Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Notes: Various Varieties of Optimism of the Will

Ken MacLeod goes to Barcelona and walks down the Rambla:

The Early Days of a Better Nation: ...a weekend in Barcelona, that city of culture and graffiti, of high art and scrawled initials, of union offices and unpredictable demonstrations, irresistibly and however incongruously calls to mind this passage, once a talisman of revolutionaries, from Birth of our Power by Victor Serge: "Nothing is ever lost [...] This city will be taken, if not by our hands, at least by others like ours, but stronger. Stronger perhaps by having been better hardened, thanks to our very weakness. If we are beaten, other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like us, will walk, on a similar evening, in ten years, in twenty years (how long is really without importance) down this rambla, meditating on the same victory. Perhaps they will think about our blood. Even now I think I see them and I am thinking about their blood, which will flow too. But they will take the city."

And Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden start a CafePress store selling, among other things, t-shirts of Oscar Romero's prayer:

Electrolite: "Prophets of a future not our own.": It helps, now and then, to step back and take the long view. The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work. Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us. No statement says all that could be said. No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession brings perfection. No pastoral visit brings wholeness. No program accomplishes the church’s mission. No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about: We plant seeds that one day will grow. We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development. We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own. Amen.