Advent: Shaping our Lives in terms of the Future

So many things have changed in Theology today in light of the scientific discoveries on the nature of the cosmos. We used, for instance, to read Genesis as though it referred only to past events, a state of perfect blessedness that had been lost and which one day would be regained in another realm we called heaven. Similarly, our enmeshment in and subjection to death was treated as the result of a "fall" from perfection. Today, more and more we are reading the Scriptures, writing, and preaching with a new focus and perspective --- that of an unfinished universe that one day will reach perfection or fulfillment in God, the day when God will be all in all. At the same time then we human beings are called to a fulfillment that lies before us and it is possible to read Genesis as a powerful myth reminding us of all we are called to --- and all our world is meant for as well. Our identity as imago dei would then be something we are in the process of moving towards, something we are allowing or at least are called to allow God to transfigure us into day by day.

Sin, a Situation of Enmeshment in the Past and that which is resistant to the Future God Wills and Represents

The situation of enmeshment, incompleteness, falseness, distortion, or sin in which we find ourselves is not a fiction that can be dismissed by a non-literalist reading of the Genesis narratives. It is as real as ever, and Genesis narratives, especially when read as myths ** conveying profound truths, explain how it is we each collude with death in all its forms as we lead one another into greater and greater enmeshment in everything we identify as sin. In light of the unfinished developing nature of our universe, I think it is especially important to remember that hamartia (sin) is most fundamentally defined as "missing the mark" or "falling short". We miss the mark or fall short of being the persons God has created us to be in any number of ways. In attempts to become what we are meant to be, in attempts to become more genuinely human, we choose gods of all sorts who themselves fall short of true divinity and make us even less complete or true than we were before we embraced them. In acts of forgetfulness and carelessness, fear, insecurity, and woundedness, we choose to embrace the past rather than the future and therefore to be someone other than the one God calls us to be. But too, we are summoned into and embrace the future as we become Advent persons, persons of the Eschaton for whom the words holiness and Saint actually fit. Our God is working constantly to bring us to freedom and fulfillment, truth and authentic humanity; his Word is active in our world and in our own hearts and each one of us is called to incarnate that Word just as fully as possible.

If we now read Genesis in a way different from what we were once used to and comfortable with, so too do we approach the Nativity of Jesus in somewhat different ways as well. Advent reminds us that the Word is at work in our world looking for those who will allow it to bear fruit in their lives. It reminds us that God's plans for us and our world are something we can hardly imagine yet --- and with the Gospel readings from next week, something we may find profoundly disturbing or even offensive. It is part of our past, but even more, it is the future by which we are called to measure ourselves.

Authentic humanity has been born into our world and we will celebrate that at Christmas, but at the same time, it is waiting to be born in us and in every person we know so that God's plans for the fulfillment of reality may be brought to fruition. The Annunciation is an invitation to enter an unimaginable future we should each experience here and now while Mary's fiat is an acceptance of this invitation we too should each offer --- and offer many times over this period of Advent! Christmas celebrates the birth of Jesus who will, throughout his life and death, incarnate the Word of God more and more definitively. But Christmas is not only in the past; it lies ahead of us as well.

Embracing the Future: Christ Brought to Full Stature

Ephesians speaks of Christ one day "coming to full stature". We speak of the Christ Event which includes not only Jesus' life and death but his resurrection and ascension as well. We are participants in this Event because we have been baptized into his death and resurrection. Thus, while part of this Event is in the past it continues in the present as well. WE are the Body of Christ and it is we who are responsible for helping to usher in the Kingdom of God, WE who are called to incarnate the Risen Christ here and now. It is only right that we celebrate Advent as a season in which we begin to look not primarily at the past but instead to the present and future. Even more, as was the case with the Annunciation when Mary began to shape her life in light of the future the angel announced to her: "You shall be overshadowed by the Most High and bear a Son and he shall be called Emmanuel," we too are called to begin to shape our lives less in terms of the past than in terms of the future which Christ's death and resurrection proclaims, the world in which in us Christ comes to full stature.

Advent reminds us it is not enough to be freed of serious sin. Baptism and the Sacraments do that, of course, but that does not make us all we are called to be, all that God dreams and wills for us.  We cannot shape our lives merely in terms of freedom from serious sin or restored innocence. It is not enough to look to the past to what we once were. Instead, we are called to truly become a new creation, (an) imago dei, those in whom the Word of God finds its full expression. Christ is the model of this new life, the first fruits of this new creation. He is the incarnation of our absolute future made real here and now in a proleptic way, the One in whom all reality has been redeemed and imbued with true hope and profound promise. Christ variously announces to us who we shall be, "I call you friends." He invites us to be his disciples, his own brothers and sisters, salt and light to the nations, Sons and Daughters of God, and citizens of the Kingdom; in him, we are called to be expressions of the Logos and commissioned to bear lasting fruit. We too are to be overshadowed by the Most High. Advent asks us to begin shaping our lives according to this vision, not that of who we once were, but of who we are created to become. In our embracing this future lies the hope of our entire world.

Readings of Genesis Sharpened by the New Cosmology

By the way, in light of the new ways Theologians read Genesis, one of the newer shifts in that reading is to understand Adam and Eve and the story of the Garden as a narrative describing the ultimate future of our world as well as (and sometimes instead of) some primordial history. That reading has been around for a while but it has been honed considerably in light of our sense of an unfinished, yet-to-be-perfected universe. The future reality described in the myth** will be a place where human beings are completed in their relationships with one another, with God, and with creation itself. As in Jesus' language to his followers, this future is defined in terms of friendship. If this is correct, then sin is most fundamentally a matter of refusing to embrace this future. That means refusing to commit to God and God's plans for his Creation, refusing to embrace our truest self --- an identity shaped in terms of this reality in which God is all in all. Sin is a matter of refusing to be made new and remaining bound by the past. And of course, that definition of sin is really not all that different from the one we are so familiar with. Our own "falling short" or "missing the mark" (hamartia) though is a matter of falling short when measured according to our future, not the past.

** It is important to understand that myths are not fictions but rather narratives or stories which convey deep truths that can be adequately described in no other way than through some narrative. While the more superficial details of the stories (myths) may be untrue (there is no such thing as a talking snake!), their deeper truths are just that, profoundly true (talking snakes are a good way to externalize Eve's (and our own) insatiable tendency to theologize, for instance, or to describe the temptations she (and we) struggle(d) with).cf: More on Stories and the Tower of Babel or Myths, Parables, and Narrative Theology

John Haught, the Future, and Advent

As a result of a panel discussion I listened to yesterday or the day before, I was reading God After Darwin again and came to an interesting passage on time and the idea of a metaphysics of future. In this book John F Haught tries to reorient both theology and science from an over dependence on (or bondage to) the past and turn them to a notion of future which is very different than the notion we are so used to. He is convinced this new perspective is (literally) the hope of both theology and science. For me personally his ideas imply a shift in the way I think of "the present moment" or the way I celebrate Advent or look to the Feast of Christ's Nativity.

Haught begins this section by describing faith as the state of being grasped (a la Tillich!) by "that which is to come." He then speaks of the future as having some kind of "efficacy" --- hard as this is to conceive of. He goes on to refer to a famous passage by Tillich in which he refers to being grasped by the "coming order." [[ The coming order is always coming, shaking this order, fighting with it, conquering it and conquered by it. The coming order is always at hand. But one can never say, "It is here. It is there!" One can never grasp it, but one can be grasped by it.]] (Shaking of the Foundations, p 27)

We are so very used to thinking of the future as that which is not here yet (because it has not yet been built out of the building blocks of the past and present), and the past as that which has been completed and gone (scattered building blocks, mostly turned to dust). We think of the present (the building blocks we can pick up and work with) as the only really real. But the situation is more complex and also more exciting than this. What we call present is the eternally-coming-to-be-and-also-passing (the eternally vanishing and ephemeral). It cannot really be fixed or pointed to, for the moment we identify it, it is gone and a new present has come into play (and gone again too). Meanwhile it is the future that takes hold of us and calls us to be. Haught writes:

[[In the experience of faith, it is the "future" that comes to meet us, takes hold of us, and makes us new. We may call this future, at least in what Rahner calls its "absolute" depth, by the name "God". In Biblical circles the very heart of authentic faith consists in the total orientation of consciousness toward the coming of God, the ultimately real. Beyond all our provisional or relative futures there lies an "Absolute future." And since our own experience cannot be separated artificially from the natural world to which we are tied by evolution, we are permitted to also surmise that "being grasped" by the absolute future pertains not just to ourselves but to the whole cosmic process in which we are sited. Theology can claim legitimately, along with St Paul (Rom 8:22), that the entire universe is always being drawn by the power of a divinely renewing future. The "power of the future" is the ultimate metaphysical explanation of evolution.]]

Later Haught explains: "by a metaphysics of the future, I mean quite simply the philosophical expression of the intuition --- admittedly religious in origin --- that all things receive their being from out of an inexhaustibly resourceful "future" that we may call "God" this intuition also entails the notion that the cosmic past and present are in some sense given their own status by the always arriving but also always unavailable future. . . . It should not be too hard for us to appreciate, therefore, why a religion that encourages its devotees to wait in patient hope for the fulfillment of life and history will interpret ultimate reality, or God, as coming toward the present, and continually creating the world from the sphere of the future "not-yet". . . .The past and present may seem to have more "being," in the sense of fixed reality, than does the future, which apparently has the character of not-yet-being. . . . In fact many of us think intuitively of the future as quite "unreal," since it has not yet arrived fully. [Haught notes this is a difficult and confusing idea at first, then says,] . . .perhaps this confusion is the result of our having been bewitched by a metaphysics either of the past or the eternal present. . . .]]

It seems to me that Advent is the perfect time to ask ourselves if we have been so bewitched, and to what degree we are really believers in the summoning call, promise, and power of the future which dwells within us and summons us from all sides as well. To what degree are our own lives an expression of the hope this future provides? (I would note that nothing unreal has this same kind or degree of power.) How truly attuned to the future are we? How truly capable of waiting, not in the grim sense of being stuck in the past, but in terms of orienting all we are and know TOWARDS the future that IS in God and is breaking in on us at every moment?

Contemplatives often speak of living in the present moment or attending to the present moment and sometimes we have the sense that the present moment is a kind of static reality of some breadth and length. We may also think that this kind of spirituality locks away the past and blocks us from looking towards the future. But really, the contemplative "present moment" is precisely what Haught is speaking of here: the powerful and continual grasping of our lives by the power of futurity -- a futurity grounded and realized in the living God. To truly dwell in the present moment is to give oneself over to this absolute future, this God who creates by summoning us forth from death and the despair of the past-only into the hope and freedom of the dawning-future we call present. This I think is preeminently the spirituality of Advent.

Our own approaches to Advent will differ one to the next, but we should ask ourselves to what degree have we become bewitched by another metaphysics than the one Haught describes, a metaphysics of the past or of a static eternal present, for instance rather than a metaphysics of future. For some that may mean spending some time rethinking our own ideas of the nature of time. We must at least, I think, begin to get our minds around this idea that the future is more real than we have allowed thus far in our conventional wisdom re time, and that IT is the reason there is a present (or really, anything at all). We, our world, the whole of the cosmos is not SIMPLY the consequence of a series of past causal events. Instead we are the result of God summoning the real out of the unreal, the more perfect out of the less perfect, the more complex out of the less complex, etc. We are here because the future opens the way for us to grow to fulfillment, not as a void into which we might merely move or expand as the weight of the past pushes us onward, but as an effective reality which empowers and summons to encounter and surrender. For me this is a really new way of thinking or seeing --- something, despite my reading of Haught, Moltmann, et al, I had not really "gotten" before now in doing theology. And so, the prospect of exploring this is new and exciting. Personally, I love beginnings and the excitement linked to them! That is what Advent (and the power of future) are all about! Apparently that is also what remaining in the present moment is all about as well!!

P.S., for those looking for a challenging and very exciting read, check out John Haught's, God After Darwin, A Theology of Evolution. If you are not up to the whole thing (and I personally am not myself right now) at least read chapter 6, "A God for Evolution." Of all of Haught's books the one I have liked best to this point is Is Nature Enough?. Great ideas, central themes, but readable. There you might want to look at the chapter on "Emergence" or the last short chapter on "Anticipation".