When world peace is a sight unseen in a galaxy far, far away, when death and sickness come bearing down on our doorposts, what's the proper response?
The year 2017 will come to a close soon. Like in so many years before it, people will again hope for a better year, for a better world.
World peace will always be a cliche. Climate change may soon be a tired slogan on a fake campaign platform. Gender fairness is so 1990s as one writer admitted.
Humankind is a never ending craft.
Civilization and all its underpinnings including equitable distribution of wealth and welfare, justice and the rule of law, responsive social and political structures and institutions, accessible education and a more humane world are a very complex and unstable equation of variables.
Let's call it the ideal social algorithm. It's fluid. It's still uncharted and very fragile.
For the new year, here's a prayer for this enterprise that will remain, happily, unfinished, unfulfilled and almost always out of grasp in the present.
But we hope. We resolve to do better. We try to do better.
It's in our nature. The personal, small group and community rituals help. Or maybe we have accrued these rituals to suit and elevate our nature.
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| Feast in the House of Levi |
"It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything. This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own."
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