense when I started reading a book by my friend and colleague from the University of Notre Dame Australia, Renee Kohler-Ryan, who wrote Companions in the In Between. The book looked at the topics of companionship and divine participation in the thought of Augustine and William Desmond. This had been on my “to-read” pile for some time, but I was glad that I waited till I had finished reading Smith’s How to Inhabit Time, and consequently becoming at least a little familiar with Heidegger’s idea of thrownness.

This is because, as I soon found out after reading the introduction to Ryan’s book, that both she and Desmond had also used that Heideggerian language of thrownness, only this time the trajectory of that throw sends us hurtling towards the divine.

At the same time as our thrownness hurtles us towards God, the time of Advent is also a time to remember that, at the appointed time, God also kenotically underwent His own thrownness. In the incarnation, the Lord inserted Himself into a history which, under the aegis of sin, took on permutations and parameters that were not of His own choosing. Yet, the Lord not only emptied Himself into this history at Christmas, but committed Himself to it and redeemed it at Easter.

This willingness of the Lord to take the form of a slave to the thrown histories we have tried to manufacture without Him, and within which we ourselves have become enslaved, is underwriting our capacity to assist in the redemption of our own history. The event of Jesus Christ, starting from Christmas, opens the path towards us becoming, in Christ, protagonists of our own history, and curves our history, onwards, upwards and towards the divine.

A blessed Advent and happy Christmas to all.

NB: We will be taking a break during the Christmas and New Year season, and will return in late January 2024. Thank you our readers for yet another year of your prayer and support. If you need some holiday reading, check out my deposit of writings on Linktree.