Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
'Abundant' life
From Repair To Optimization
Bishop Paul V. Marshall
January 2000It's just a number. Watching the date becoming 2000 is like the odometer phenomenon, watching your odometer turn over 50,000 or 100,000 miles. Besides, Jesus was born in 3 or 4 B.C. But zeros turning get our attention. They make us take stock and consider the future.
The 1900's were years of unparalleled progress, widely-spread wealth, and unparalleled atrocity and horror. As we enter the 2000's, we remember that records are made to be broken and we shudder, hoping for a century where we can keep the progress and overcome the oppression and violence.
I hope that the next century will see us move from sick care to true health care, where the emphasis moves not only from the cure to the prevention of disease but on to the enhancement of health and the physical aspects of life.
Resistance to such an idea seems strong throughout the health care and insurance system. No insurance company on the planet wants to pay to make you smarter, more aware, or enjoy life more unless you are "sick" in one of those ways. Educators, lawyers, and members of the helping professions, too, need to move toward optimization.
What about religion?
As long as Christianity is centered on empathy, feeling one's brokenness, healing one's pain, or even forgiving one's sins, the harvest will be of weak and dependent souls. Church leadership will be made up of those who enjoy having others dependent on their empathy, compassion, and general niceness - while most of the world yawns.
Physical disease, to be sure, will require sick care. Injustice, ignorance, and other deficits will need correction. The helping and caring aspects of our culture must march on, and do so more effectively. Repairing damage to psyches and souls, forgiveness and reconciliation, must continue in religious and other circles. But none of these "sickness" models is about life marching on: they are about getting over something, getting back to "normal."
There are those among religious and professional thinkers who would dismiss all talk of a century of enhanced human life as "New Age" -- incompatible with our religious and cultural heritage. Nothing could be more wrong.
The appeal of biblical religion has been and will remain about much more than repair. Whether one reads the Hebrew prophets and poets or the first apostles of Christianity, the offer is, in the simple words of St. John's gospel, "abundant" life, life with the joy and purpose of following a reality bigger than oneself. The peculiar paradox of "the way," as Christianity was first called, is that this "way" of following the Master provides peace and joy beyond the wildest hopes of any program of grasping self-fulfillment. Repentance and forgiveness restore: then the interesting part begins.
From this point of view, at least for Christians, evangelism in the years ahead can set the pace for the culture by telling the fearful, the timid, the self-oriented and arrogant that there is a great deal more offered them than repair or maintenance. There is life in abundance, something to be truly passionate about.
Perhaps we will then see the last Health Maintenance Organization and the first Life Optimization Organization. Many religious and secular sacred cows must be put out to pasture before this can happen, but with all those zeros flipping, there is no time like 2000.
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