Enjoying the Present, Extending the Future

Since early 2022, I have posted several times about the disturbing matter of the likely collapse of the world order in which we now live. Many of you are probably tired of hearing/thinking about that. So, here I am focusing on enjoying the present as well as extending the future of our civilization. 

We humans are prone to embrace extremes. There are many people who focus so much on the present that there is but scant consideration given to future perils. Of course, many such people are so busy with work and family there is little time to think beyond the press of daily affairs.

On the other hand, others think/worry so much about the future in light of the current ecological predicament, their present happiness is stifled. This is especially true for those who realize that TEOTWAWKI (the end of the world as we know it) may soon become a reality.

Eco-anxiety is a current psychological problem for many, and especially for many younger people—and I encourage you to read this Sept. 16 article posted in the New York Times, which Thinking Friend Anton Jacobs sent me last week.

Is it possible, though, to be keenly aware of the likelihood of TEOTWAWKI in the near future and still live with joy in the present? I think so.

As in many other situations, we must seek to be firmly established in a position between the poles—in a radiant center, if you will. At the very least, we need to learn how to “toggle” between the opposites.

How can we live with enjoyment of the present while being aware of the collapse that lies ahead in the not-too-distant future?

I asked Bard (Google’s AI chatbot) for suggestions about how to live joyfully in light of the current ecological predicament.

I fully agreed with the beginning of their response: “The ecological predicament is a serious one, and it is important to be honest about the challenges we face. However, it is also important to find ways to live joyfully in the present moment.”

Indeed, that’s what we must seek to do: both to be honest in assessing the world’s ecological challenges and also to learn how to live now with a sense of joy.

Bard’s suggestions regarding how to do the latter were not bad. They included “spend time in nature,” “connect with loved ones,” “be grateful,” and “give back to others.”

(They also suggested, “do things that you enjoy,” but it didn’t seem very intelligent for AI to say the way to live joyfully in the present is to do things that you enjoy.)

Enjoying the present largely depends on not allowing the fears of the future to dominate our thinking. Rather, we must be fully present in the present for much of the time.

Knowing that industrial civilization will at some point collapse—and sooner than most people are willing to consider probable—doesn’t mean we can’t live with enjoyment in the present. We individuals, especially we older adults, know that death is coming, but we still can experience much joy now.*

But it is imperative that as we enjoy the present we don’t jeopardize the future by damaging the environment. Or, more positively, our goal should be living joyfully in the present and also doing all we can to extend the future for the coming generation(s).

While TEOTWAWKI is most likely to happen sooner than any of us want to think, human action now can push that collapse further into the future. Twenty years from now is far better than ten years, and collapse in 40 years is much to be preferred over 20 years.

What can we do to extend the future while enjoying the present? Here, very briefly, are three important things we can do in this regard:

1) Seek increasingly to practice simple living.**

2) Continue to develop good environmental practices and to encourage friends and acquaintances to do the same.

3) Work actively for the election of Senators and Representatives who have a good understanding of the current ecological predicament and who will work to enact public policies that will, indeed, help to extend the future.

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* I have already dealt with this matter to some extent in “Memento Mori,” my 1/28/23 blog post, see here, and I encourage you to read that post (again).

** A helpful book in this regard is The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Simple Living (2000). This book is now out of print, but several used copies (reasonably priced) are available at Abe Books. I also encourage you to read “The Shakertown Pledge: Nine Ways to Make a Difference,” my 5/5/11 article on the GoodFaithMedia website (here). 

"Windows to God": Introducing Kelly Latimore

Perhaps many of you haven’t heard, or don’t remember, the name Kelly Latimore, but he is a man who deserves to be known because of his work as an iconographer. I am posting this article to expand the circle of those who know & appreciate Latimore’s outstanding artistic creations and what we can learn from him. 

Ruth Harder, my pastor, is finishing her work on “Stained Theology,” the name of her pastoral study grant project funded by the Louisville Institute (which you can learn more about here).

Her project grew out of concern at Rainbow Mennonite Church regarding the large stained glass window in our sanctuary, which I wrote about in my 10/10/20 blog article titled “What To Do about a White Jesus?”.

Pastor Ruth’s meticulous study has been not only about stained glass windows but also how images of Jesus in such windows and elsewhere have stained, in a negative way, theological understanding and has abetted racism and attitudes of white supremacy.

In her research, she visited Kelly Latimore in St. Louis, and while he is not directly involved with stained glass windows, he has produced many striking images of Jesus (and his birth family).

This past Sunday (Sept. 10), Kelly was the guest speaker at Rainbow Mennonite Church.*

Kelly Latimore is a youngish (b. 1986) artist who grew up as a PK (pastor’s kid) in a conservative church in the suburbs of Chicago and graduated from Greenville College (now University), a conservative Christian school in central Illinois. And then his religious viewpoint/understanding expanded.

From 2009-13 he lived/worked on the Good Earth Farm in Ohio as one of the Common Friars, affiliated with the Episcopal Church. It was there in 2010 that he painted his first icon.**

After Trump was elected President in 2016, the first icon he drew was “Refugees: La Sagrada Familia,” in which Latin immigrants crossing the desert depicts the holy family’s flight to Egypt. A picture of that icon is on Pope Francis’s 2018 book A Stranger and You Welcomed Me.

Kelly’s most widely known (and in some circles infamous) icon was the one titled “Mama” (pictured above). It was painted in 2020 in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Kelly and this icon, among others, was featured in a 5/5/21 Christian Century article (see here).

These two icons elicited hate mail and even death threats. Kelly says, though, that such opposition is confirmation that his “icons are preaching as they should.”

In his Sunday talk at Rainbow Church, Kelly referred to icons as “windows to God,” and his icons mainly show God and God’s actions in the world now, not in the past.

He emphasized that as an artist he must “pay attention,” and that all of us “must practice seeing.” Kelly’s icons help us to see, to engage in what he calls “holy pondering.” He also challenged us not only to see, but to become “living icons,” acting for peace and justice in this needy world.

The icons of the past, most prominent in the Eastern Orthodox Church, always portray the holy family or recognized saints with halos. Kelly’s icons are of contemporary people who have not been formally designated as saints by any Church, but they are “saints” nevertheless because they are windows to God.

His modern-day “saints” include several African Americans, such as MLK Jr., James Cone, and John Lewis. But there are also notable White saints as well: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Henri Nouwen, Mr. Rogers, and Mary Oliver, for example.

Although he didn’t mention it Sunday, one of Kelly’s recent and publicized paintings is of Matthew Shepard. It is now in the Washington National Cathedral. Their website explains:

On Dec. 1, 2022, on what would have been Matthew Shepard's 46^th birthday, the Cathedral dedicated a devotional portrait of Matthew Shepard by acclaimed iconographer Kelly Latimore.

I encourage you to open this link to see a picture of that portrait and the story about it.

My prayer is that we all will learn from Kelly how to see God more fully through the icons, the “windows of God” around us, and that we, too, can more and more become living icons.

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* The YouTube video of that worship service is available for viewing by clicking this link, and Pastor Ruth’s introduction and Kelly’s talk begins at the 18:50 mark.

** Kelly tells about painting his first icon in this article.

NOTE: Learn/see more about Kelly’s icons by clicking this link to his website. Reproductions of his icons can be purchased by linking to “store.”  

LKS posing with Kelly on Sept. 10

Why God Gets Angry

“When you see God getting angry in the Bible, it’s often because the poor are being mistreated.” These are the words of Matthew Desmond in the August issue of Sojourners magazine (see here).

Over the years I have written about poverty several times on this blog, but reading the Sojourners’ interview with Desmond spurred me to post here again about that troubling topic.*¹

Matthew Desmond is a sociology professor at Princeton University. His first book was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). His new book, Poverty, by America, was released in March. I was highly impressed by what I read in both books. 

In introducing their interview with Desmond (b. 1979/80), the editors of Sojourners note that he “is the son of a pastor, and his work is rich with spiritual metaphor and flare while founded in the material realities of poverty and the conditions that cause it.”

Indeed, rather than an outside academic studying the problem of poverty from the “ivory tower,” Desmond did his research by living among the poor for extended periods of time, becoming friends with those suffering from the many perils of poverty.

Interviewer Mitchell Atencio began by asking Desmond to comment on Gustavo Gutiérrez’s depiction of poverty.

The Peruvian liberation theologian defined poverty as “premature and unjust death,” and stated that “the poor person is someone who is treated as a non-person, someone who is considered insignificant from an economic, political, and cultural point of view.”*²

Desmond agreed, noting that “one of the leading causes of death in the United States is poverty.” For that and other reasons, Desmond declares, “I want to end poverty. I don’t want to treat it, I want to cure it. I don’t want to reduce it, I want to abolish it.”

Accordingly, he challenges his readers to join him in becoming “poverty abolitionists.”*³

The abolitionist movement was the name of the long struggle for the eradication of the enslavement of human beings mostly to do manual labor without pay.

There have also long been attempts to abolish capital punishment. The Death Penalty Information Center has a webpage titled The Abolitionist Movement, and it is, of course, about the history of attempts to abolish the death penalty.

Some people are seeking to abolish abortion. For example, the “Abolition of Abortion in Missouri Act” was introduced to the Missouri Senate last year.

Little has been said, though, about the abolition of poverty. There was, of course, “the war on poverty” launched by President Johnson in 1964. Although opposed by GOP politicians from the beginning, some positive steps to reduce poverty were made. But it soon began to lose effectiveness.

Accordingly, early in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., started the Poor People's Campaign to address what he saw as the shortcomings of the war on poverty—and his trip to Memphis where he was assassinated in April was not to struggle against racism as such, but to protest against poverty.*⁴

Desmond’s call for a new abolitionist movement is something that we need to take seriously. That is so for all people of goodwill and especially true for those of us who are Christians, or Jews, and take our Scripture seriously.

Reflecting on what Desmond said about why God gets angry, consider the words of the Old Testament prophets speaking for God in judgment on those who are wealthy and mistreating or neglecting the poor, words, for example, found in Isaiah 1:11~17, Ezekiel 22:29~31, and Amos 2:6-7a, 4:1-2.

If we are going to work to abolish poverty, we must work toward ridding our neighborhoods, and our churches, of segregation—not of racial segregation so much as economic segregation. Most of our neighborhoods and churches now have far more of the latter than the former.

As Desmond says, “Segregation poisons our minds and souls. When affluents live, work, play, and worship mainly alongside fellow affluents, they can grow insular, quite literally forgetting the poor.” (Poverty, p. 162).

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*¹ My May 20, 2015, blog article was titled “The Culture of Poverty,” and it has been one of my most accessed blog posts with over 3,000 pageviews.

*² “50 years later, Gustavo Gutiérrez’s ‘A Theology of Liberation’ remains prophetic” is the title of an informative 8/17/23 article in America (the Jesuit review of faith and culture) about Gutiérrez and his ground-breaking book first published in English in 1973.

*³ “How to Be a Poverty Abolitionist: On Matthew Desmond’s ‘Poverty, by America’” is an excellent review of Desmond’s book published on March 21 by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

*⁴ In 2018, William Barber II launched the Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival, seeking to complete what King started 50 years earlier. (See my May 5, 2018, blog post: “Can a Barber do what a King couldn’t?”.)