‘What do you see in the future?’ was the question being posed to the three young men in the bar. I’ve often found the corner rum shop to be as amenable to deep spiritual and philosophical reflection as a Sunday morning sermon at church, though truthfully I admit that both places at times can be equally void of purpose and focused on empty entertainments, leaving both body and soul empty of nourishment, temporarily diverted from a reality they offer no power or guidance to confront.
Each had a different answer: Good life. Chaos. Nothing at all. The latter answer struck me first with strongest impact. How many Gaza youth (if Jerusalem is the emblematic city on a hill, Gaza is the emblematic Ghetto on its outskirts) see no future, because for them it does not exist. Their only future is the grave. For what reason did fate assign them their geographies in the most hellish places on earth? What is to be the purpose of their wasted lives?
We’ve had our taste of evil conflagration, but for most of us, those moments are buried so deeply in the oblivion of history’s trash, we’re ill equipped to emote with the uprootment and displacement of Gaza’s 2 .2 million. A world away from ours, there is no gravity likely to suck us into their predicament, to turn our eyes away from our own entertainments, to consider their anguish.
We certainly are acquainted with lives by the thousand being snatched in violent death. The Jamaican war of Politics in the 70s, the Tivoli incursions, The Morant Bay war, the annual amalgamation of the trickling but steady stream of crime and violent death. We know, if we could just remember, the ominousness of the moment ritualized in the Catholic prayer, sometimes said in terror: ‘Hail Mary Mother of God …. pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” Some of us have survived some ‘end-is-near’ moments.
The truth is that visioning is future-shaping technology. That fore-brain capacity all humans have to see something promising with the imagination is exactly what gives us the capacity to manufacture futures of our own formation, let’s call it the ‘manufuturing’ capacity – the ability to shape the future.
Indeed, for most of us, this capacity is latent. First of all, whatever muscles the imagination might have are crippled in fear. Fear, the ruling God of the age, throws us right back to the base of our brain stems, sucks the very oxygen from the forebrain, and leaves us with our most rudimentary human instincts – the choices are limited to kill or be killed. When death is the only game in town, there are no futures to aspire to. All concentration must be singularly focused on surviving today. That is the height of our human creative capacity.
Having and holding a vision of the future, of how things end up, simply makes sense. Eschatology is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of theology precisely because of its pretensions that the future is written by the finger of God and someone other than ourselves has the script. Post-trib, Pre-trib dispensationalist BS (hopefully readers will by now be familiar with the abbreviation) are the diversional intoxicants that rob so-called believers of agency. No wonder Martin Luther with a host of other famous Fathers of the Christian church rejected the Book of Revelations outright and objected strongly to its canonization, having observed the intoxicating potential of its cryptic symbolism. Of course the seven churches to whom the book was written would have understood clearly both its symbolism and the reasons for occluding the message in code.
Whether Gaza, Jerusalem, the church or whosoever, whenever the day comes one must flee from surrounding armies – ‘tribulation’ is not a sufficiently potent word …. it is for Days of Terror that the Book of the Revelation of Jesus Christ was written. It was sheer terror those churches were experiencing at the time and they needed a victorious vision of the future to sustain them because it is impossible to keep faith where hope has died. The triumph of Judeo-Christian culture, now taken for granted by Israel and the USA of today was inconceivable at that time.
I understand the religious reasons that Jerusalem, the shining city on a hill, represents the vision for which many aspire. The Day of Judgment is not necessarily ominous and terrible, even with much death in its shadow. In fact some of us are waiting quite patiently for that day for exoneration, others for retribution.
Those who pray for the Peace of Jerusalem, but take no thought of the burdens of those who scramble on the margins of the city have many surprises in store for them. For the same God that blesses, curses (surely people of the book should have figured that out by now) and when the change comes, nothing is holier and more sacred than Justice, Truth and Mercy. Those more sentimentally attached to any other thing – nation, race, system of belief, doctrine or worship are not safe and will be exposed. Hosea’s two children serve as an eternal reminder for those who consider themselves chosen of God. Hosea 1:9,10)
The Israel of 1948 is not the Israel of 2023. Little Jeshurun has waxed fat and kicked. Jerusalem, be warned and remember, your own God, (not the god of your enemies… it would be facetious of me to remind the people of God that there is only but one God) has used the nuclear option against you before. Why might He not do it again? Why not? Your contrived eschatology?
My vision of the future is not a city on the hill at all, but rather a village in the valley. The kind of quiet habitation Isaiah spoke of (chapter 33)…whose tent can never be taken down nor one of her tent cords broken …. kind of ironic, when all the great stones of her temple fortress were so quickly dislodged and dismantled.
YeKengalé 