I’ve been reflecting a lot about time during this Advent season. During these weeks, our present seems more refracted through the past and future than usual. We celebrate the birth of Jesus and anticipate the second coming of Christ in our worship communities. Outside of the liturgical calendar, time also feels different in November and December. In one moment, time seems to crawl as the winter solstice approaches with shorter days and many workplaces and schools slow, easing into the break. At another, the frenetic energy which accompanies holiday preparations makes time race. Since it’s clear that I receive time differently during this season, I’ve started to wonder more about how we perceive time or rather, choose to interpret it.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about Omar El Akkad book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which was announced as the 2025 National Book Award Winner in Nonfiction in late November.In this text, El Akkad “centers his attention on American and European complicity in the destruction of Gaza and the Palestinian people, arguing that mass apathy towards immense suffering is leading to innumerable fractures across Western societies.”1 While the concept of complicity first drew my attention, I’ve since become captivated by the title of the book. In a February 2025 interview, El Akkad offered insight into the title’s awkward phrasing. He shared that
…I’m just so preemptively furious at the moment, many years from now, when we’re gonna get all of those, you know, “Hiroshima”-type stories. The after-the-fact shared grief, the how-could-we-let-this-happen type stuff. I’m just so furious that we’re going to do it again…we’re all going to sit around and wait until the taking is done and the killing is done and everything colonialism needed it has gotten. And then we’re all going to feel sad about it afterwards. And I find myself so furious about that all of the time.2
The title, thus, aims to capture El Akkad’s fury at the problematic ways we relate to the past, present and future. In particular, El Akkad draws attention to how prioritizing the needs and desires of every present moment can obscure the hard edges of our past, present, and future realities. What impact might this have on how we see ourselves and our moral responsibilities? In our current context, a deep attachment to the present moment can magnify the costliness of meaningful action in response to domestic and international horrors and encourage inaction and apathy. Alternatively, at a future moment, attachment to that present could serve to minimize judgments of guilt and emphasize moral innocence and absolution instead, even if not warranted. With the title, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, El Akkad highlights the potential costs of present-focused encounters with time, including but extending beyond the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
By sharing his preemptive fury, El Akkad suggests that one way forward is to view the present from the vista of the future, one ruthless in its judgment and untouched by a present-focused interest in mitigating factors. I find this shift in perspective compelling. How might we act differently if we were preemptively furious about the injustices and atrocities unfolding around us? What action would we take if we allowed ourselves to be horrified, at this very moment, by the prospect of yet another how-could-we-let-this-happen reckoning? In some ways, this insight connects well with Matthew 25:31-46, a reading that immediately precedes the First Sunday in Advent in Year A of the Revised Common Lectionary.3 In this passage, a vision of God’s final judgment is offered in which all are divided according to their treatment of “the least of these.” While this text can be read as a forward-looking hypothetical imperative – if you want salvation, feed the hungry, care for the stranger, and tend to the sick and imprisoned – it can also be read backward, encouraging us to view our present and discern its moral obligations through the lens of God’s future judgment. It is the latter interpretation that resonates with El Akkad’s insights, albeit without the salvific elements. Rather than God’s judgment, El Akkad emphasizes the importance of our own, in its most radically truthful form. Given that Advent is a time ripe for transformation, I wonder if adopting a stance of preemptive fury might be a helpful and necessary complement to the more traditional approach suggested in Matthew 25.4 This is what I’ll be reflecting on in these first weeks of our liturgical year.
Notes:
1 “2025 National Book Awards Finalists Announced,” National Book Foundation News, October 2025, https://www.nationalbook.org/2025-national-book-awards-finalists-announced/.
2 Dan Sheehan, “Omar El Akkad on Genocide, Complicit Liberals, and the Terrible Wrath of the West,” Literary Hub, February 25, 2025, https://lithub.com/omar-el-akkad-on-genocide-complicit-liberals-and-the-terrible-wrath-of-the-west/.
3 For more on the Revised Common Lectionary, see https://www.episcopalchurch.org/about-revised-common-lectionary/.
4 For more on Advent and transformation, see Elissa’s “A Reflection on the First Sunday of Advent.” https://womenintheology.org/2025/12/01/a-reflection-on-the-first-sunday-of-advent/
Photo by Leanne Zeck on Unsplash.
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