Time, Gender, The Sacred and Everyday Life

Akke van der Kooi (Protestantse Theologische Universiteit, location Kampen)

Introduction
This article deals with time, more precisely with women’s time. Time as we perceive it as women searching for a new understanding of ourselves, of our world, of the divine. Time as we let it imprint our lives (in our bodily existence, in our imagination) in such a way that it opens up new possibilities to connect us with the dimension of what we commonly call the sacred. I will focus on texts and paintings by women in which they express an innovative conception of time out of which I believe a new vocabulary for speaking about the sacred and human existence can be opened up and developed. This interwovenness of women’s views on time and a new understanding of the sacred is my main subject. As such it will be a contribution to the central issue addressed by this part of the book: how can gender-informed thinking about place and time in everyday life lead us to a new way of experiencing and reflecting on the sacred beyond the old dichotomies in thinking about transcendence: in terms of the holy and the profane, linear and cyclical thinking etc.
This undertaking methodologically requires giving attention to three interactive elements: context, text, theme. The context is the course of modernity since the Enlightenment and the way it generates a specific view of time that dominates human lives in the West and influences their religious convictions and theological discourse. I will briefly address this in order to be able to point out in the next section the difference women make in resisting the limiting force of dominant time perspectives. I cannot do that without asking: how to speak about “women’s time”? Does there really exist such a thing? And if so, in what sense? Here I shall introduce some observations which can be found in the feminist debate on time in order to sharpen my focus for the following explorations. The text (broadly understood) is given in some selected artistic expressions by women, which I am going to explore as examples that reveal other time dimensions than the dominant ones we are familiar with, that is, the linear and the cyclical. In this exploration I will come closer to some substantial themes which are hidden in these expressions and which tell us something new about the relation between time and the sacred in everyday life experiences.

Modernity, Temporality and Theological Discourse

Thinking about time is as old as humanity. The experience of time belongs to the fundamentals of human existence. Ordinary people’s wisdom in the region where I live says that when somebody has died: he or she is “uut’e tied” (fallen out of time). As soon as we think about the temporality of our existence we get in touch with oppositions which are anchored deeply in philosophical and theological thinking through the ages and in ordinary people’s religiosity: eternity or endless time versus finitude; divine time versus human time etc. In classical theistic thinking, the idea of eternity employed here has its roots in Plato’s definition of what is everlasting, unchanging, and perfect. It was developed further in the thought of Plotinus and Augustine. Eternity took the meaning of God’s timelessness. In contrast, human beings are seen as temporal, changeable and corruptible. God is unchanging, not subject to temporal decay. These distinctions have endured through the ages in mainstream reflections in philosophy of religion and theology. Linking temporality to reflection on creation in theological discourse made things even more complicated: on the one hand creation as opera dei ad extra (created by God) belongs to God’s world, comes from God and returns to God (this notion has been developed in terms of the so-called “history of salvation”, a linearly determined way to God’s kingdom); on the other hand, creation is subjected to the cyclical pattern of all life in withering and dying. The way in which these oppositions between eternal and temporal life became construed in theological discourse instigated a hierarchical order in which the finite order was given a negative position in comparison with the eternal. It can be said that this hierarchal order includes gendered implications: it reflects a specific view on the relationship men-women. Man was linked to “male” linear time of project and history and via this connection with the divine plan with the world; woman as the Other was seen as belonging to the finite and cyclical dimension of time. Within this perspective the sacred belongs to the dimension of the eternal; it belongs to the sphere of completeness and wholeness which we as human beings lack. Only in a derivative sense can one say that times, places, persons are “sacred”, near to God. The sacred is connected with specific times (worship, churchly feasts) referring to the eternal world. In this way of thinking, the sacred and finitude stand in opposition to each other. And because of the fact that women in mainstream theological thinking are more connected with the cyclical and finite dimension in stead of with the linearity of project and history bound up with God’s future, their expressions and experiences do not seem capable of expressing something substantial about the sacred. In modernity, however, theistic thinking with its distinctions between eternity and time came under attack, not in the last place because of the phenomenon of what we call a rising secularity. What happened with time in a secularizing modernity? How does this affect the relationship of women and time? In the following I shall move from general reflections on these kinds of questions to my main subject: the way women articulate their views on time and the sacred under contemporary conditions. Do women’s views on time challenge the dominant “male” view on time in a secularized world and if so, what then are the consequences of their views for a re-thinking of the sacred?

I start with some remarks about the shifts in perspective on time in modernity. For this purpose I use the recent book by the Canadian philosopher and sociologist Charles Taylor A Secular Age (2007), because Taylor tries to illuminate among other things the relationship between time and the sacred I am discussing in this article. Taylor’s approach has to be refined and advanced from a feminist perspective. In the following sections I will give a (small) contribution to that task.
In A Secular Age Charles Taylor has written a “metanarrative”, as he calls it, about how we in our time have arrived where we are now. In Taylor’s story about secularisation since the Enlightenment the change in the view on time plays a key role. He calls this change one of the three conditions which makes modern secular society possible, besides the disenchantment of the world which leaves us with a society that is superficial and bureaucratic, driven by rules instead of thoughts, and the loss of the intertwinement of the social and the sacred, causing the emergence of a society without shared religious convictions. The change in thinking about time entails the disappearance of entangled conceptions of time as they existed in pre-modernity, in which the events in ordinary (secular) time or everyday life were understood and coloured by their place in relation to higher times, such as (platonic or biblical) conceptions of eternity or the time of origins which can be recalled in liturgy and feasts. What remains is a homogeneous time structure: the time we have and make as mortal subjects. This time structure is empty, a kind of container, indifferent to what it fills. Paradoxically, this homogeneous time, this time shaped by human beings themselves, is a time that programs people. We are entangled in secular time, strengthened as it is by the very massive surrounding of measured time we have woven around us in our civilization. It is a time frame that works as an “iron cage”, in the famous formulation of Max Weber (“stahlhartes Gehäuse”). This is a view on time in which time is dominated by linearity and clock time. We all have experience with the “tyranny of time” (Robert Banks). That makes time an instrument of power, although the gender aspects of this issue seem to be neglected in Taylor’s analysis of this conception of time. It is clear that in modernity it is not that simple to connect time with “higher” times or with ideas of eternity. Even if human beings are religious their conditions for being religious are still purely secular. Religious people too are living in this secular frame and cannot put it between brackets when giving shape to the religious dimension of their lives. Homogeneity and emptiness are the main characteristics in the modern consciousness of time, according to Taylor. We are locked in an immanent frame. In the analysis of Taylor one senses a desire to look for the possibilities where the closeness of the modern world view can be interrupted (e.g. in the phenomenon of pilgrimage or carnaval). But the central theme is that secularity implies a view of time as homogeneous, without having holy junctions. All the events are part of the same homogeneous time. In a secular time view one can only imagine society in a horizontal way, not related any more to high points. In his opinion, that has broken up our possibilities of viewing time other than as an instrument, or as something that has to be managed, put together. So we have arrived in a rigid timeframe, which leads us into a kind of mental desert. Taylor calls the human self-understanding which is the product of living in a secular frame without holy junctions “a buffered self”: when their life is no longer bound up meaningfully in higher times, human beings will shield themselves from all kind of external impulses in order to survive in this new order of secular time. At the same time Taylor states that one has to doubt that human beings ever could live in such a homogeneous empty time. We need a kind of mini-kairoi; telling stories, memorials, unprogrammed moments too. We need them as trajectories to the discovery of a meaning that in earlier times was held by the connection with higher times or the eternal. In short: for Taylor it is a fact that the movement to a secular time as we are going through now, carries with it the threat of meaninglessness of our life. That is the reason for his sympathy for such movements as romanticism because of their resistance to a hardening of society. According to Taylor there are still enduring residues of religion and the spiritual life, and we should try to discover them. The depths of humanism have survived as spiritual values, that is a lesson one can draw from his book.
In spite of the brilliant analyses and erudition, one feels uneasy with Taylor’s book from a feminist point of view. It is too much a book about a man’s world. A conversation with what is going on in the feminist debate on time is lacking. In the following I will focus on the issue of time in lived life itself, lived and articulated in artistic forms by women in recent times. The three works of art I have selected have one thing in common: they are expressions of women of age. Their work shows us something of a view on time that is free from being influenced or evoked by male-dominated thinking of time, including theologically oriented visions. I see it as a source of resistance to the dehumanisation caused by the tyranny of linearity and clock time in modernity as described by Taylor and as a source for developing new perspectives on the sacred. In order to collect tools for analyzing their work, I will start in the next section with some important observations from the feminist debate on time.

Lived Time in Women’s Experience and Imagination

To consider lived time as articulated in paintings and poems by women is to consider interpretations of this lived time. These paintings and poems are not the same as everyday life practices and events like cooking, having a child or growing ill. But the artistic expressions I have selected can be seen as a reshaping of these practices and events, a kind of condensing by which its expressiveness is increased, in a multidimensional way. I use this focus on lived time as a vehicle to explore what it can tell us about new alternative avenues for communicating the sacred in everyday events and experiences. “Lived time” thus functions as one possible way of sharpening of what is meant by the more general expression “everyday life”. As announced, I start with some remarks about central issues in the feminist debate on time of the last decades.

Some observations from the feminist debate on time
For a long time feminist reflections on time focused on well-known issues like linear versus cyclical time, objective (given) time versus subjective (experienced) time or social versus biological time. This reflection was especially stimulated by impulses from the literature of the so-called modernists in Great Britain like D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, who instigated a renewal of the narrative form in prose in the beginning of the twentieth century. The focus on time is central in their work because of the growing threat that time as measure of production implies for humanity. I give a brief explanation as a background to recent feminist reflections. Besides that I want to show that we get in touch here with alternatives for thinking time in modernity which have been insufficiently noticed by Taylor. Time in the work of these authors serves as a strategy to guarantee the worth of the individual. That is why these early twentieth-century writers concentrate on the subjective approach to time, instead of to the public time of the clock. Connected with that is the emphasis on memory. Especially the linear form in literature is questioned in order to undermine the tyranny of public time. Woolf for example, in famous novels like Mrs Dalloway (1925), investigates in what way the time of individual consciousness, of inner time, can be reconciled with the public time of history, of outer time. One can say that in this novel Woolf already gives answers to the problems which Taylor outlines a century later in the above-mentioned book: her female characters resist being programmed by the punctuated time of the clock. In the way they develop their own self-understanding in relation to their time experiences they show the possibility of a breakdown of the “buffered self” as Taylor has characterized the modern human self. Let me say something more about this novel.
Although Woolf in Mrs Dalloway especially focuses on the experience of the time of the consciousness, the inner musings of the characters in the book are interrupted by mechanically measured time. There are clocks that constantly sound; threatening, limiting the here and now. There is a sentence that is constantly repeated: “the leaden circles dissolved”. This emphasizes the compulsory artificiality of clock time, which dissolves as attention shifts to the inner time of consciousness in the novel. What gives meaning to life is not the passing of time as measured units, but the inner sense of time, and the meaning of specific moments of beauty, love, pain and death. Consciousness of growing older and of a death at hand creates an attentiveness in Woolf’s characters to the here and now and generates a discovery of meaning in singular moments which offer completeness. One illustration: although the time that is passing is measured by Big Ben’s threatening “leaden circles,” Clarissa Dalloway is able to redefine time as “the moment of this June morning,” firmly fixing herself in the present.
This, what we can call synchronic, dimension of time, in which several temporal threads – biological, social, chronological, cyclical and linear – become interwoven, allows Woolf to escape the limiting shackles of linear time, and opens a way to meditate deeply on the numinosity of an event, a thing, or an experience.

Those of us who are familiar with the themes of recent feminist conferences and publications on time will have noticed that in the last decades feminist theorists are looking for new conceptualizations regarding time beyond linear versus cyclical, objective versus subjective, patriarchal time versus women’s time. In the following I will not give an overview of the feminist debate on time but articulate two fundamental insights of recent feminist thinking on temporality and the existence of women.
In her contribution to the volume Taking Our Time. Feminist Perspectives on Temporality (1989) Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth starts by hypothezing that the formula “women’s time” is a contradiction in terms because of the fact that this formula is rooted in patriarchy. She states: “[…] women’s time qua time does not exist at all: except as an exile or an absence of time as it is conceived in patriarchal conventions, that is, as what Julia Kristeva calls ‘linear time, the time of project and history’.” Deeds Ermarth, following suggestions of Hélène Cixous, points to a destructive kind of logic in our Western cultural system: women have access to historical time and its project, personally, professionally and culturally, but only when they are prepared to maintain their role as Other, as victimized or repressed. This logic implies “that the hand sustaining them is the automatic hand of suppression”. One can ask: “Is there any idea of time possible now that is not phallogocentric?”
Important in my opinion is the direction in which Deeds Ermarth tries to advance a step. Her suggestion is to link temporality to language and only hence to discourse, instead of linking it to structures and roles in which women can only continue their existence as depreciated. In this way she picks up, not without critical remarks, central thoughts from Julia Kristeva’s famous essay “Le Temps des Femmes” (1979), in which Kristeva suggests a similar move to language in order to get new knowledge about the relationship of women and time. This move to language should be freed from static conceptions of structure, and stimulate us to search “for the crisis or the unsettling process of meaning and subject”.
I cannot discuss in detail here Deeds Ermarth’s criticisms of Kristeva’s essay. One of the problems she rightly points out is that Kristeva, when distinguishing between the symbolic (thetic) and semiotic (playful) powers of language, associates them with paternal and maternal functions. Deeds Ermarth states that we should stop validating the idea that biological difference is relevant to problems of meaning and signification, otherwise women will continue to be the excluded and the repressed, and will not escape from being the “carriers of whatever is not privileged by the prevailing discourse”. Janeway in her essay on women in history comes to the same conclusion: women’s history is “a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others”.
The alternative Deeds Ermarth points to with reference to Kristeva’s reconsiderations is a feminist theory which moves beyond the joining of the patriarchy (and its connection with linear time, the time of history and project) of first-wave feminism and the articulation of a matriarchal order of second-wave feminism (and its estrangement from the time of history and project), because these modes of thinking about time are still (re-)producing a gendered dichotomy, women as the Other, identified with “nature”, and men as associated with “mind”. The new step – in relation to the third wave of feminism – could be in line with Kristeva’s suggestion of “the crisis of the unsettling process of meaning and subject”. To concretize this: it implies the articulation of women’s lives as discourse and not Other. That discourse can be powerful and is able to break new ground by “throwing the emphasis off what is finished, conclusive, static, identified and on to what is open, playful, mobile, relational.” Interesting is that in this third way of interpreting women’s lives and its time-dimensions in terms of discourse some elements of the first and the second feminist wave can be integrated in a fresh way and at the same time passed by. Women’s lived time as discourse has linear aspects (first wave) and offers alternatives for the dominant male-oriented views of time and history (second wave) but it does not stop there. It opens a new understanding of the human self and religious experiences in daily life, as we will see.

I derive my second observation from the feminist debate on time from the reflections of the Italian feminist philosopher Luisa Muraro. In a paper for a conference in 1984 she describes the situation of women as beings who live a contradiction: “the contradiction … between otherness and the will to thrive, between the reality of having a sex which is not the one represented and recognized in the world and the fact that I want to be present and to count in the world”. We live an opposition between our otherness and our desire to win out. This can be seen in women’s lives in a lot of varying forms. Female identity cannot escape this contradiction, it resides not somewhere else, removed from the contradiction which we experience in the meantime. This contradiction has to do with the issue of time: when there is something I want to bring about, then I have to reckon with time. We should go on with dreaming about a new female identity but we should not just dream! We have to collect our strength and power to endure the contradiction we live in and use our time to do whatever we want in the here and now.

These two observations from recent decades – speaking about women’s lived time as a discourse and speaking about women’s lived time as living a contradiction – I will use as guidelines when reading my “examples”. The paintings and poems I am going to introduce can be seen as generating an authentic and autonomous discourse on time which undermines the dominant masculine time view on our world. They can be read as the uncovering of new modes of livable time. In doing so it does not veil the contradiction women have to live but opens a way to deal with it.

Temporality and Discourse. Three examples of lived time in women art and poetry
Sharpened by these observations from the feminist debate on time I now am going to listen to the work of three women artists in order to hear what they tell me about time, exposed as they are to the realities of finite existence and social events. What kinds of insights about time are conveyed when we read their work as a kind of discourse instead of as demonstrating the role of women as the Other? And in what sense does their work deal with the contradiction Muraro mentioned as unavoidable in female identity? Later on in my third section, I will discuss in what sense their insights facilitate a rethinking and re-conceptualizing of the sacred in everyday life, beyond the old dichotomies.
My selection of these three artists rests on the observation that each of them strives to communicate something about the realities of finitude, limitation and mortality in human existence. They communicate a kind of knowledge, which “unsettles” the meaning of project and history in patriarchy. That knowledge emerges from their practice of interweaving several temporal threads – biological, social, chronological, cyclical and linear – as I called this before. They know that every very moment has its own newness, in the situation of a death at hand as well as the birth of a child. Regarding the theme of the sacred their work seems to express that finite forms – a face, a bird outside the window, a hand of a grandmother – are able to carry along a transcendence, without defeating the finite or the earthly. In my opinion these expressions affirm that the sacred and finitude do not stand in opposition to each other.

Temporality in Art: Lived time in the selfportraits of the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck
Fig. 1, 1884/85 Fig. 2, 1912 Fig. 3, 1939

Fig. 4, 1944 Fig. 5, 1945 Fig. 6, 1945

Fig. 7, 1945 Fig. 8, 1945 Fig. 9, 1945

Fig. 10, 1945 Fig.11, 1945

Helene Schjerfbeck, born in Helsinki in 1862, was a gifted female painter, struggling with a bad health during her entire life. She made more than 120 oil paintings, watercolours and drawings and worked from her 14th till some years before her death in 1946. Poverty was one of the other things she had to struggle with in her drive to develop her talents and become an artist. As a young painter she travelled in Europe and was awarded a prize at the age of 27 at the Paris World Fair. Because of her health problems and family circumstances she returned to Finland and worked for decades in a kind of isolation. Art was for her a way to experience the life she couldn’t live. In her work she approached the little everyday things of life in a surprising way, without superfluous details and with a clear perceptible feeling for the beauty of everyday life (e.g. in the painting “Drying Clothes”, 1883). Her work shows a development from romanticism and expressionism to a kind of abstraction and reduction. This reduction to the essence gives her work an impressive force and a great depth. She tells as much as possible with as little as possible. Once, she wrote in a letter (1928): “Final details are always lacking in a piece of art, the completed is dead.” And elsewhere: “[…] We do not need to list all the details, an indication takes us closer to the truth.”
As a painter Schjerfbeck was dealing with the finiteness of human existence throughout her life. Often her works are the imagining of the disappearance of a form. She draws and paints matter which is freeing itself from its form. Although she was not an active participant in the Finnish women’s movement in the beginning of the 20th century, she gave her own contribution via the themes in her paintings by clarifying the importance of work in the life of a woman. From 1907 Schjerfbeck painted several portraits of women from different professional groups (e.g. The Seamstress, The Housemaid, 1911). What is striking here is the power and the concentration she expresses in these female figures.
Throughout her career she made selfportraits; esp. in the last ten years of her life she started with drawings and paintings of her own face. Simply because that face was always available, as she wrote somewhere. Annabelle Görgen writes that just like the still-lifes the portraits are silent monologues of the artist which are nevertheless audible to everyone. Her art is a kind of discourse. What does she tell me in these selfportraits?
When one looks at the whole series she made between 1939 and 1944 (before her death in 1946), then one sees a woman who paints her decline in a very impressive honest way. The face seems to fade away; in the last pictures she draws herself with hollow eyes and an open mouth, almost a shadow of a skull. That shows the uncompromising openness of her lifelong spiritual exploration. But that is not all. At the same time one is touched by the loving attention of the painter to her subject, of which these paintings are testimonies. Dignity remains. The less there is to see, the more there seems to be told about the essence, about the unique human being. A striking phenomenon in the portraits is that the eyes are painted differently: one is looking straight ahead to the world around, the other seems to see in a different way, exploring inside things, looking in depth. These portraits are kinds of tales about time from the perspective of a female painter. There are more kinds of time at work in the paintings than just the linear time of life between birth and death. First, there is the time of what has been painted: the time expressed in the face of a human being close to death, time as decline. But there is also the time of the painting. The image also shows something of the dedication of the painter to her object, working in an abiding attentiveness. The truth of what is told here is only to be found where both these times, the linearity of a life hastening towards death and the retarded time of a perception in depth, cross each other. In that interplay of times the truth of a person is revealed, a mystery which cannot be revealed by chronic time.

This is the discourse which is opened up by these overwhelming pictures. It is the result of a crossing of different times at work. Women’s time is not to be understood here as an inscription in a dominant masculine view of time. It is not to be understood as the playground which leaves dominant time perspectives unchanged. On the contrary: it “unsettles” (to use Kristeva’s expression) the meaning of project and history in patriarchy and gives it another valorization. What kind of valorization? Not in the sense of a personal colouring by references to illnesses or personal injuries. Not in the sense of demonstrating fear of life. But, in the words of Uwe M. Schneede: the selfportraits show “a series of fundamental witnesses of human existence within modern art: the maintaining of the own person against the horrors of the world and its mortality.” While honestly establishing her own fading away in her bodily existence, she – at the end of her life, during wartime, not at home – shows a power and creativity which is not touched by her approaching death but moved by a desire to see painted what made her happy, including the strength to open herself up to her passing away. We are encountering here a view of the self which is far removed from Taylor’s buffered identity and which is generated by a discourse in which several conceptions of time are at work at the same time.

Temporality and Poetry: Women’s life as “reversed flourishing” in a poem by Elisabeth Eybers
I make the same observation in reading a poem in which the poet Elisabeth Eybers (1915-2007) is portraying herself. This originally South African poet, who lived and worked in the Netherlands the second half of her life, like Schjerfbeck, constantly scrutinizes herself in her poems, honestly and curiously too. I quote her poem in the original (Afrikaans) and give the English translation in a footnote:

Uitsig op die Kade

Nouliks vertolkbaar wat hulle my vertel,
spreeus, eksters, meeue, eende, kraaie, al
die ywerige dagloners van die wal,
die reier so afgetrokke opgestel.

Ek mis myself steeds minder. Ek bedoel:
as steeds meer buitedinge my gaan boei
dan sintels van inwendige gevoel
tintel dit of ek selfafstotend groei.

Vermindering neem waarneembaar toe. Ek hoop
om te voldoen aan omgekeerde bloei
en leeg genoeg te loop om vol te loop
met wat vanuit hierbuite binnevloei.

As in the selfportraits of Schjerfbeck we find in this poem a kind of paradox: a letting go on the one hand and an abiding attentiveness on the other hand. Speaking about time, we are here beyond the linear and the cyclical. Where are we? We could perhaps call it a time-less time, or an “elastic time”, as it was called in an Italian conference about women and time: to think about things as just being there and of time as “elastic” and surrounding these things, always to be rediscovered “beyond the opposition between objective and subjective time”. This also is the time of a new self-understanding, a “porous self” beyond that of the “buffered self”, as Charles Taylor characterized modern self-understanding.
There is a reference in this poem to a new, still unknown flourishing whenever letting go is practised. That flourishing has its own time. In an almost mystical language (of birth) the poet writes: “tintel dit of ek self-afstotend groei”. It is the flourishing of a new “I”: a blooming amidst the world surrounding her, in which the “I” doesn’t need itself all the time but opens itself to what is coming from the outside, at first sight unfiltered. It gives expression to a kind of hope of something indefinite, which as such gives fulfilment. Consciously, self-analysis has been replaced by an abiding attentiveness. The poet tells something important: about the encouragement to stop finding your own image in the world around, and, in a reverse sense, to let your heart widen to the magnitude of the whole of life. There is no negation here of the hold of linearity on life: “vermindering neem waarneembaar toe”. But in a paradoxical way this decreasing is a form of growth at the same time. It is hidden in contrasting (temporal) words like “vloei” and “stol”. That is, when boundaries fade between outside and inside, between the “I” and the world. It is not a denial of the inner self, on the contrary. “Ek mis myself steeds minder” is the victory over the narcissism in which a human being – like Narcissus looking for his own image in the water – is still looking for her- or himself in the world. Fading away and finding of essence go hand in hand.

Both observations, which I have drawn from the feminist debate on time, can illuminate what this poem is telling us. It opens up a discourse of a woman who wants to reconcile herself with finitude and does so by exploring a new meaning of the self that forms an alternative to dominant perspectives on human identity and dominant views on time.

Temporality and Poetry: Women’s life as birth in a poem by Antjie Krog
In women’s views on time, birth and death are often connected in a way that opens up new ways of thinking about these themes. A good example here is a poem by another South African woman poet: Antjie Krog (1952). Krog is one of the most famous poets in present-day South Africa. She has been writing poems since she was seventeen and has been awarded many prizes for her outstanding work. She is also a journalist and prose writer. Her experiences with reporting the sessions of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (which was set up by the Government in order to deal with what happened during apartheid) for the South African radio, she reworked in the book Country of my Skull (1998). She wrote an impressive autobiography, A Change of Tongue (2003), in which she tells about the daily struggles in the township where she lives, with everyday life problems like electricity and sewerage. One of her last poetry volumes, Verweerskrif (2006), has as its theme the life of a woman growing older, in all its aspects. Remarkable is the honest way in which she investigates the inner world of female emotions and experiences and their relationship to the outer world. One of the cycles is entitled: “Liedere vir die pasaangekomenes” (Songs for the Newly Arrived), and articulates the birth of a grandchild in the perception of a grandmother. The third and last poem of this cycle goes as follows:

in die groot ewige brand
van die tyd, in die gang
van gebeure is dit irrelevant
dat jou hakskeentjie gistraand

in my handpalm was – klipglad
en spoelkoel. die wreef as vorm
in my hart getap terwyl ek jou help
om spelend oor die muur te ontsnap –

uit my hand na bo gestrek het jou
hakskeen ’n vlerkie geskeur. die bloed
aan my pols het ek afgelek terwyl
jy ligvoets en lank-uit die ruimte in trek

In this poem too, several times are at work at the same time: the time of the course of events in general and the time of this moment of birth. The interwovenness of these times in this poem generates the discourse which it contains. Striking in this poem is the meaning of the physical regarding the experience of time. The way the poem deals with the physical points to what has been called “a somatic eternity”: an encounter with the fullness of life, in and through the flesh. The intensity of the moment of birth has been put aptly by the references to the corporeal involvement of the grandmother (with her hands, heart and tongue). This is still more deepened by the connection with memory (“in my hart getap”). The body is constitutive of expressions about time in this poem. The feminine self, encountered here in the figure of the grandmother, knows about a time experience, which cannot be articulated without body images, and in doing so this self makes use of a dialogical form. The futility of this moment of birth, viewed in the light of the course of time in general as “irrelevant”, is transcended in this female experience of time. This moment can be called “a momentary taste of being” (Inez van der Spek), which provides a key to still unexplored meanings of being a human person in time. Sharing this time experience, in this case via the logic of the poetical, brings in a new world, an eternal world in which is nothing other than birth. Every moment has its newness. After all, the infant causes the grandmother as the helper also to be born anew: her heel reshapes the hand of the grandmother to a wing, along which the child (personification of the new South Africa) finds her way into the world. This poetical reasoning about the relation between a grandmother and her grandchild at this very moment is another example of speaking about the “porous self”, which I mentioned earlier. It creates a view on time beyond objective and subjective time.
Anyone who reads this poem attentive to a possible religious load, cannot get away from images like “my handpalm”, and “die bloed aan my pols”. Can’t we say that in this acting of the grandmother as a midwife, there is a reference, intended or not, to the divine or the sacred? (Cf. Psalm 22,10). Can’t we say this is telling us something of what theological language has expressed in the concept of incarnation? Something about the divine will to welcome and embrace all the created, and to share the human condition? In my last section I will come back to this point.

Lived Time and The Sacred

In this last section I return to the question of the relationship of lived time, gender and the sacred. We have seen in my first section that the relationship of human existence with the sacred has to be considered anew in a secularized modernity that has left behind theistic thinking about eternity and time. We heard Taylor suggest that we should listen to the experiences of human beings articulating their “mini-kairoi” or memories in order to discover the religious potential in it. Taylor is not a theologian but a male, Catholic philosopher and sociologist, and in spite of all the brilliance of his thought, he has a blind spot for the new avenues women show towards understanding the sacred and their selves anew. We saw in the previous section that contemporary female artistic expressions contain a discourse in which temporal structures and consciousness play a central role and challenge dominant temporal consciousness. In their work we discovered a simultaneity of different time threads which can be distinguished in lived time, which in turn is grounded in a specific cultural and social context. It can be argued that in this way they contribute to a revision of the temporal paradigm in Western secularized society where time is seen as linear and precisely measurable.
I am writing this article as a systematic theologian. I still have one step to go and ask myself: what did I discover in female artistic discourse as an opening to new reflections on the sacred? Before answering that question I shall briefly outline the general issue of temporality in theological discourse in order to identify my theological starting-point.

Temporality in theological discourse
In mainstream theological thinking there always has been an ambivalence regarding the valuation of temporality. Often it reflects a contrast between the perfection of timeless eternity and the imperfection of the temporal. I indicated above its gender-implications. On the other hand there is the confession that in the incarnation of Jesus Christ God truly got involved in temporality, which makes temporality meaningful. But how? Augustine for example, never could totally distinguish the timely and the fallen, the Manicheaen in him stays alive. The hierarchy of times of which I spoke in my first section, including its gendered implications, remained intact. One of the theologians who has thematized this ambivalence in theological thinking about temporality is the British theologian Colin Gunton (1941-2003). With regard to his thinking about time he appeals strongly to the pneumatology of Irenaeus, in which the eternal is not superior to the temporal but rather is a quality of the finite order. Created things are what they are, they have a temporal nature and can only be perfected in and through time by God as the creator of time. In his book The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (1993) Gunton gives a new doctrine of creation embedded in a trinitarian theology that includes a rethinking of the framework in which human life is lived. There are two interwoven insights in his reflections which I find very stimulating regarding my subject. The first insight has to do with his understanding of a central element in Christian tradition: incarnation. The second insight regards his emphasis on the particularity of human personalities within the communion of all creatures, which according to his observation is not safeguarded in postmodern reflections. I will briefly explain these insights, without going at length into the main outline of his book.
Firstly, serious research into the history of Christian doctrine leads to the conclusion that incarnation became a timeless presence inserted in time instead of a real divine involvement in the world of time and place. Gunton argues that a lot of the responsibility for the embarrassment in speaking about God in modern theological discourse has to be attributed to the medieval tendency to think about God apart from his temporal manifestation in the historical economy. This neglect of God’s involvement in the world of time and space had implications for the way in which people, not only believers, understand time and history. “It is the positive concern for living in time that Christianity submerged in a false eternalising of the divine economy, and which modernity has attempted to appropriate apart from Christianity.” Gunton calls this the tragedy of modernity and Christianity both. Secondly, Gunton complains that Western trinitarian thought has spoken about God’s substantiality in terms of a unity of being which underlies the three persons and so has lost “the particularity at the very heart of the being of God.” We should see it the other way around and start with thinking God as Many. God’s being involved in the economy of creation and redemption points to “a richness and space in the divine life, in itself and as turning outwards in the creation of the dynamic universe that is relational order in space and time.” Some of Gunton’s observations about our present age come close to those of Taylor about the homogeneity of time structures and cultural forms in modernity. Gunton is deeply concerned about the loss of particularity in our present age. Postmodern reactions against the universals of modernity, in terms of “difference” or “otherness”, did not succeed in improving respect for the nature of particular persons and things in the world. What we see is an indifferent individualism in which everything is “equally interesting”. I quote: “if you are real and important not as you particularly are, with your own distinctive strengths and weaknesses, bodily shape and genetic pattern, family history and structure, loves and sorrows, but as the bearer of some general characteristics, what makes you distinctively you becomes irrelevant.” The way Gunton rethinks the theme of particularity in theological discourse is interesting. The loss of particularity in the concept of God encourages the loss of a view on the particularity of persons. In the end we all disappear in God’s all-embracing oneness. The very notion of divine incarnation resists this. It implies God’s coming in the flesh, in all its finite diversity. Incarnation tells something about God’s drive, which will empower human persons to find their particular mission. Here Gunton rethinks an old theological concept (haecceitas: the “thisness” of things), which underlines the possibility of human persons to be themselves and to bring forward what one can call their own personal truth. This implies that the notion of particularity is connected with openness, with unfinishedness, with being on a journey. So, what we notice here is that stressing the meaning of particularity, rooted in a view of trinitarian theology which is not subjected to the logic of the one, allows us to do justice to the unalienable particularity of every human being.

Evaluation

Gunton’s proposals for rethinking the goodness and the diversity of the lived life in space and time via his considerations on incarnation and particularity are fresh and stimulating. But this rethinking is more or less preshaped by his ideas about the creating, conserving, redemptive and perfecting activity of God. That can imply a blind spot for the richness of knowledge enveloped in the events and expressions of the reality of everyday life. I understand the motives behind this kind of thinking and agree with him: we should not identify the divine and the human. But in my opinion we have to take the incarnation of the divine in our earthly realities even more seriously than Gunton does! The sacred – whatever that may be we always have to discover; theologically we have to say that it is an eschatological reality – dwells in our realities and asks for us to be attentive and to look in depth. This is what I want to call my point of departure as a theologian. Divine salvation does not need to come as an extra, it is already there but one can live without having perceived it, when one does not trust the possibility of encountering it in daily life, in joy and in affliction. To distrust that possibility is to shorten the meaning of divine incarnation in our temporality. The way we meet it is in a multiplicity of forms, and as such it always has to do with a surprising creativity, even in a situation of confronting death. We cannot give an a priori fixed definition of the sacred, apart from concrete situations; we would deny its indwelling character. My argument in this article thus far has been that contemporary women’s art and poetry can help us to discover this connection of lived time and the sacred, even if these artists do not articulate this explicitly or consciously. What they offer us with their artistic work, which is inhabited by time in one way or another, is, as I said, a new kind of discourse, a new language that gives rise to new thoughts about the sacred.

New avenues in rethinking the sacred
I stated before that in the artistic expressions I introduced as a form of women’s discourse, we encounter new modes of livable time. All these modes show something of what we already discovered in the novel by Virginia Woolf: a “being attentive”, a “firmly living in the present”. Not as a “buffered self”, but rather as a “porous self” that affirms the unalienable particularity of the human person, but this not in terms of a strengthening of one’s own boundaries. Now, at the end of this article, I am looking for the potential in these female views on time for a rethinking of the sacred.
I summarize the main themes that are generated from the simultaneity of different times at work in the artistic expressions, and which open up new perspectives for communicating the sacred in everyday life.
Schjerfbeck tells me about a paradox: confronting death and simultaneously a persisting desire to paint what makes her happy: her loyalty to her personal mission as a female artist in Finland in the first half of the 20th century. Eybers tells me about a “porous self”, a new view on growth that resists the laws of linear time. Krog tells about the mystery of our life as an ongoing birth, about the newness that is given in every moment, and about the role our physicality plays in getting knowledge.
I recall what I said before: there is no opposition here between the sacred and finitude, between the sacred and death. The play with different times at work in the paintings and the poems leads me to this conclusion. But if so, what then can be said about the sacred in lived time? More or less explicitly I have already said a lot about this in the previous section.
I summarize my findings briefly:
1. The sacred in lived time manifests itself as the “more” in the moments of our lifetime hastening towards death. We noticed this “more” in the paradoxes we met: a painter confronting her death in an inexhaustible passion for life; a poet who speaks about a growth that cannot be touched by death; a grandmother born in the moment of her grandchild’s birth. The sacred is the fullness of life that transforms our life time on its way to death into holy time.
2. The sacred in lived time is to be understood as an abiding nearness, which evokes in us a reverence for the unalienable particularity of every human being and which is “caressing and calling the particularity of each and every creature to its new births.”
3. The sacred in lived time is the overwhelming generosity in which we learn to participate whenever we risk living beyond the boundaries of a buffered self.

Traditionally the sacred is often spoken about in a fixing, substantializing or objectifying way indifferent to ordinary life events. But we cannot locate the sacred above or outside our everyday life. It is something that dwells inside our lives, waiting to be noticed. It embraces us, certainly, but not as a womb. It demonstrates itself not in the maximal or in the spectacular but in the minimal, in the particularities of our realities: in the dignity which remains present in mortality (Schjerfbeck, Eybers), in the joy by which one can be overwhelmed, in the language of the bird outside the window. It comes along in a movement which is recognized and articulated by the women, in an inexhaustible multiplicity: in their articulation of a moment of birth in which everybody involved is reborn (Krog), in their articulation of singular moments of an awareness of being blessed amidst a contingent reality of illness and mortality (Woolf), in their articulation of a moment in which they have reconciled themselves with themselves and with a death at hand, grown to a “selfless self”(Eybers).
This sacred as I come to understand it from these expressions is a reminder of the economic divine involvement in the world of time and space, which gives us reason to feel a positive concern for living in time.
In attempting to find new words for the sacred beyond the old dichotomies and in relation to the question of time, I repeat my earlier formulation: the sacred is the transcendence which is carried along by finite forms. Finite forms in all their richness are the bearers of a mystery. This formulation reminds me of a word of St Paul: we have this treasure in earthen vessels (2 Cor. 4,7). We only have to open our eyes to it, to perceive it and give it shape, like the poet who as a grandmother looks at her hand being transformed into a wing for her grandchild entering the world. Lived time in this sense has the potential to challenge the dominant “male” view on time in a secularized world that threatens the unalienable particularity of human beings.

The new self, broken out of “the iron cage” of a modernity preoccupied with linearity and measurability, comes into being where human beings in lived time are going to participate in the movement of the sacred which travels through life.

So I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us. The eternal as an idea is much less preposterous than time, and this very fact should seize our attention. In certain contexts the improbable is called the miraculous (…)
Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and if its plainness does not disguise it from us, as if we were visited by revelation.

Time, Gender, The Sacred and Everyday Life

Akke van der Kooi (Protestantse Theologische Universiteit, location Kampen)

Modernity, Temporality and Theological Discourse

Lived Time in Women’s Experience and Imagination

Temporality in Art: Lived time in the selfportraits of the Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck
Fig. 1, 1884/85 Fig. 2, 1912 Fig. 3, 1939

Fig. 4, 1944 Fig. 5, 1945 Fig. 6, 1945

Fig. 7, 1945 Fig. 8, 1945 Fig. 9, 1945

Fig. 10, 1945 Fig.11, 1945

Uitsig op die Kade

Nouliks vertolkbaar wat hulle my vertel,
spreeus, eksters, meeue, eende, kraaie, al
die ywerige dagloners van die wal,
die reier so afgetrokke opgestel.

Ek mis myself steeds minder. Ek bedoel:
as steeds meer buitedinge my gaan boei
dan sintels van inwendige gevoel
tintel dit of ek selfafstotend groei.

Vermindering neem waarneembaar toe. Ek hoop
om te voldoen aan omgekeerde bloei
en leeg genoeg te loop om vol te loop
met wat vanuit hierbuite binnevloei.

in die groot ewige brand
van die tyd, in die gang
van gebeure is dit irrelevant
dat jou hakskeentjie gistraand

in my handpalm was – klipglad
en spoelkoel. die wreef as vorm
in my hart getap terwyl ek jou help
om spelend oor die muur te ontsnap –

uit my hand na bo gestrek het jou
hakskeen ’n vlerkie geskeur. die bloed
aan my pols het ek afgelek terwyl
jy ligvoets en lank-uit die ruimte in trek

Lived Time and The Sacred

Evaluation

…Omdat het om mensen gaat !

Time, Gender, The Sacred and Everyday Life