The Highway and the Future

Herbert O'Driscoll sent me a couple of email messages last winter that are very relevant to this Easter Season:

THE HIGHWAY OF CHRISTIAN TIME

We Christians of the late 20th and early 21st century have not only begun to go on many pilgrimages. We have also begun to travel a great deal in time. Past chapters of Christian spirituality fascinate us. One of these chapters - or ways - of Christian experience is what we have come to call Celtic Christianity.

It is always important to ask why a period of the past begins to haunt us in the present. To ask that question is to realize that it is because in some sense, unrealized until now, that past period speaks to our present experience.

Frederick Turner on the Faculty of the University of Texas said something I believe to be deeply true. "Sometimes", he said, "the present can free us from the shackles of the past and help us to build the future. But it is equally true that sometimes the past can free us from the shackles of the present and help us to form the future".

This is the reason for us spending some time together exploring the past, but doing so to open for ourselves some gates to the future. To stand at any point on the great highway of Christian experience is to see it emerge from the mists of the past and to disappear into the mists of the future. The point at which we ourselves stand on this highway is the place of our vocation.
(4 DEC 2009)

TWO WORDS FOR THE FUTURE

Jurgen Moltmann once wrote something I never forgot. He said that we have almost forgotten that in Latin there are two words for the future. One is Futurum. Futurum, he said, is the future we see stretching out in front us by our brainstorming, trend spotting, number crunching etc. It comes from OUR wrestling, He calls this the FUTURE OF SOCIAL CALCULATION.

But, he says, there's another future that comes towards us from beyond us, over which we have no control. We can't fashion its outline or calculate it. We grapple with this future by asking a question. "What kind of X (parish...diocese...state...country...family etc etc) would we like to have in (fill in a date). In other words we in a sense "dream" this future.

Moltmann says that this dreaming can be very powerful. When a society starts dreaming of a different future to what it now has, it can produce tremendous energy. Sometimes all the tanks in the world can't stop it. Walls can tumble. He calls this future THE FUTURE OF ETHICAL ANTICIPATION.

He then says that each is incomplete with out the other. Both are needed for future planning.
Cheers
H.
(23 NOV 2009)

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