Seeing into the Future

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Driving around Louisville yesterday I remembered the fun of finding my way back to places I'd been years before. In the 1960's I was a student here and had a fondness for places like Crescent Hill Presbyterian Church. When I came back to live here six years ago, I enjoyed driving around to find my way back, relying on the way coded deeply into my memories to guide my driving. It's fun. That's one way of finding our way around this world--following our memories.

A second way of finding our way is by using the encoded memories of others who have charted out the path ahead of us. We call them "maps"--printed on paper for those of us who remember them before the age of Google maps and GPS. Being able to read a map and orient oneself to them is a useful skill in negotiating a way around the world as it is known.

But I'm more fascinated by a third way of finding our way around. That is learning to move into an unknown future where our memories and our maps are not as helpful. If we truly believe that the cosmos is on a trajectory of transformation, then the future "ain't what it used to be." Simply downloading our memories and the guide-maps of the past and the present will only keep us stuck in the past or the present.

I like to pull from the insights of the behavioral and managerial sciences to inform my understanding of human nature, and for this question I look to the work of Gary Klein on intuition (Klein, Gary. The Power of Intuition: How to Use Your Gut Feelings to Make Better Decisions at Work. New York, Currency/Doubleday, 2003.) When new situations present themselves, our intuition pulls in our previous experiences and helps us transform them by imagination into possible scenarios for the new situation as it might unfold. Those quick choices of scenarios can inform quick action in a crisis situation.

If there's time for a more leisurely movement into the future, the spiritual concept of discernment comes to mind in which one quiets other voices and tunes into the deeper seated voice of God. A current source for understanding discernment in an organizational setting is Otto Scharmer's Theory U (Boston: Society for Organizational Learning, 2006). It's a discernment and systems thinking model that takes change into account for what he calls "leading from the future." I also go back to Jane Kise and David Stark's work in Life Directions (Bethany House, 1999) in which they help us identify our gifts, our passions and our values as part of the holy design for our lives that are part of of the guidance system. It is through these realities of our personal or corporate identity that we can build scenarios for the future that are true to ourselves and open to the future.

Finally, I like to invoke the notion of desire. If we can place in abeyance our own smaller agendas and fears and put our own desires in the context of what we understand of the Divine, we pray that our desires and the desires of the Holy One can be one. It's a future desiring, not for our own comfort and convenience, not to revisit the old familiar places, or even to impose the maps of others on the future, but to hope for something new that suits a new humanity in a new world.

How do you move into the future?.