When I’m in a WTO protestor mood I like to drop in to Adbusters. It’s a weird and wonderful collection of stuff. Anyway, today I noticed the headline above and it occurred to me that I should send out some posts on my project for this year. During the second half of the year I plan to write a book on Eschatology so things like the end of the world are on my mind.
Over at Adbusters they are in a more apocalyptic or “the sky-is-falling” mood and the picture from “the Road” and “Avatar” is not actually related to the article. I saw both of these movies and enjoyed them in the own kind of way. In the grey corner, The Road is an amazingly bleak account of a man trying to keep his son alive in a post-apocalyptic world. They journey through the wreckage of what used to be North America matching their will to live against the efforts of marauding cannibals and earthquakes - if the future is like this, let me just say, have a good meal and take a bath tonight.
In the blue corner [sic.] is the latest Cameron blockbuster. The military/industrial complex that is humankind has gone off-world to open Pandora’s box in search of “Unobtanium” - presumably some wonder mineral that will enable humanity to survive now that it has destroyed its own world. In this scenario all that is caricaturistically bad in white-military-male culture crashes head-long into “I-we-Gaia” that ends right where the Copenhagen summits wished they had.
Well, after all that cynicism let me say in response that I think our prayers are the best indication of what we think about the future. At least, that is the line I shall be pursuing in my book. Our prayers are the most basic element of the “now/not-yet” tension that characterises life between the ascension of the Lord Jesus and his return. What we pray about and the manner with which we pray reveals everything about what we think of the present, the past and, especially, the future. For now what I’m suggesting is that your prayers are a far better indication of the future of life on the earth than anything else - especially a Hollywood blockbuster.
