It is one of the more clichéd remarks of our time to decry the distracted age in which we live. Ours is the generation of “instant gratification,” as the saying goes. And so it is.

As with most other clichés, this one arises from actual observations about our habits and movements within the world. The list is endless, and easily assembled. Scroll-culture reigns supreme. The happenings of yesterday are ancient history in the Twitter-verse. Sitting alone with our thoughts is almost unthinkable. We have forgotten the intricate art of good conversation, the kind that stretches on for hours, days or weeks at a time.

Indeed, the outlook is quite bleak.

Of course, the trouble with clichés is that they offer us little in the way of solutions. Their hallmark is the quick comment, the passing remark. They operate on the surface, spelling the cessation of long reflection on a matter, not the beginning.

Ironically then, the endless opining on this question, while addressing a truly dire problem, does not—and cannot—take the issue seriously enough. Although well intentioned, the suggested remedies are quite telling. Perhaps a weekend away from Instagram is prescribed. Download an app for meditation, pocket your phone at the dinner table, gaze at the sunset instead of taking a picture of it—do all these things, along with others like them, and rest assured you’ve beaten back the distracted demon of our age.

I am deeply unsatisfied with these prescriptions. They are the band-aids offered to the man with a gaping hole in his chest, the cough syrup for the cancer patient. They reveal a fundamental misapprehension of that which is ailing us, and therefore, merely offer back to us a slightly modified version of continued subjection to its power.

Our need is not for more guilt-ridden screen reports reminding us how long we’ve been gaping at our phones. Our souls are yearning for far more. They seek, instead, the centuries-old rest of the cathedral, with its incalculable connection to the present moment and its divine anticipation of millennia to come. In the presence of such enduring beauty we are caught up within the rhythms of deep time; we adopt the habits of long art, the kind that transcends the fleeting vapor of our lives.

We are entrusted with the seeds of sequoias.

“Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.”

—Wendell Berry, Manifesto

Trees are mysterious creatures. They are timeless, yet supremely time-bound. Firmly situated within the landscape, they are fixtures of the present moment; and yet, they somehow defy captivity within its bounds, stretching instead to symbolize both past and future. This can be seen reflected even in their physical makeup: deep roots, intertwined with the earth, anchor them to the past; solid trunks speak of their connection to the present; long branches stretch forward into future seasons, bearing the leaves and fruit of countless years to come.

They have seen what this place was like long ago, have watched over its cycles of life and death through the centuries. They are the rooted nomads, the strangers in a familiar land.

This truth was impressed upon me as a young boy. I can vividly recall making my way downstairs to the basement of my aunt’s house in the city, where the roots of the large tree that stood out front had begun to churn up the carefully poured concrete floor as if it were brittle clay. It seemed as though the tree was saying, in its own quiet and confident way, “I was here long before you were, and I will remain long after you are gone.”

In The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien relays this mysterious quality wonderfully when introducing us to Treebeard the Ent, the ancient shepherd of the trees of Middle Earth:

“These deep eyes were now surveying them, slow and solemn, but very penetrating. They were brown, shot with a green light. Often afterwards Pippin tried to describe his first impression of them.

'One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present; like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don't know, but it felt as if something that grew in the ground—asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years.'”

To plant a tree then is a mighty deed. Bound up in such a simple act is supreme faith in the future: that the years will come, one after the other, and that this tree will matter within them. One cannot escape the gravity of such an action, for gazing up at a Sequoiadendron Giganteum, once a young tree in the days when Christ walked the earth, makes a man ponder the legacy of his life. How might he leave behind something that will, in its own noble way, endure just as long?

To enter into such an arrangement with a distant and future world is no simple thing. It demands of us a perspective we cannot easily muster, imaginative resources we do not readily possess. It reacquaints us with the ways our momentary actions give life and shape to a world in waiting. It asks of us the kind of foresight that is utterly alien to our instantly gratified sensibilities, and in return, grants us the requisite patience for such enduring work.

And yet, as much wisdom as a single tree may impart to us, as much as it may teach us of our relationship to time, it cannot wholly reorient our temporal perspective all on its own. For that, we must enter the ancient sanctuaries where the trees have been planting themselves for time immemorial, where they have steadily built a haven on the hillside or in the deep valley. This is a place where time takes on a different hue, where it is stretched infinitesimally, where a thousand years is captured in a few inches of topsoil.

Here in the forest the trees have long communicated through intricate underground fungal networks, sharing nutrients and warning of danger. Seeds from a mother tree lie dormant for decades, sometimes even a century, awaiting their own open space in the forest floor. Hundreds of generations of bacteria and bugs and beasts have found shelter within the undergrowth. Often, quick things happen here, but they are always swallowed up by the millenia before and the millenia to come. This is where patience finds its physical manifestation, where the rhythms of long years find their articulation through the slow changes of the soil and the burdened boughs.

To learn from these places requires a kind of imitative patience. One does not rush through the forest and acquire its secrets—an entire lifetime must be spent abiding there, listening quietly and adopting the slow habits of the place. Only then can a few fragments of its story be caught.

Dr. Suzanne Simard, a Forest Ecologist at the University of British Columbia, has spent her years doing this very thing. As her own account in a recent film reveals, it is a process that inevitably produces awe within us, moving us toward a posture of reverence:

“The forest is a holistic place, it’s a place that’s connected. You know, since I was a little kid I played in forests like this. They’re like treasure chests full of biodiversity, of genes, of species that are really, really old. This is a special little heartbeat in the landscape where these things reside. Six hundred years is a long time, you know; that’s twelve times as old as I am. And so you get that sense of history, of many spirits have been here before; not just human spirits, but many creatures have lived here and they still live here, and I get that sense that I’m not here alone—ever. I feel like I’ve entered into this cathedral, and the pews are full.”

And so she is right in describing a forest as a place of worship, for it does not speak merely of this particular moment, but intertwines the memory of all that has passed before with the magnificent tale yet to unfold within its coming years. It is a place which demands an acknowledgment of its history, and plants within us that unshakable faith in the future. It offers to us a divine template of creaturely harmony and astounding longevity, of faithful presence within a story extending far beyond the reach of our human gaze.

It is, in short, in the business of imitating eternal things.

“Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.”

—Wendell Berry, Manifesto

In a popular video taken from a debate on the existence of God, the late Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken critic of religion and prominent figure within the New Atheism movement, fields a question from an audience member. “If there is no God,” he asks of Hitchens, “why do you spend your whole life trying to convince people that there isn’t?”

Unsurprisingly, the central thesis of Hitchens’s reply was the notion that religion “poisons everything.” In particular, he argues that faithful adherence to religious teaching demands a sort of eschatological fatalism. True believers are, according to him, eagerly engaged in a headlong rush toward the end of the world. They are consumed with visions of messianic deliverance from the evil that has corrupted the earth, usually as a means of escaping the hard work of living well within it. Such anti-humanism must be opposed, he claimed, and to this end his life’s work was devoted.

This is of course quite the caricatured rendering of the religious project, more representative of a fanaticism that distorts orthodoxy to fit its own ends than true and humble faith. The opposite is actually the case: ours is a creed of stewardship and the cultivation of life. And yet, amidst all the impassioned rhetoric and sharp wit which marked Hitchens’s style, there is some truth to be found in his critique: religious adherents—and Christians in particular—are often inattentive to preparations for the distant future.

While this is rarely the result of the kind of disdain described by Hitchens, it remains true nonetheless that the modern Christian imagination is generally ill-equipped to wrestle with considerations of true longevity. That we who have received a divine commission for the sustained caretaking of creation for centuries to come are often lacking the necessary foresight ought to prompt sober reflection. And, anticipating the objection of a skeptical reader, far from requiring an abdication of responsibilities in the present moment, to “invest in the millennium” demands an even more attentive stewardship of our resources here and now.

What can be done then to regain habits of long preservation? In what ways can we strive against the continued contraction of our temporal horizons? How are we to become reacquainted with the vital work of preparing the world for those who will follow us within it?

The longer I consider questions of this nature, the more I am convinced that many of their answers lie in a renewed commitment to the creation of long art—art that will itself endure far into the coming ages, or that simply speaks of a distant time, transporting our imaginations along with it.

There is nothing novel in such efforts to broaden our artistic gaze, for the history of the Church on this point is a long and storied one. A dedication to the creation of artistry that reverberates far beyond the fleeting span of our mortal frame is a well established precedent within Christian thought and teaching. The cathedrals of Christendom stand as a testament to this, as do the countless sculptures and paintings and writings and poems.

Even beyond the rich historical tradition found within the Church, there are many recent examples of art that expand our conception of time, from which Christians can learn much. The Land Art movement of the 1960s and ‘70s marked a fascinating period of creativity, in which artists sought to escape the constraints of the gallery and instead permanently imprint their artistic vision on the landscape. The movement, chronicled in greater length here and here, produced early works like Spiral Jetty, an iconic project by Robert Smithson:

“Smithson used trucks to dump black rock and dirt into the Great Salt Lake, forming a 1,500 foot long spiral that is revealed or concealed by the rising and falling of the reddish, salty lake water. He spoke of the work ‘as connecting distant futures and distant pasts.’”

Charles Ross’s Star Axis is another captivating piece within the Land Art tradition that connects us to the rhythms of deep time. The project, which is still under construction, will allow visitors to experience various celestial cycles and consider how each one shapes our relationship to the passage of time. The centerpiece of the work is a long tunnel aligned precisely with the axis of the earth. The passage opens up toward the night sky, revealing the ever-widening circular procession of the North Star resulting from the slight wobble in our planet’s axial rotation. As one simulates the progression of time by moving upward through it, their view of the sky is increasingly widened in turn, slowly unveiling the expanding arc of Polaris on its 26,000 year journey.

Orbital Reflector, a project undertaken by artist Trevor Paglen and commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art, recently played its own part in drawing attention to the magic of the night sky. Launched aboard a SpaceX rocket in December of last year, the small payload unfurled a 100-foot-long balloon upon ejection from the spacecraft, reflecting sunlight back to earth-bound stargazers. Amid the turbulence of our age, it was Paglen’s hope that “Orbital Reflector encourages all of us to look up at the night sky with a renewed sense of wonder, to consider our place in the universe, and to reimagine how we live together on this planet.”

Long art can take many other forms as well. One example is the storytelling of Didrik Soderstrom, a co-founder of the Hnossa Project, which seeks to preserve ancient Scandinavian folk tales and myths. In his own words, the “Hnossa Project looks at the myths of the past and uses them as a springboard to dream the future and explore the present.” The result is truly gripping, and accomplishes this brilliantly—immersed in these tales, one feels instantly connected to all who have heard them before, and hopes to play a small part in passing them along for generations still to come.

Each of these endeavors represent their own unique and compelling artistic aims, but a single uniting thread runs through them all. Somehow, they both transport us far beyond the constraints of our transient existence, while anchoring us ever deeper within each particular moment we inhabit.

This is a beautiful mystery. It is the work that only art can do—and, in spite of Hitchens’s claims to the contrary, is all the more potent when informed by a robust theology of cultivation.

“Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.”

—Wendell Berry, Manifesto

David Brooks, writing in a recent New York Times column, reflects on Nihonga, the painstaking Japanese technique mastered by Makoto Fujimura:

“Nihonga is slow to make and slow to see. Mako once advised me to stare at one of his paintings for 10 to 12 minutes. I thought it would be boring, but it was astonishing. As I stood still in front of it, my eyes adjusted to the work. What had seemed like a plain blue field now looked like a galaxy of color.”

To participate in the creation of long art, to spend time in its presence—this is what teaches true patience. It conforms us to its own steady pace through the years, imparting wisdom, equipping us with far-reaching vision and a profound sensitivity to the lessons of the past. It is brimming with life that may endure for ages to come.

To plant a piece of art then is a mighty deed. Bound up in such a simple act is supreme faith in the future and its sovereign overseer: that the years will come, one after the other, and that this work will matter within them.

Forefront is committed to fostering a robust conversation on the intersection of Christian faith and the arts by publishing a wide range of voices and opinions. The views expressed here reflect those of the author.