H. THE INCREDIBLE PRESENT MOMENT

What a time to be alive!  I remember my grandmother saying one time when she was about the age I am now. "I suppose I could just roll over and die any day now, but I'm just so curious to see what's going to happen next!"  The future has never been so unpredictable.  The possibilities, for good or for ill, seem to be without limit.

The times are not only exciting, they're also to some extent dangerous. Earlier on we mentioned the importance of asking questions.  Warren Lane Melton put it rather starkly when he said, "I need one answer to one question:  What should I be asking now that the world is burning?"

"Tsunami", by Tim Holmes
As we begin this new millennium all is not well.  The pollution of the environment, the escalating and unjust distribution of wealth between nations and between people in our own nation, the increase in  ethnic violence and terrorism, the uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear war power– among other problems– make this a time when the world does, indeed, appear to be burning.  It all serves to fuel the pessimism of those who believe we're worse off than ever before in history.

I don't believe that for a moment, nor does anyone else I know who stops to ask, "Is there any previous time in history in which we would prefer to have lived?"  All things considered the answer is "certainly not!"  We in this country, of course, are much better off than the folks of any previous generation financially, in terms of comfort and convenience, and with respect to the breadth of experiences open to us.  My generation looks at yours and asks, "Do you have any idea how much more privileged you are compared to my generation?" which is what my parents' generation asked us.

Be that as it may, we do live in the midst of a troublesome time.  Walter Brueggeman, a theologian and cultural analyst for whom I have a great deal of respect, has put it quite simply and directly.  He said, 

"Something is going on among us and it cannot be stopped...What is happening is that the world is being dismantled before our very eyes.  The world we have known is dying, withering, slipping through our fingers.  Perhaps this is always so, because the old creation is being displaced.    Whether or not it is always so, it is so now.  It is so economically as the old powers tremble and the markets fall.  It is so politically as the great nations cannot stop the new danger which we so piously label 'terrorism.'   It is so intellectually, as all kinds of new people do not accept our ways of knowing or the old conclusions we have drawn for so long.  It is so very close to home.  That the world is dying before our eyes is not idle speculation, but a daily experience of change so massive, of alienation so powerful, of anxiety so unending."

Or as another of my favorite cultural analysts, Woody Allen, has put it:  "Never before have we faced such a crossroad.  One way leads to utter despair, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we take the right way!"

Well, I don't believe those are the only options open to us, nor do I believe we need give up in despair over the radical changes taking place in our world.  We need to be honest about them, then, learning what we can from the past, apply the best of our intelligence to responding to this new reality in new ways.  Alfred North Whitehead said, "The present contains all that there is.  It is holy ground."

And planted right in the midst of this incredible present moment is YOU.  If you have any doubts about the importance of that, get your calculator out and figure how many ancestors you have had, say, in the last 500 years.  You had two parents and each of them had two parents.  Then multiply 2x2x2 twenty-one times.  That gets you back about 500-600 years.  Check it out and see if that doesn't mean that just in that period of time you have 2,097,152 ancestors who had to live in order for YOU to be born.  Don't underestimate your importance!  That's not supposed to make you feel arrogant, but it is meant to help you feel responsible.  It might even be said that you owe it to over two million people to make something of your opportunity to live.

French philosopher Blaise Pascal put it quite directly.  He said, 

"When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant and which knows me not, I am frightened and am astonished at being here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then."

So here's one more Rule for the Road:

YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED IN THE HERE AND NOW


NEXT TIME:  FREEDOM VS. DETERMINISM

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