Someday, our Bride will come… She is here already.

Recently, Henry Karlson wrote an insightful series on the issue of eschatology. I must admit, I knew what eschatology was (in a very basic kind of way) but never had heard, or if I did I failed to understand, the notion of an eschaton. Needless to say, I didn’t want to look foolish in the com boxes, but I have been stewing on the discourse his series created for some time. Yesterday, when Matt Talbot posted a mutually unexpected dialogue with me, it helped me to connect some of those dots together with politics and I’d like to try and lay them out here, in brief.

We long for Love. We desire to desire God. Even when we hate God or reject the Divine as nothing at all, that hate is amorous and erotic in its passionfruit: desire. We cannot escape the eros of the human condition. Love and desire, feeling and intuition. We wait on our Bride. We await the fulfillment of desire. And yet, it is here. Among us. Right now.

This is a mystery of the world. The contradiction of the things-to-come that are here and now—and urgent. We cannot suspend desire to some far-off place and simply exist without it. Yet, we cannot presume that what we have is the limit and horizon of what we can and must long for. We are stuck. And we are fluid. We are restless.

The restlessness of the human spirit is the standard that pushes our imagination of the possible into the possibility of the impossible: the Cross, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the Gospel alive in our lives and our relations to one another.

So, let me make two points, one concerning eschatology and the other about politics—in others words, I have one point to make in two different ways:

1. Politics must remain of today/yesterday and tomorrow. What is hard is that the “now” is so strong. It captures us too easily and put a harness on our desire for tomorrow and next year, next decade, and next century. It can all-too-often shoot Peter Pan in mid-flight. It relegates poetry, music, theology, and gardening to the irrelevant. So, it seems to me that politics needs very little help in sustaining its nowness, its today/yesterday feature. But, the to-come, the tomorrow, is much harder. Without slipping into complete futuristic isolation, it seems that we could create or imagine a politics of tomorrow that takes its status today seriously. This may be a way to re-conceptualize and practice politics.
2. The eschaton must remain of today/yesterday and tomorrow. Eternally ancient and forever new. What is hard is that tomorrow, the “to-come,” is so strong. Converse to politics, eschatology seems to too-easily become futuristic, a thing merely to-come. It muzzles our ability to speak of the radical presence of God-among-us, here and now. Indeed, it can strip the imagus Dei of its present-tense divinity. It can all-too-often ignore the immediacy of the Gospel and the abundance of revelation in temporality and history. Without becoming nothing but the present and the temporal, it seems that we could submit to an eschatology of today that takes its status in eternity-to-come seriously. Unlike politics, this will require more humility and seems more prone to imbalance and corruption. But its danger also reveals it fecundity.

Someday, my Bride will come… She is here already.