The future is many things at once. It is the vessel into which we pour all our hopes and all our fears. “When all else is lost,” Christian Bovee says, “the future still remains.” The problem is that future is a panacea for some and a threat to others. It is at the edge of the future that we walk off the side of a cliff into the arms of God.
The spiritual challenge of the future resides in being able to accept it before we know it. But accepting the future before we know what it is becomes one of the central problems of life. Rather than embrace the unknown, we stumble along from one fear to another. From day to day, intent on going tenderly into the future we want for ourselves, we are inclined to do one of two things: escape the present or cast it in stone.
So we cling and claw our way from day to day, trying to preserve this, to avoid that, intent on our need to control tomorrow and awash in our uncertainties along the way. Then we begin to see what the future really demands of us. We come to realize that it is not the particulars, the details of time and place and position to which the future finally takes us that really matter much. No, it isn’t so much what happens to us in the future that counts. It is the attitudes we take to it that make all the difference between a future that’s full and a future that’s frustrating.
After all, Charles Colson went through a prison sentence and came out into a completely different future than he had ever imagined — and thrived in it. Christopher Reeves, Superman, became a paralyzed man who fought depression for two years and, before it was over, became more effective, better known, and more socially involved than he had ever been before the accident that everyone was sure had destroyed his life. A friend of mine lost his wife from hepatitis three days after they took her to the hospital. He was left with five children under the age of twelve and went through five brain operations after that. Is he happy? He says he is. As John Lennon put it, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
The function of the future must be, then, not simply the achievement of the goals and dreams of the present. The function of the future is to keep us growing beyond our own small designs for ourselves in the present.
An alleluia to the future is an alleluia to the courage and faith and effort it will take to wring out of us every last drop of character, every ounce of faith, every trembling “yes” we’ve ever said to the God of surprises.
Joan Chittister and Archbishop Rowan Williams
Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia for All That Is (Liturgical Press)
