December 8, 2014
I was thinking lately that most of my education had a backwards slant – reading ancient languages and studying long-dead theologians. But in the past two decades I’ve been thinking more and more about the future, about hope.
I’ve been absorbed by the ways the future draws us forward: our expectations and strongest desires line things up toward a world reshaped and transformed by the power of hope. The image of the Kingdom of God—not as some future event that we may get into if we are good, but as a present reality growing into God’s future—has seemed more and more decisive to me. Didn’t St. John Paul II make “The Proclamation of the Kingdom” the third Luminous Mysteries?
God, as absolute love, draws everything forward into the Kingdom – everything and everyone except those who, kicking and screaming, resist God’s love. The Kingdom is the attainment of absolute love by all that God has created, all that has responded to the draw of God’s future.
Of course, as much as I think about a future emerging, I realize that I now already live in something very much like a future. I have done so many times in my life. I dreamed once of a future date of ordination; it came. I dreamed of a renewed parish in New York; and so it happened. I dreamed of serving the Church by underscoring the ministry of evangelization; indeed, that happens every day. Futures have always come. Our lives are futures, now arrived.
How paradoxical that the future always looks exciting; but once it becomes the present, it can seem to lose its luster. It becomes ordinary.
Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe Advent’s spiritual discipline is recovering the luster, the gleam, that hope threads through all our experience of faith, retrieving the brilliance that familiarity can cover up. Maybe Advent’s special gift is to force us to see the future, already present – and, seeing that, to see God’s future all the more clearly.