Dreaming the Future Closer

As in, getting it right in the here and now.

This entry will probably be short and sweet, but I’ve been chewing on this one awhile and it feels like it is precisely the principle I’ve been looking for:

Lived spirit, lived religion, cannot be satisfied with an understanding of its past as the past.  It must have a sense of its present and its future, as a trajectory, as a vector for growth.  Getting it ‘right’ must never be reduced to reproducing it right after some model from the past.

This insight comes to me courtesy of Walter Benjamin’s meditation on history.  Contemplating them closely helped me realize what was missing in much of my historical study of the past: I lost the sense of the religion as lived in favor of a series of frozen images of one moment of its past life.

In the present, all religions are related to each other, not by virtue of some deep, common archetypal source, but by virtue of their shared presence with each other.  We don’t need correspondences (science before the fact) but ‘reports from the field’ (facts without the presumption of science), where we can discover the real encounters between spirits and peoples.

That sort of spiritual history is a lot harder to do in public, a lot more exposed.  It demands finding an active, ethical core (not just an ethical code, a list of morals) from which we can derive a path, a direction, to carry the religions forward.  That is firstly a personal project, a constant reflection on what has brought me to this point, but like all personal questions it has a social aura.  To speak of my destiny (destination, destiny) is also speak of who shares that. 

It’s also, in the end, to acknowledge that there are many with whom I share a present but with whom I must diverge.  We may share a present, a past, even a future, though we do not share a destination.  We may, too, share a destiny without sharing a present or past, just as two arrows may meet in the same target.