I’ve been reading the “Finding Ourselves in Our Tradition” chapter in Arthur Henry King’s Arm the Children, and these two paragraphs really struck me:
History happens forward, but we are allowed to go back. We live forward, but we are allowed to return in our minds. And the further back we go, the further forward we can go. Going back in eternity is part of going forward. We walk into the future backwards. We can’t face the future; we can’t see it. We can see the present here and the past back there, and, in terms of the past and present, we can imagine what the future will be like. That is what prophecy is about. Prophecy can be expanded in our own lives by looking at the past. The past needs to become incarnate to us so that we can understand the present and feel for the future and, indeed, find the past in the envisaged future and the future in the envisaged past. To move to and fro in a great tradition is to give oneself something like the experience of eternity. It is an important experience.
The tree is for us an image of this process, and the tree is not the roots as the past and the trunk as the present and the branches as the future. The tree is the totality: the roots are still alive, the trunk is alive, the branches are alive; the roots are seeking the tree’s sustenance and the leaves are seeking its sustenance; the whole thing happens together. The tree is an image of eternity: the tree of life, the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the tree of Jesse, the tree of the condescension of God. (p. 127)
Being an amateur genealogist, the tree metaphor really stuck out in my mind and it’s fascinating to think of the past and the future as being alive and co-existent with the present. He talks more about this in the chapter but class is about to start so I must go.
[tags]history, genealogy, eternity, Arthur Henry King[/tags]