On prescience
Reading Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, I was impressed by how well America’s preeminent theologian foretold something like 2003 from 1933. To wit,
[Modern men of power] may still engage in social conflict for the satisfaction of their pride and vanity provided they can compound their personal ambitions with, and hallow them by, the ambitions of their group, and the pitiful vanities and passions of the individuals who compose the group.
Niebuhr demands an account of the “vanities and passions” which led us to war in our time; I suspect that even the staunchest of doves among us have a bit of reckoning to do there.
Two more stories of prescience. I rode over the hill from Social Work to Union Theological Seminary, thinking on this text and on Niebuhr’s prescience, and remembered my own occasion to peer into the future as a boy with a new bike.
I was having a great deal of trouble getting my feet into the clip-and-strap pedals on my new town fixie. After years of racing on clipless pedals, it was minutes-long struggle to find the rhythm necessary to get my shoes into the straps in rhythm with the spinning cranks. “Go on ahead!” I’d shout to friends as I turned in wobbling circles, staring at my feet with gritted teeth. I thought,
This is awful, but in six months I’ll be able to slip into these without hardly thinking about it, and it will be great to look back on this time.
And of course it was true. Run, jump, kick in, off we go on a green light before the cars even get rolling. I love that memory of prescience, of anticipation for the proficiency and joy to come.
Last story. We’re riding over the hill again, in the rain, to Seminary and the peace it brings. Thinking of prescience and another memory comes dripping back in, a long-forgotten one from the First Church mission trip to Colima, Mexico. From my laughably abbreviated journal,
It’s late & dark on the steps outside the girls’ apartment, but the night is the most beautiful - beautiful thing, no less noisy & a little bit warmer than home but somehow transcendent & distinctly of this time & place. Maybe for once I can see it in the moment - this will be a time whose smells, tastes, little triggers of whispers of memories will bring me vividly back. Or perhaps not, but here we are now.
Brakes squeaking over wet bicycle rims on a New York City street, it was precisely a year later - to the day - that my moment of meta-prescience had recurred, and indeed, smells and words do triggers memories of that time. The smells and godliness of Union bring me back, as does a good quesadilla or a Negro Modelo.
Molly was in town this weekend; dinner with she and Rafe and others last night and that most certainly brought me back. She gave me this most knowing of glances as dinner wound down and I wonder about her own prescience, prodding me along to Seminary. All of this discernment feels a fumbling task now (“Go on ahead!”), but maybe in a few years, I’ll look back just the same? The future can hardly be known, but when I have gotten quiet to think about it, it has usually served me well. Up, over the hill we go.
