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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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We see many examples of unhealthy religion obsessed with some or other vision of the future. Living solely for the future can lead us on an exhausting trek of predicting or to a state of indifference toward the present.
But to abandon our vision of the future is no way to live well in the present. The way we live this life— that we can see and touch—is determined by what we believe about the mystery behind all of life, about the future, beyond our place and time.
Whether one is brutal, cynical, apathetic or gentle, constructive and alive, depends on one’s view of the future.
Is our world and human experience a spark of light in the vast meaningless darkness that has come with a bang and will go away with a whimper? Or is our world and human experience a part of a great mystery of light, goodness and meaning that will last? Whether religious or not, our beliefs— or even mere hunches—about the future matter.
Discussion of the future in the Bible has been centred around the prophets— often misunderstood personalities of the ancient world. They were mystical and earthy, gracious and angry. We can hear the voice of the prophets in three ways.
First, we hear prophets as predictors, people God sent to help us see the supernatural origin of religion. Like fortune tellers, we hear prophets giving us insider knowledge to help us survive in the difficult times we fear are coming or to help us identify the correct way to go. This way of hearing the prophets can help us in times of suffering to have confidence that the ultimate reality of justice, goodness and meaning will prevail in the future. But it does little in helping us change the present.
Second, we hear prophets as social protesters. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel describes prophets as those who, instead of taking us to the elegant mansions of God’s mind, take us to the slums. Their impatience with injustice may strike us as hysteria, but this is because prophets feel fiercely.
A prophet sees and hears what God sees and hears at all times: cries of pain, tears of oppression, the agony of injustice.
While, as Heschel says, the rest of us have grown scales on our eyes, calmed our nerves and silenced our conscience, the prophets still feel what God feels. And for the prophets, the greatest cause of oppression is when injustice is organised and systematised, and then legitimised in social, political, economic, religious or educational systems. To the patriots, prophets were committing treason; to the pious they were blasphemous; and to those in power they were saboteurs. But regarding the prophets merely as social protesters is still an incomplete way of hearing their message.
The third way to hear prophets is as those God has sent to help us imagine and work on what the world can become. They not only protest our actions; they help us dream. They not only talk about “what is not” but “what can and must be.” Behind their austere and stinging words is compassion for people. The prophet Isaiah was sent to “strengthen the feeble hands, steady the knees that give way” (Isaiah 35:3).
The ultimate object of the prophet’s life is the “dream of God” for our world and that’s why their sayings are imbued with some of the most beautiful poetry in the ancient world. Far more radical than social protesting, their struggle was for us to change the ways we see each other, God, the world and everything in it. To them, we appear blind and deaf and their job is to wake us up to God’s dream among us, to help us re-imagine.
Today, compassion has become strictly an individual virtue, not a sociopolitical affair that drove the prophets of old and Jesus Christ to be the revolutionaries they were. Instead of merely helping the victims, they insisted that compassion without justice meant quietly giving in to a system that creates ever more victims. Rather than “practising random acts of kindness,” these prophets practise the systematic dismantling of injustice.
The task of tackling injustice in the world seems so daunting that most of us retreat from it. To survive, we become numb, imagining that since suffering is not visible to us, it is not our responsibility. But we are interdependent with our human family, wherever they are.
While we think injustice in the world is hurting others but not us, we are oppressed by our own success, by consumerism that leaves us feeling inadequate, by broken relationships sacrificed for that same success, by isolation and loneliness, living in fear for our jobs, for our future, for our planet.
Something needs to be dismantled.
That’s why grief is necessary. Through the prophets, God grieves—and we should grieve too. There is no dream of the future without grieving the losses of the past. We have to learn to grieve as a society, because without grieving we cannot leave the past ways and hope again. Abandoning our dreams of money, sex and power as an ultimate fulfilment for human life will take some grieving, but without grief, no new vision can emerge.
Each of us is called by God to make a choice. As the prominent thinker and activist Jim Wallis tells us, the real choice of our time is between cynicism and hope. Cynics are not irrational or naïve. They see what’s wrong and might have tried to change things, but they got hurt, disappointed and weary. Now they find refuge in cynicism, finally free to look after themselves.
Prophets too begin with criticising, but they always end in hope. To view the world realistically you have to be a cynic or a prophet. So what do you want to be? n If you see the dream of God, you will be restless for the rest of your life.
That’s why the trumpet is the symbol of the dream of God, all throughout the Bible: a sound of awakening, a noise of grief, and the music of hope.
God said to Isaiah: “Shout it aloud, do not hold back. Raise your voice like a trumpet” (Isaiah 58:1).
To change this world, we need God’s dream of justice, a vision of what comes after the end of the present order of things. And as we await that future, we learn to live by its ways today. If God is going to restore the earth, we work to restore the earth; if God is going to bring peace, we are peacemakers today; if God is going to destroy poverty, we live now in a way that dismantles and replaces structures that produce poverty.
In the life and teachings of Jesus, many of us have found a large window to look into this dream of God, even a door to walk through. And we expect God to open these doors again and set the world right. We call that event the second coming of Christ.
That’s why our view of the future is so outrageously hopeful. Our hope is confidence in the goodness of the universe that once was and is, and is to come. God dreams for us, and this expectation of justice, peace, love and oneness that is coming to us from the future has become the agenda of our lives today.
Extract from Signs of the Times, May 2007 .
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