May 11 2022
EYES HAVE THEY, BUT……
I love the Tweed Library. It is new, it is spacious, the staff is superb: I can order any book not among its extensive volumes. I can read the periodicals to which I don’t subscribe and that’s how my eye fell upon the extra issue of MacLean’s with the bold – too bold- prediction, THE YEAR AHEAD, 2 0 2 2.
Predictions are ‘dictions’ or ‘sayings’, foretelling happenings before they occur. A risky game. We take ‘Weather’ forecasts or predictions with a grain of good humor, yet we consult them every day. Insurance Companies always have high salary actuaries, who project, after complicated computer calculations, the chance of this or that to happen. A risky game.
Oh yes, MacLean’s was basically on the ball with the obvious: weather, inflation, but with a few weeks into 2022, the Ukraine Affair messed it all up, totally: Putin spoiled all predictions!
Gone is optimism. Gone is stability. Gone is, sad to say, the future. We live in the NOW, afraid for tomorrow. We have become a deeply pessimistic people, who feel alone, marginalized, hopeless, who believe our families face a dark future. For the first time, the significant majority of us feels our children will not be better off than we are.
Is that really the case? Yes.
I believe that writers, poets, artists in general, are better ‘forecasters’ than computer-inspired projectors. Books, where pandemics wipe out, where nuclear bombs wipe out, where natural disasters wipe out, are on the best-seller lists. Doom and gloom are in.
Take Emily St John Mandel, who wrote on series on how people cope after emerging from the wreckage of a world-wide upheaval: both in Station 11 and Sea of Tranquility people are trying to rebuild after a flu has decimated the world’s population. Even traveling to and occupying the moon enters the picture.
The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. The book details the grueling journey of a father and his young son, after global calamity.
Then there is Kim Stanley Robinson and his The Ministry of the Future in which he outlines the challenges facing our planet.
All writers are great in describing the terrible consequences of our lifestyle, especially Elizabeth Kolbert in her The Sixth Extinction.
But we need Seers!
Seers? What are they? Seers are visionaries. The Bible is full of them. They were called ‘seers’ not because they could see into the future, but because they could see the truth, could understand the deeper meaning of life and have a holistic view on events. In other words, seers do not major in minors, but grasp the true consequences of the day’s happenings, and the deeper spiritual message of the present moment.
A seer sheds unblinking light on the pain and injustices of the present. By doing so he or she links heeding to hearing and action to understanding.
Thus, a seer is not an extraordinary gifted person who knows the unknown, a sort of fortune-teller who magically foretells what is to come. No, a seer is first and foremost a believer who refuses to nostalgically wallow in the past, but is convinced that a new coming age requires new thinking and different approaches.
A seer is first and foremost a believer who openly and unabashedly dares to look at what is happening ‘out there’ and, as a consequence, rings the alarm bells: the End is near.
A seer is first and foremost a believer who from his or her perspective on contemporary life dares to look to the future where, through our relentless creational abuse, a sudden spike in temperature, will wipe out all that lives.
A seer is first and foremost a believer who by seeing Scripture as a lamp for their feet and a light for their path in God’s wonderful creation, knows that Christ, as the Son of Man, the Ben-Adam, the Son of the Soil, will return to make all things new. That’s why a seer, in spite of all the sin and evil in this world, looks to the future with full confidence.
A seer is first and foremost a believer who now already can visualize what this future will be like and thus can critically evaluate the present in the light of the glorious future that is coming, as Isaiah told us, a future, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart has conceived, that is what the Lord has prepared for those who love him and his creation.”
The harm we have done to creation is irreparable, dooming all that lives. That’s why God, in his grace, and Jesus by his sacrifice, will soon wipe out the old system and bring in a new system, populated by people who have learned how to live eternally.
We all have eyes, but only the biblical seers, see.