p/c Dave Hoefler via unsplash
Commenting on the current financial situation Paul Virilio notes the lack of confidence which has come in the last couple of decades to animate the financial sectors of the globe. The players who are making moves and taking risks are by-and-large (with some exceptions) animated by a kind of nihilism about those moves. The players who are working to shore-up and secure things are by-and-large animated by a kind of terror over the possibility of collapse. Neither group, according to Virilio, seems inspired by any kind of confidence.
This is not, I think, just true of the financial world. It is true of the globalized world generally. It has proven increasingly incapable of real confidence. Confidence is the accident and the exception, not the rule. Why is this?
Virilio traces at least one contributing factor: our contemporary obsession with instantaneousness. Faster, more productive, quicker, more efficient, speed-of-light, now, gimme-gimme this instant, microwave popcorn, fast-food, immediate gratification.
The problem is that confidence, precisely because of what it is, “can never be instantaneous” (p.76). “It must be built, earned, over time” (ibid). Confidence, as the capacity to endure and withstand, only exists over the course of time. “It has a tempo.”
Our age is marked by a pervasive kind of craven fear, a general malaise of dread has settled on everything precisely because are losing the capacity to remain, wait, endure, and carry-on.
God has a holy remedy: sabbath. Cessation. God calls us every Sunday to desist and to abide without rushing to the next thing. In that resting and waiting we gain confidence, we learn how to move through time without becoming merely a passenger of acceleration and instantaneous gratification.
Are you afraid? Here’s an exercise, sit in the Lord’s presence and enjoy Him. Allow time to move. Let it happen to you for a moment. Abide for 5 min., saying, whenever you become distracted and elsewhere in our thoughts.
“Be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). That’s what builds confidence.