Saturday December 2, 2017
There’s a good book called The Past is a Foreign Country. Looking at it another way, however, you could say that the past is not so foreign since we spend a lot of our time there! And the future is another favorite holiday spot! David Lowenthal lists some of the things that have now become ‘nostalgia objects’: cars with starting handles, 1950s juke-boxes, Bill Haley, Button B.... But no matter how stuffed the past is, the future can be even more stuffed. The past is somewhat limited by reality, but the future is limited only by imagination. Everything we can’t face, everything we want to postpone, we send there. Everything we want to change the easy way, we send there. Everything we want to have without doing anything to have it, we send there. Everything we want to be, without really trying, we send there. The past can keep Button B, because the future has every Button in the alphabet! It’s a comfortable place, full of easy promise….
Unless, that is, it isn’t! Today’s reading puts it in a different light. It can “catch you suddenly like a trap.” “Watch!” Jesus said. That doesn’t mean, “Be a spectator.” It means, “Be awake!” What he called “that day” will not come as a future day but as Today.
