I’ve been reading historian David McCullough’s book “The Path Between the Seas,” which chronicles the creation of the Panama Canal. It takes the reader back 150 years, and into the mindset of the movers and shakers of the second half of the nineteenth century, when great strides were being made in engineering and mechanics.
At the time, one French prelate proclaimed, “One of the most formidable enemies of mankind and of civilization is ‘distance.’” McCullough writes, “Men talked confidently of future systems of transport that would bring all people into contact with one another, spread knowledge, break down national divisions, and make a unified whole of humanity.”
150 years later, most of the physical distances in the world have been breached. Modern communication technology gives us up-to-the-moment information about people across the globe. But the nineteenth century dream of a unified humanity eludes us. National divisions are as strong as they have ever been, and the word “disinformation” had to be coined to define many of our interactions.
Two thousand years ago, Jesus offered a contrasting antidote for humanity’s divisions. He called it the “Kingdom of God.” Where the nineteenth-century vision relied upon spanning the physical distances between us, Jesus’ vision relied upon spanning the spiritual expanse within each of us. The “Kingdom of God” was to be a continuous work in progress during our lifetimes, with the promsie that all would be made known to us later. “At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known” (I Cor 13:12).
The Kingdom was also to be a process, not a place, with some guideposts left behind for us to find and follow.
“So, faith, hope, love remain, these three: but the greatest of these is love” (I Cor 13:13). Just how do these virtues equip us for the great enterprise of healing humanity’s divisions?
Faith:
Faith teaches us to make friends with ambiguity.
With faith, we work at relinquishing our drive to control everything. We accept the flow of life as we acknowledge that we are never going to see the whole picture, because the whole picture is well beyond human understanding.
Hope:
Hope is the memory-keeper.
Hope stands on the heights, sees God’s ultimate intentions for creation and for humankind, and holds firm to them. Keeping an eye on the long-view, hope undergirds faith and love, absorbing the tensions that continually batter and beleaguer them.
Love:
God is love; therefore love is the change-engine,
which reaches into a person’s soul, and pushes us beyond our own personal advantage, insisting on our continuous transformation. Teilhard de Chardin called love the energy of the divine milieu. He saw love as the living context of each person’s relationship with God, with each other, and with all created reality. Each act of love, no matter how small or hidden, moves all of reality closer to full union, each act of non-love moves it further away.
Thomas Groome described the “Kingdom of God” as a great utopian vision of God indwelling in people’s lives and in the world. I have faith and hope that humanity overall, is moving in that direction. As with evolution, there are times of great creativity and times of destruction. But change is happening. I see it emerging in a greater compassion and acceptance of racial, religious and gender differences; in the growing awareness that we are a planetary community as we come to terms with the climate crisis; and in the deepening belief that we must work together, not separately, to address the violence among and within the nations.
Teilhard de Chardin saw this too:
“Faith teaches us to make friends with ambiguity”
Amen!
Amen!
Amen!
I really need to continually remind myself everyday.