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The Enlivened Present Moment

Some books are so good, I return to them for reminders and inspiration.  Some of these books, like Thomas Kelly’s Testament of Devotion, are spiritually rich.  Kelly was a Quaker writing in the first half of the twentieth century.  He reminds me why I am a Quaker and how my own tradition can always help me on my journey.  Other books are less overtly spiritual.  One of these books is by the late Chicago theologian, Langdon Gilkey.  

I met Gilkey a few times and read many of his books.  One I regularly use in class is Shantung Compound.  This was published in 1966.  It traced Gilkey’s personal story of being a prisoner of the Japanese in an internment camp in China.  Gilkey had gone to China soon after graduating from Harvard.  He was teaching in an American school when he was rounded up, along with many others from the area, and placed in this camp.  It was not a prison per se, but they could not escape.

They spent about two and a half years in very cramped confinement until WW II ended and they were free.  It is a fascinating story of how complete strangers are thrown together and had to figure out how to create their own civilization.  If you can imagine more than 2,000 people living in an area equal to about three football fields, you get a sense of this daunting task.  Gilkey’s own pilgrimage is an interesting one.  He arrived in China as a fresh college graduate with a faith that was intellectual at best.  Early on in his camp experience, he concluded religion offered little to the real needs of making a life.

He entered his agnostic phase.  But human issues and, particularly, human weaknesses pressed on him and others in camp.  In theological language, they faced all the predicaments of sin!  Morality mattered more than he assumed.  Community was impossible without things like love, justice, etc.  Gradually Gilkey grew more and more into a mature faith, which became the basis of real hope for any long-term life that would flourish.  As students read this book, they are drawn more and more into a discussion of issues in life that they will face.  My job is not to make them religious, but rather pose questions which ask them how they will figure this out for their own lives.  

Of course, as Gilkey tells the story in real time, he never knew when or how his situation would come to an end.  Finally, in August 1945, Japan was defeated and the camp was liberated.  We follow Gilkey back to the US, but he is a very different person that the young guy who left Harvard for an adventure.  One of my favorite chapters in the book comes toward the end and is entitled, “After It Was All Over.”  He talks about the good-byes that were exchanged---“the farewells were too ultimate even to be sad.”  He then begins to reflect on time---the future and all that might come to him.

He comments, “the thought came to me that only when destiny gives us the great gift of an open future are we able to fully live…” (223)  I wonder how many of us really think there is a destiny?  I know some religious traditions believe in predestination---a destiny that is decided ahead of time by God.  But my own Quaker gang does not go this direction.  I think about destiny as the accumulation of my past and the world’s history that does propel us in certain directions.  

I am intrigued by the fact I might be given an “open future.”  To me this is a future that has some built-in choice.  Gilkey says this is necessary for us “fully to live.”  I can’t imagine anyone who does not want fully to live.  This is where the spiritual is implicated.  I think God needs to be part of the picture for me fully to live.  Gilkey adds an interesting note to this thought.  Fully to live means “intense life in the present is made up in large part of expectancy.  Expectancy is one way to talk about a future.  To expect is not to have something, but we have every hope we will.  Expectancy is future stuff.  

Gilkey concludes, “Whenever we are alive and excited, it is the future and not the past that enlivens the present moment.”  This obviously contrasts with his time in the camp when they were not alive and excited.  They were not even sure they had a future.  This demonstrates to me that our future is key.  In effect, without a future we are doomed.  That is the problem with depression and despair---there is seemingly no future.  

It is important to me to remember that my life---my life in the present---is a gift.  Of course, I am living it, but it is still grace---gift.  And it has potential and possibility because of my future.  To me this implicates God.  God is the giver of the gift.   God is life and shares life with me, which gives me life.  Because of God, my future is open.  I have the possibility of fully living.  We have the chance to be alive and excited.  I am so grateful.  I am grateful for the fact that I live and that I have a future.

I am grateful for this enlivened present moment.   


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