With an eye
towards the future
(Second part)

"Also seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper." (Jeremiah 29:7)

Jeremiah wanted to implant a beautiful vision of the future in the hearts of his people. For he looked beyond the day of calamity towards something better.

We know it is entirely possible for human beings to completely lose trust in the future. Not only critical situations lead us to a loss of nerve; we can also lose faith in human possibilities.

It is interesting that in the area of technology a man in 1838 resigned his job in the patent office in the U. S. A. because he decided that all the inventions that would ever be conceived in the human mind had clearly been realized. In 1886 another man declared that all imaginanble means of national defense, transportation and communication had already been invented. But in 1886 Thomas Edison (electric bulb) was 39 years old; Henry Ford (automobile) was 29; Orville Wright (airplane) 15; Marconi (telegraph) 12, and Albert Einstein only 7 years old!

Only fifteen years ago, we watched Communism as it was sweeping the world; it seemed unstoppable. But we know it experienced its last gasps.

And this, not by force of arms, but by the superiority of a greater ideology. Yokolev, father of perestroika, and Savardnadze (former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the USSR) had deserted Kremlin. And Gorbachev himself declared to the world: "The advance of communism is no longer a realistic goal."

Our national crisis is getting more serious by the day. The present, as Charlie Brown puts it in a Peanuts Cartoon, "drives us crazy"; therefore the future is dim doomed. One columnist is quite right is describing the Philippine situation as not unlike the Myth of Sisyphus. The mortal man Sisyphus, because he had challenged the gods, was condemned to roll a huge rock up the hill, and down the hill, and up again without let-up. The coup d' etats, the political turmoil, typhoons, volcanic eruptions, and floods visiting the country in rapid Sisyphean succession have left the country devastated, annihilated and gravely damaged.

But no matter how discouraging the situation may be, no matter how hopeless, we have a future. Of course we should not talk to glibly about the sufferings of our people. We must do much more to be helpful. Roger Hazelton, one of my favorite theologians, was quite right when he says in his book, Graceful Courage that there should be "a fine balance between fearing the worst and believing the best." TO BE CONTINUED*

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