Cure of Souls in the Church of the Diaspora:
Pastoral Care and Spiritual Formation for the Coming Apocalyptic Age
Larry Hart, Curtal Friar
Abstract
This paper is about the future cure of souls. It raises the question and offers some suggestions of how the practitioner of Christian ministry is to go about the work of spiritual formation and pastoral care as the Earth undergoes catastrophic climate change, overpopulation, and unparalleled and unimagined mass migrations as humanity flees the global south for the north. As cultures collapse, and possibly civilization as we have known it, how can Christians best go about the work of shepherding –– whether as clergy or lay persons? How is the church, as an ark of safety, to navigate this strange and dangerous sea of what appears to be a coming apocalyptic age? Karl Rahner’s image of the church of the Diaspora is helpful, but really says little about how we might intentionally begin to develop the practical, skills, attitudes, and spiritual practices such communities will require for the good of both themselves and the world. In its analysis of these questions, and in its proposals for becoming more intentional in the future cure of souls, this paper engages with a wide range of disciplines––environmental science, psychology, ethology, anthropology, theology, and Biblical scholars along with the Christian mystics –– all in an effort to hold both the heart and mind of the question together.
Key Words
future church, “social sink,” diaspora, pastoral care, spiritual, formation, climate change, migration, civilization, culture, mystic, apocalyptic age
Future Church
Today in the late afternoon, in the heat of the afternoon, as I was quietly praying, silently meditating, I had a vision. It may have been a dream. In my old age when I become still and quiet, I occasionally doze off and dream pleasant dreams. So, it may have been a dream, but I don’t think so. It could possibly have been something more akin to a daydream; or, perhaps simply an image passing through my mind as a result of having worked on this article earlier in the morning. But I think it was a vision. Robert Johnson, the famous Jungian analyst, author, and lecturer observed:
The disaster that has overtaken the modern world is the complete splitting off of the conscious mind from its roots in the unconscious. All the forms of interaction with the unconscious that sustained our ancestors –– dream, vision, ritual, and religious experience –– are largely lost to us, dismissed by the modern mind as primitive or superstitious.1
Our capacity for spiritual wisdom, and even our understanding of factual knowledge, has been stunted by our enculturation in the scientism and materialism of our age.2 John J. Pilch who studied dreams, visions, and other altered states of conscious, from the multidisciplinary perspective of anthropology, cross cultural psychology, and Scripture noted: “In Western culture, because of our scientific and psychological socialization we tend to be skeptical about or even resistant to these experiences.”3
Behind my closed eyes, in my mind, I saw a single masted sailing ship, almost like a drawing, or illustration, of a small thirteenth or fourteenth century wooden vessel used for exploration. It was a velvet black night with pounding rain and fierce winds. In spite of the intensity of the darkness I could clearly see the ship on a violent sea ––– tossed and beaten savagely by wind, rain, and waves. The only light was an antique ship’s lantern secured on the deck. There were men and women, vivid and distinct in their individual appearances, treading water in the wild sea (I thought them perhaps survivors from a larger craft), some were treading water or holding on to wood planks floating near them but they made no attempt to swim to the ship, while others were swimming desperately toward it, and some were already clamoring up the heavy rope rigging that hung over its side. The ship’s crew stood at the rails loudly and vigorously yelling encouragement to those in the turbulent water. But the aspect that seemed to be most central and significant, was what began as a discussion on deck in which it was determined that someone needed to make the dangerous climb up the mast to the crow’s nest and look inside. A sturdy and tough looking sailor dressed in the simple strong white linen and wool of his trade said he would do it. When he had made it up the mast and looked inside the basket he called out, “It’s a bird!” Someone on deck shouted up, “Is it a crow?” Fumbling inside the basket he shouted back, “No! It’s a dove!” And everyone on the deck below murmured, “That’s good. Yes. Very good!” And that is all I saw or heard.
The meaning was not unclear to me. The future church, like that of our ancient spiritual ancestors, is a ship, an ark of safety, sailing across a strange and fearful sea –– it’s crew mainly a motley bunch of misfits. Nevertheless, no matter the intensity of the storm into which we are sailing, we have light to cheer us and by which to work, and the comfort and guidance of the Spirt.
An Unpredictable Sea
No one can predict the future, or how it will unfold––at least not with absolute certainty. We human beings do not like ambiguity. It frightens us. We prefer certain knowledge because it gives us the comforting illusion of control. But like Abraham and Sarah we are called to embark on a journey without knowing what will happen or what will become of us (Hebrews 11:8). For anyone watching the barometer things do not look promising for either humanity in general or the church in particular –– the prospects for a smooth voyage into the future are, as they say, “few to none and dim.”
Gaia Vince, who works with the University College of London’s Anthropocene Center writes: “The forecast is terrible. We face environmental, social, and demographic catastrophe: drowned cities; stagnant seas; a crash in biodiversity; intolerable heatwaves; entire countries becoming uninhabitable; widespread hunger; and a global population of some ten billion humans.”4
In 1972 Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows published Limits to Growth, now thirty years later they have come out with an update –– Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update. Limits to Growth, has a blunt and simple message: It argues that either civilization or growth must end soon. Continued population and industrial growth will exhaust the world’s minerals and bathe the biosphere in deadly levels of toxic pollution. “If the present growth trends. . . continue unchanged, the limits of growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next hundred years.”5 No material resource, regardless of its original abundance is infinite –– not water, not lumber, not oil, nor anything else in the temporal realm.
Most social decisions, it is noted in Limits to Growth, require compromise. While benefits and costs are distributed unequally in any society, people are generally willing to accept less now for the promise of more later. Isn’t that the premise of the “American Dream?” Be content, the economy is expanding (is always expanding), and if you “work hard,” and are clever enough you can join the elite yourself. However, this promise, the promise of unending growth, is no longer plausible when resources are depleted and become scarce. When there is not enough there to compromise over, the mechanisms of democracy become gridlocked. Eventually having to choose between order and liberty, people tend to choose order. “Hence the drift toward authoritarianism.” The likely hood, then, is that the future will either be characterized by an oppressive authoritarianism,6 or lawless disorder, but neither uniformly so. That is, it is probable there will be some places that are orderly but harshly autocratic and with little freedom, while others are lawless and chaotic. Either way, and even if we opt for one of the less severe computer simulated scenarios described in Limits to Growth, the collapse of civilization, at least as we know it, appears inevitable.
Denial Is No Impediment to Reality
As the rate of decline increases an honest and objective appraisal will simply not support an optimistic view, but rather than accepting the reality and responding appropriately, there is a doubling down on denial, rationalizations, and self-deception. More and more there is a drift towards magical ideation –– “thinking that assumes solutions will emerge in violation of scientific laws.”7 Among fundamentalists this may take the form of believing God cannot use thermal nuclear warfare or natural causes like global climate change to end the world, but is limited to acting according to the fictional images they may have fixed in mind after reading The Late Great Planet Earth.8
But neither denial, rationalizations, magical thinking, nor faulty Biblical
exegesis are an impediment to reality. The enormity of the coming migration crisis, which has actually, already begun, will shatter our misconceptions and eventually overwhelm all denial. It will include many of the poorest in the world, but it will also include the middle and wealthy classes; people who because of storm or fire can no longer afford to build or buy the insurance that will allow them to continue to live anywhere they choose –– or tolerate the morbid heat if they could; farmers who can no longer survive crop destroying drought;9 people who can find no employment where they are because those who can afford it have already moved to more desirable locations; men and women displaced by lack of water, flooding, or catastrophic heat and storms. In America violence of every sort already seems to grow exponentially. The tragedy of the war in Syria, and now in the Ukraine stuns all human sensibilities of compassion, morality, reason, and simple caring. The ubiquitous violence and inhuman depravity all around us will only increase under the pressures of climate change and overpopulation. As I write armed farmers in Northern California are threatening to use force to open water gates for irrigation. It takes little to imagine what violence may occur in a world where there is desperate competition for a glass of water to drink or a potato to eat.
It is estimated that in the next thirty years there will be 1.5 billion environmental migrants. After 2050 that number will rise dramatically. How will the nations of the global north respond? Will they attempt to manage it rationally? Will they try to stop migration with barbed wire, walls, or deadly force? It cannot, of course, be stopped. Can you stop people in a burning house from running outside and across the street? Does the threat of the lion prevent the other thirsty animals from coming to the waterhole? But there are also forces other than global warming changing the world.
By 2052 the world population will be nearly 10 billion and is expected to reach 13 billion early in the next century. It is estimated that the world can feed nine to ten billion people (some say 13 billion). Right now, the problem with world hunger is poverty rather than under-production, but that will change, and it will change even if the capacity is for feeding a world population of 13 rather than 10 billion. As the earth’s population, and crop production, shifts from what will become the unfarmable global south to the north the essential food supply chain will, without thoughtful transitional planning and unprecedented cooperation, likely collapse.
The question of scientists and informed environmentalists no longer appears to be how we can avoid catastrophic climate change with its physical and social consequences, but can its effects be mitigated, and if so to what extent. Will human beings have the sort of concern for the common good, the insight, the unselfishness, and the willingness to cooperate in salvaging a sustainable habitable earth. The signs are not hopeful that this will be the case. Parag Khanna, writes:
A map of the world population distribution in 2020 shows large concentrations along the coasts of North America and the Pacific Rim, as well as the dense urban clusters of Europe, Africa, and South Asia. But as we animate that map toward 2050, the coast lines of North America and Asia will submerge, and their people will retreat inland. South Americans and Asians will surge northward as their farmland desertifies and their economies crumble. South Asia––India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh––will be the origin of an even greater exodus as sea levels rise and rivers dry up, while automation makes human labor redundant and governments fail to provide stability and welfare… The complex chain reactions we have unleashed among industry, ecology, demographics, technology and other factors, spell continuous turbulence. . . Our present reality is somewhere between geopolitical suspicions and climate volatility in a toxic brew. Without coordination over our common resources, we get land grabs and resource wars. In places with weak property rights governments and their corporate allies can seize land (and critical resources) by fiat.10
Societal Sink Hole
“Behavioral sink” is a term invented by the ethologist John B. Calhoun to describe the serious disruption, or collapse, in useful; and orderly social behavior which can result from over population.11 The term designates a concept derived from a series of experiments conducted by Calhoun between 1958 and 1962. In these experiments, Calhoun and his researchers created a series of “rat utopias” and “mouse paradises” –– enclosed spaces in which rats, and later mice, were given unlimited access to food and water, which, as expected, resulted first in a population explosion, and then overcrowding. Calhoun’s work became an often-referenced model of societal collapse due to overcrowding.
In the 1962 study, Calhoun reported that once overcrowding had begun to occur many of the female rats were unable to carry litters to full term, or to survive delivery. Infant mortality in some areas of the pen reached 96%. An even greater number did not provide normal (normal for rats) maternal care after successfully giving birth.
Among the males the behavioral disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption. In Calhoun’s most famous experiment, known as “Universe 25,” which was with mice rather than rats, population peaked at 2,200. At that point the mice exhibited a variety of abnormal, often destructive behaviors, including dispensing with mouse courtship ritual and instead engaging in both heterosexual and homosexual “rape.” Some became pansexual and hypersexual, attempting to mount any mouse they encountered. Females quit building nests, and either abandoned or attacked their young. Although they had more than sufficient food and water, they frequently cannibalized their dead.
In the last phases of the experiment the majority showed signs of extreme psychological distress, huddling vacantly in a mass at the center of their pens.
Even when the population fell once again to lower numbers, the mice were unable to recover. They had lost the ability to exist together harmoniously, and they had lost the social skills required to mate. They eventually successfully extinguished themselves. This horrific and chaotic world of rats and mice observed by Calhoun and his colleagues in their experiments was, they said: “A social sink.” A hundred years ago (December 1922) the Christian mystic and poet T. S. Eliot imagined Western society and culture as an intellectual and moral “wasteland.”
Long thought by many to merely be the interesting but pretentious highbrow talk of intellectuals, Eliot’s poem now has to be understood as prophetic.12 But my point here is not to trace any connections between Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” or what Calhoun and his colleagues originally referred to as “mouse paradise” and “rat utopia” and its collapse into a “social sink” (“mouse hell”) with the demise of our own culture –– school shootings, domestic violence, human trafficking, serial killers, pandemic addictions, political and corporate corruption, megachurch scammers, oppression, exploitation, hyper-sexuality and hyper- sexualization, clergy sexual exploitation and perversion, greed, materialism, dishonesty, bigotry, hatred, homelessness, hunger, and poverty. Rather, my intention is to raise the question: How can those consecrated to the purpose of God best go about the work of Christ as civilization collapses in unparalleled chaos and misery?13
Wiser Than Children of the Light
Douglas Rushkoff in his recently released book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, tells how the world’s richest people are increasingly attempting to shield themselves from the real and growing threat of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, resource depletion, and food scarcity.14 They are building multimillion dollar bunkers, with trained Navy Seals on retainer to come guard them and their storehouses at a moment’s notice. Or, they can buy into hidden farms with luxury compounds protected by elite security forces (you wouldn’t want a starving mob to come and take the food you are growing).
It all makes one think of Jesus’s story most often referred to as “The Parable of the Unjust Steward,” which concludes with the aphorism: “For the children of this world are wiser in dealing with their own kind than are the children of light” (Matthew 16:8). In The Annunciation: A New Evangelization and Apologetic for Mainline Protestants and Progressive Catholics in Postmodern North America, I noted the serious and well documented statistical decline in every professed Christian church whether conservative or liberal (two rather meaningless terms), and whether Catholic or Protestant. I also noted the low opinion most people have of clergy, which is attributable to a number of factors, including: the idolization of greed, and power; adoption of the world’s model of success; pastoral incompetence and theological ignorance; belief in nothing that matters ultimately; rampant sexual misconduct; and a lack of any real personal experience of the numinous. The literature demonstrates pretty clearly that mainline denominations (personally I think this is valid across all denominational and theological lines), need to make a number of changes, not only if they are to survive, but if they are to have any sort of meaningful ministry:
1. Bishops and church leaders must renounce their status as CEOs and once again become humble pastors.
2. Leaders in central offices, by whatever high sounding ecclesiastical terms or corporate designations they are known, must give up being permission givers and managers. Managers will manage an organization right into the ground.
3. Resources of every kind must flow from the top down, and from the center out, otherwise the denomination, whatever the brand, becomes totally irrelevant. In hierarchical churches like the Episcopal Church, for example, “Bishops who sell off parishes with a growing reputation as places of hope, help and healing and spiritual worship, with free health clinics, food pantries, and resource centers for victims of human trafficking, in order to find the money to buy a beautiful home near the ocean water, cannot expect anything but the world’s contempt.”
4. The church as an institution focused on money, power, status, and self- protection must be renounced in favor of the church as a living organism–– the mystical Body of Christ.
5. Secular programs and methodologies must be replaced by spiritual practices. The use of secular consultants to determine spiritual goals is diabolical.
6. A way must be found of choosing clergy and lay leaders, who lead by first working on their own spiritual formation and pastoral skills; and, therefore, who lead through service and wisdom rather than political astuteness or neurotic ambition.
7.I would now add, it must be realized that the strongest both individually and corporately are those who adopt the kenotic spirituality of Philippians the second chapter, and let go the belief that they, or their community, must survives at all costs.
“Quite frankly I doubt the spirituality, the will, or the inclination for anything this bold exists. Most likely candlesticks will be replaced.”15
Christian Mystics and Church of the Diaspora
The question we must now ask is one which if not “the” essential question is
certainly “an” essential question; namely, considering all this: “How then should we live?” It is a question taught us in 2 Peter 3:11, as well as Psalm 90:12. The simplest, most concise, and obvious answer is that no matter what, we must live the reality of our faith as deeply as we possibly can. Absolutely nothing, no matter how cataclysmic, changes our call to live out and into the two great precepts each moment we draw breath. The great twentieth century Catholic theologian Karl Rahner elaborates on this in a helpful way. Rahner said: “The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experienced something, or will cease to be anything at all.”16 By mystic Rahner meant someone who has “a direct relationship with the ineffable and incomprehensible God.”17 Mysticism, according to Rahner, is the primordial experience of God’s grace and presence in the midst of ordinary life.18
What Rahner said of the individual Christian is, as he meant it to be, equally true of the church. The church of the future will either be a mystical body, or it will not exist at all. This latter we know, cannot be true theologically. I am speaking, of course, as one who believes the community of faith to ultimately be invincible (Matthew 16:18); for although the total number of devout Christians in the world might be reduced to no more than a quarter ounce of yeast that is still enough for “one loaf” of bread. (1 Corinthians; 10:17; Matthew 13:33). Yet, we know that profession alone does not make one Christian (Matthew 7:21). My mother was a life-long member of the Churches of Christ. Shortly before her death at 93 she said, “You know, I am a member of the Church of Christ. When I drive down the street and I see a church with a sign that says: “The Church of Christ Meets Here!” It makes my heart glad. But you know not everyone that says it’s one is one.”
Rahner thought the church of the future would be a church of the diaspora.19 “Diaspora” is, the Greek term for the English “dispersion.” This is how the Church lived in the early centuries –– as small groups of committed believers scattered throughout the Roman Empire. Peter, therefore, addressed his First Epistle like this: “Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to God’s chosen sojourners of the diaspora (scattered) throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia”. (1 Peter 1:1).
The church of the diaspora, the future church, as Rahner imagined it, will
be a composition of small Christian communities all over the world, though not evenly distributed.20 “Everywhere there will be a little flock.” Men and women, not taking into account the sacred influence of family, friends, or small groups, will be Christian only because of personal faith “attained in difficult struggle and perpetually achieved anew.” 21 Christians of the future, of the little flock, will live in a vast world of non-Christians. In some places they may be admired, and in others hated. Their faith will be supported neither by convention, custom, nor institution. They will not regard the church as the “exclusive band of those who alone are predestined;22 and, neither is it certain that those who are inside the church belong to the band of the elect.”23 In sharing Christianity with “non-Christians, the future Christian will not so much start with the idea of aiming to turn them into something they are not, as trying to bring them to their true selves.”24
Paul says something along these lines in Philippians: “Our citizenship,” he says, “is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20 NIV). Philippi was a Roman colony. It was populated mainly by former soldiers, citizens of Rome, settled there strategically by the Empire. Paul’s readers knew very well what it meant to reside in one city- state while remaining loyal citizens of another. Christians of the diaspora will be keenly aware that they reside in the worldly dimension while citizens of one that is spiritual or heavenly; that they are, as Stanly Hauerwas put it “resident aliens.”25
Questions For Care and Formation In the Diaspora
Rahner’s picture of future church, of the apocalyptic church, is in general
encouraging and helpful as a vision and starting point for a sustainable way of being Christian individually, as well as in community in an age of crisis and catastrophe, but it leaves many critical and practical questions unanswered. Will the church of the diaspora arise naturally, organically, under the guidance of the Spirit without human agency; or is there something that can be done now in co- operation with the Spirit of Christ to prepare the way for these companies of the committed, these small bands of mystics? Is there some way we can begin now to intentionally co-operate with the Spirit? How can communities of hope, help and healing be prepared for the time of confusion and desperation to come –– “spiritually and psychologically therapeutic communities” in which people are accepted as they are with the gentle expectation that they will not remain that way?
Systems leadership theory, like Scripture, assumes that transformative
leadership begins with leaders first working on their own spiritual formation. But where and how can that best be done? Certainly not in the context of a modern seminary or school of theology as presently constructed. If the last forty or fifty years have taught us anything it is that the study of “academic spirituality” is a contradiction in terms. Every psychotherapist knows that a sure way to anesthetize spiritual sensitivity and to create a barrier between the person and his or own emotional experiences is to encourage intellectualization. Actually, this raises the whole question of how pastors are to be identified, educated, and deployed in the future, a time which may, for very practical reasons, require training and education more along the pedagogical lines of an ancient disciple and master teacher, or a medieval monastery with its novices. The work of ministry itself might resemble that of the “worker priests” in France between 1944-1954 (Acts 18:1-4).
Not only is the training and deployment of clergy in a collapsing civilization (particularly for Protestants who lack Catholicism’s network of convents and monasteries), an issue, but the future shape of the specific practices of pastoral care and spiritual guidance also form an enormous question. What pastoral skills and approaches will be most helpful when self-help truisms no longer hold, and humanity sinks into vacuity. I would suspect, but certainly do not know, that a rather eclectic training and orientation combining elements of what we now know as Client Centered Counseling, Systems Family Therapy, Cognitive Therapy, and Logo Therapy, all wisely employed by someone deeply immersed in the Christian spiritual practices of prayer, contemplation, worship, and sacred reading, might prove most helpful.
I hurry to note what is well established. Research has produced considerable evidence that there are certain core conditions common to all effective counseling.26 Furthermore, what is quite clear is that these conditions are relational in nature. Very simply stated, these conditions are not really techniques or methods employed by a pastoral counselor or spiritual director, but rather describe a particular way of being and relating. People are helped when they are offered a healthy relationship; that is, one characterized by such qualities as unconditional positive regard, acceptance, empathy, genuineness, clarity, appropriateness, immediacy, and hope.27 So, I simply reiterate, all Christian ministry, counseling, spiritual direction, preaching, teaching, evangelism, caring for the sick, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, sitting with the dying, and all the rest, is from beginning to end about presence rather than technique or methodology.
A Proposal
No one knows for sure what the future will hold. There are simply too many
variables, and while always dependable God is not always predictable. Meadows and her authorial colleagues recognize this in Limits of Growth; and, therefore, discuss multiple computer-generated scenarios. However, grasping that the future will be radically different than the present and considering and preparing for its contingencies thoughtfully, calmly, prayerfully, and with foresight might prove helpful, not only for future church, but here, now, in the present.
One way of doing this, or a least of providing some leadership in this process, might be to create a Center for Classical Christian Thought and Practice, or several such centers. The purpose of such a center would be to elucidate everything falling under the rubric of classical Christianity –– that which has been historically believed and practiced by most Christian in most places, in most times. Such a center, or centers, would be composed of confessing scholars, and focus on understanding Scripture as interpreted in the light of reason, experience, and tradition. In an age of bizarre definitions of Christian faith and practice they would pursue such questions as: What does it mean to be Christian? What is Christian spirituality? What disciplines and practices foster peace of mind, alleviate afflictive states of consciousness, and open one to awareness of the presence of God. What does it mean to be a nachfolger Christi?
They would study such questions as these and seek to offer, in so far as is possible, helpful guidance. This work would obviously have nothing to do with building academic careers or raising the status or incomes of the scholars engaged in this work, rather it’s value would be measured by the clarity, insight, and helpfulness it provides in understanding and advancing Christian spiritual formation and pastoral care.
Among other specific projects, serious first-hand research, perhaps utilizing trained missiology students as on-site interviewers, could be done on what ministry, if any, those who have actually been part of a mass migration march in the last ten years have experienced –– Syrians moving across Europe, and Latino’s making the long trek from Central America to the Southern U.S. border. Certainly, Palestinian Christians, the Coptic’s, Pakistani Christians, and the Chinese House Churches, among others, who have clung to their faith in hostile environments, have much to teach us. The patristic writers, Basil and Chrysostom, and later St. Patrick, also have a lot to say about what it means to be Christian in a time of plague, as well as, property ownership and the common good, wealth inequality, human trafficking, and poverty.
Since such a center would have as its reason for being the educement of truth and wisdom, it would have an apologetic component. Liaisons between scholars and the general public could identify and correct disinformation and ambiguities in something that would at least come very close to real time. By disseminating study results, which begin with neither the speculative theology of hyper-progressives nor the meaningless cliches of conservatives, it might be possible to redirect the flow of religious consciousness in a more honest and transformative direction. Obviously, reliance on large financial donors could make this quite difficult. Money corrupts, and it corrupts absolutely –– even where seminaries and theological schools are concerned.
Fantasy Flight
William Shatner’s character, Captain James T. Kirk in the old Star Trek television series, along with the rest of its cast, became from the time the show premiered in 1966 something of a symbol of American scientific and humanistic optimism for the future ––on earth a future of incredible technology in the service of humanity; in the powerful interplanetary Federation beyond Earth no hunger, no war, only peace, freedom, and prosperity; throughout the universe human creativity, love of personal freedom, and intuition indominable and shining on every frontier. So, Shatner’s 2021 Blue Origin Flight into space was anticipated, even by Shatner himself, as a celebration of human accomplishment. But back on earth, as the others were drinking Champagne, Shatner felt confused and found himself weeping with profound sadness. Having stared into “the vicious coldness of space,” he experienced something more like a funeral than a celebration of human accomplishment and scientific triumph.28 He writes of his space flight:
When I looked … into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold … all I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. . . It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life, Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her. Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.29
It is not in the least surprising that a ninety-year-old man risking the hazards of a rocket ride, detached from the seeming solidarity, comfort, and relative safety of his earthly home, staring into the dark nothingness of space would react as Shatner did.30
The negative aspects of his experience do not entirely fit the sort of cognitive shift sometimes experienced by astronauts and referred to by researchers as the “Overview Effect,” a state of wonder and beauty and appreciation with self-transcendent qualities accompanied by an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole. What stands out is that, although there is a feeling of connectedness to the Earth and humanity in Shatner’s experience, there is also something unexpectedly sad and horrifying.
Like many celebrities, Shatner has, as an informed environmentalist, warned that overpopulation and climate change are existential threats to humanity. “Existential threat” is, of course, simply an intellectual way of talking about a threat to our existence, a sophisticated way of speaking about death. When Shatner stared into the cold dark viscousness of space, he obviously experienced the acute consciousness of his own “non-being” as Paul Tillich put it 31 –– the reality of his own relentlessly approaching death in which everything he is and everything he has done will, from the secular perspective, come to nothing. So maybe if he fixes the toxic environment problem, and the overpopulation problem, and the violence problem then the earth and the humanity with which “he feels at one will go on,”32 and in this way he will achieve a kind of immortality. In the end his vow to redouble his effort to save the planet is little more than the “denial of death” of which the Pulitzer Prize winning author and philosopher Ernest Becker famously saw as the cause of much of the neurosis and psychosis so characteristic of modern humanity.33 However, at the end of the day (Shatner’s day, and our day), the reality which cannot be evaded is that finite means finite whether we use it of ourselves, our -planet (“. . .this fragile earth, our island home”),34 or the entire cosmos.
The Earth is, rounding off, about five billion years old. That is a very long time, but it is not an infinite amount of time. The reaches of space, for all practical purposes, are infinite, yet we are told space is still expanding which must mean that like a grain of sand space must have something like an outer edge. Unimaginably large does not mean infinite. And, the finite 35 cannot satisfy an infinite longing. What is limited cannot fill-up what is limitless.”36 As Tillich noted, when what is less than ultimate becomes our Ultimate Concern then not only have we by definition become idolatrous, but fulfillment (ultimate fulfillment) is no longer possible. No human being can prevent death or “save” the earth. Only someone who has watched too many Star Trek reruns too many times can believe human science or cleverness can save the earth, and to think the earth can save us is both idolatrous and delusional.
Question and Response
I think the first part of the story of the man born blind, may be helpful in
answering the question of how we should live and serve in an apocalyptic age:
As Jesus passed by, He saw a man who had been blind from birth. And His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must carry out the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the Light of the world” (John 9:1-5 NASB).
As Jesus and the Disciples are leaving the Temple precincts, they see a man blind since birth––probably begging. This encounter raises an important philosophical and theological question for them: “Rabbi,” they ask Jesus, “Who sinned, this man, or his parents, that he would be born blind?” For the man it is, of course, not merely a theological question to be analyzed and interminably debated. It is the reality, the misery, with which he must wrestle every day. Jesus incisively and wisely answers that looking for someone to blame is not only useless but interferes with doing what needs to be done. The situation is simply what it is. But in confronting the situation as it exists in the moment there is opportunity––opportunity to do the works of God.
One of Viktor Frankl’s great insights as he suffered terribly in the Nazi death camp was that the question he needed to ask was not what he expected of life, but what life expected of him.37 Whether in a world of plenty or desperate need, security or constant peril, of civility and refined grace or crude vulgarity, of order or chaos, whether the sea is rough or smooth the primal question before each of us is always the same, “What response is required of me here and now?” And the answer is always the same answer: Following the two great precepts moment by moment, “do the works of God.” To paraphrase Frankl, “We need to think of ourselves as those who are being questioned by Life –– daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation only, but in right action and in right conduct.”38 “And yet,” Jesus asks, “when the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth” (Luke 18:8 NRSV)?
––––––––––––––
End Notes
1 Robert A. Johnson, Inner Work: Using Dreams & Active Imagination For Personal Growth, New York, San Francisco: HarperCollin, 1986, 9-10.
2 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy, New York: Harper and Row, orig. pub. 1958. Also see: Glenn F. Chestnut, God and Spirituality: Philosophical Essays, New York and Bloomington: IUniverse, Inc. 2010.
3 John J. Pilch, Visions and Healing in the Acts of the Apostles: How the early Believers Experienced God, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2004, 2.
4 Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World, New York: Flatiron Books 2022, 1.
5 Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004, 170.
6 Randers and Meadows, Limits to Growth, xi.
7 For the sake of disambiguation, denial does not mean rejecting the truthfulness of a statement, but rather discarding it as personally relevant.
8 Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Colson, The Late Great Planet Earth, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1970.
9 Rich investors are already buying farmland north of what has been traditionally considered the “Breadbasket of America.”
10 Parag Khanna, Move: The Forces Uprooting Us, New York • London • Toronto Sydney • New Delhi: Scribner, 2021, 263-264, 266.
11Edmund Ramsden & Jon Adams,” Escaping the Laboratory: In The Rodent Experiments of John B. Calhoun & Their Cultural Influence,” Department of Economic History London School of Economics, January 2008 (eprints.ise.ac.uk/22514/1/2308Ramsdadams.pdf) accessed 08-30-2022.Also: J. R. Vallentyne, Tragedy in Mouse Utopia: An Ecological Commentary on Human Utopia, Bloomington: Trafford Publishing, 2006.
12 T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, Los Vegas, NV: FQ Publishing, 2015. (First published December, 1922).
13 Although our cultural crisis is more acute than what Schaffer perhaps thought, and his analysis of specific philosophers is sometimes faulty, his perspective on the collapse of Western culture is still worth reading. Francis Schaeffer, How Then Should We Live?” The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1976.
14 Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, New York: W. W. Norton, 2022, 5.
15 Larry Hart, The Annunciation: A New Evangelization and Apologetic for Mainline Protestants and Progressive Catholics in Postmodern North America, Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017, xxi.
16 Harvey D. Eagan, Karl Rahner: Mysticism of Everyday Life, New York: Crossroad, 1998, 56.
17 Eagan, Rahner: Mystics of Everyday Life, 56-57.
18 For Christian spirituality or mysticism as the practice and experience of the presence of God see: Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Vol.1 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Mysticism, New York: Crossroad, 1991.
19 Karl Rahner, The Christian of the Future, New York: Herder and Herder, 1967, 77-101.
20 Rahner, The Christian of the Future, 78-79
21 Rahner, The Christian of the Future, 79
22 Rahner, The Christian of the Future, 92.
23 Rahner, The Christian of the Future, 93.
24 Rahner, The Christian of the Future, 88.
25 Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the
Christian Colony (Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition Paperback – April 15, 2014, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014.
26 C. H. Patterson, Relationship Counseling and Psychotherapy, New York: Harper and Row, 1974.
27 Larry Hart, A Model for Relational Counseling Through Expository Preaching at The Santa Cruz Church of Christ (A Dissertation), Pasadena: CA: Fuller Theological Seminary August 1984. Also: Hart, The Annunciation, 2017.
28 William Shatner, Boldly Go: Reflections On A Life of Awe and Wonder, New York: Atria Books, 2022, 90.
29 Shatner, Boldly Go, 89.
30 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Volume II, Existence and The Christ, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 41.
31 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Volume One, Reason and Revelation, Being and God, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.
32 Shatner, Boldly Go, 90.
33 Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.
34 Episcopal Church. The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church: Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David According to the Use of the Episcopal Church. New York: Seabury Press, 1979, 370.
35 William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future, New York: Basic Books, 2022. MacAskill, a young optimistic philosopher believes through the use of technology, particularly that of safe AI, we can extend human existence on Earth by millions, perhaps billions of years, and with the development of space travel and exploration maybe even by trillions of years. MacAskill’s philosophy of “long termism” will seems reasonable to people of ordinary goodwill, but not so much to those who ask: What’s in it for me?” are cynical, or press that great philosophical question of “Why?” Neither will it necessarily resonate with the poorest of the poor, the suffering, or oppressed.
36 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume III: Existence and The Christ, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951, 47.
37 Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning: From Death Camp to Existentialism, Ilse Lash (trans.), New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959, 77.
38 Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 77.
