By Barry Casey
The world is always passing away. . . . The art of successful living requires discerning what things need to change to preserve the things that really matter.—Rod Dreher, How Dante Can Save Your Life
If you had told me back in 1968, when I was in the tenth grade at PUC Prep, that here I would be, fast closing in on my allotted three scores and ten and still chained to this earth, I would have been confused. That was the year that a group of us from a number of Northern California academies joined hands at a youth conference and sang “Side by Side” and promised each other we’d be in the New Jerusalem by the same time next year. That is what the dynamic youth pastor who led us announced, although many of us were still trying to do the math on the 2,300 days chart and figure out how the plagues were going to be squeezed into a few months.
It was not so mad an idea, that the world could end soon, given that our world seemed to be exploding around our ears. We were in the midst of a never-ending Vietnam War, President Kennedy had been killed a few years earlier, the Weather Underground were blowing up buildings and them- selves, and students not much older than us were forcibly occupying offices in universities like Columbia, Cornell, and Berkeley. In April of that year, Martin Luther King, Jr., would be assassinated and in June, Bobby Kennedy would fall to Sirhan Sirhan’s gun. And the next year the Hells Angels would beat Meredith Hunter, a black teenager, to death in front of the stage at the Altamont Speedway where The Rolling Stones were playing to 5,000 people. That was when some social commentators said the Sixties ended.
We thought, as teenagers have for hundreds of years, that we might not live to become old (anything over 30). And in our darkest, most secret anxieties, we hoped the Lord would not return before we got married and had sex—since we had heard there wouldn’t be marriage in heaven and most certainly wouldn’t be sex. There it is: the trapdoor upon which our dithering feet of clay stood.
In media res, “in the middle of things,” is us surfacing with a gasp in the stream of our lives. It’s the moral equivalent of dropping into a conversation and belatedly realizing that we are part of it. It’s a conversation that’s been going on since “in the beginning was the Word,” and it includes us until we pass on out of it while the conversation continues. By the time we’ve caught up to what everyone is talking about, and discover we have something to say, they’re on to the next thing. But now and then we see something or dive into some- thing or even start something ourselves that deserves a sharp intake of breath and clear-eyed wonder. And it’s then, while lifted by the waves on the river of our lives, we discover what we may pour of ourselves into that stream.
Religion has always played a part in my life, waxing and waning but always lighting my way. I was fortunate to grow up with friends who took religion seriously too. Some embraced it, some stepped thoughtfully away from it with regrets, but none of them dismissed it.
We lived in a culture that was rooted in religion expressed as Adventism and manifested in a time of social and political upheaval. There was no better time for a sharpening of the lens of our imaginations and the thrumming of our creativity. Music, poetry, paintings, and stories poured from us; we didn’t know what we couldn’t do yet, so we did what we could with what we had. It was exhilarating. One of our favorite texts was 1 Timothy 4:12: “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young.” The patience of our elders allowed us to imagine that our inventions were unique and gave us the room we needed to grow and be creative.
Of course, not everyone felt that way. We got plenty of resistance from behind. Some pastors, more church administrators, and a good many people in the pews saw the change as threatening and divisive. The status quo was enough, they said. Stability and continuity were what mattered in a time when people were marching in the streets and breaking down barriers. The church, they argued, would go through to the end. It would be triumphant, victorious, and inimitable as it swept across the world with the message of the soon-coming Savior. Just don’t be bringing guitars into the sanctuary during divine service.
We didn’t have anything like a philosophy of change. We were more or less of the view that change in itself was good. I don’t think we understood that good or not, change is inevitable. We didn’t have a summit from which to look back and see all the changes that had happened, most of them the result of inattention, slippage, and decay. And while a number of us loved history and the study of it, I’m not sure we grasped that we were now living with what had happened in the past. That was then, this was now. History was a museum with fascinating dioramas, not an avalanche starting high in the mountains above our village.
Michael Mayne, the Dean Emeritus of Westminster Abbey, in his Lenten meditation, Pray, Love, Remember, mused that a distinction should be drawn between our inheritance and our tradition. What we inherit from our ancestors—buildings, paintings, fine china—cannot be changed. But our traditions, those values, and customs, rituals and symbols passed down to us must be continually examined to see if they still speak to us and are still relevant to the lives we live.
We have to discern what realities are permanently true and of value and communicate them in language that links with life as most people experience it, with all its heartbreak and delight and mystery. (p. 39)
One of the ideas that lifted Ellen White to the status of a quiet revolutionary for our Sixties generation was “present truth.” We took it to mean the constant search for truth that shapes the present if only we are willing to learn from history, listen to the Spirit, and be faithful to Jesus. We put that together with her conviction that we should not be “mere reflectors of other men’s thoughts.”
Adventism, like any authentic faith, is never complete. If it is alive, it is a constant filling and flowing, like pouring into a bowl that overflows and pours into another. We can keep the equilibrium and the level constant only through constant infilling and outflowing. Stagnant waters are the dead remnants of what was once a clear, bright, sparkling stream of life.
When we are infants we grasp what we can from the world that is passing by. When we are young we run to the world that is becoming. When we are older we choose what to keep from the world that is passing away.
–Barry Casey taught religion, philosophy, and communication for 37 years in Maryland and Washington, D.C. He is now retired and writing in Burtonsville, Maryland. More of the author’s writing can be found on his blog, Dante’s Woods. Email him at: [email protected]