Saturday, May 12, 2007

Freedom=Cleaning Out, Starting Again

Thoreau wrote at this time in 1857:
How rarely I meet with a man who can be free, even in thought! We live according to rule. Some men are bedridden; all world-ridden. I take my neighbor, an intellectual man, out into the woods and invite him to take a new and absolute view of things, to empty clean out his thoughts all institutions of men and start again; but he can’t do it, he sticks to his traditions and his crochets. He thinks that governments, colleges, newspapers, etc., are from everlasting to everlasting.

What will it take for us to re-imagine our world, our schools, our churches, our nations, our entire global climate? The things we count upon as most enduring may be the very things which need to adapt most rapidly, and if they do not, we are pouring our energies into something either useless or counter-productive. I read a theologian once who remarked that our ethical and prophetic responsibilities could be summed up in this way: to observe our situation, to critique it, to propose an alternative, and to demonstrate this alternative. This is the value of the image of the Reign of God.

It is also our difficulty with the Reign of God. Can we actually see our situation? From what vantage point can we critique it? What new dream have we?
How much energy and risk will we invest in what is not already established in our time?

Thoreau is right. Humanly speaking, it is not what we imagine to be everlasting that matters, but what is just ending or just springing up. A free person knows the difference between what dies and what lives.