“Millennium, Schmillennium.” So says a bumper sticker in my neighborhood. The car’s owner apparently does not attach much value to thousand-year periods. Or, perhaps, my neighbor has gone public just to resist all the hoopla that comes with the turn of the ages.
Aside from hoopla, however, one can find important implications for spirituality in the passage from the 1900s to the 2000s. Some of those values can be expressed in the image of doors. Doors open and we enter into another place, a place that may surprise us and offer us new inspiration that could change our lives.
That was the idea behind Pope John Paul II opening the holy doors to St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve. He knelt at the threshold of the great church and pushed back giant bronze ornamental doors that had been bricked up for a year. He also issued a call for people around the world to change, to put behind them enmity and hatred, replacing them with love.
Not just individual people need change, however. Institutions also must turn away from past sins and be renewed in the spirit of justice and charity. This need applies above all to religious institutions. In that spirit the pope declared that his own church needs forgiveness for past transgressions of God’s law and must be renewed in love for all people.
For that to happen, the church and, in fact, all of society will depend upon new leaders who will help shape the beginnings of the new millennium,.men and women who can provide vision and who can inspire others to live by love. Our past century, amid its horrors, has seen the rise of many such people.
Spiritual inspiration coming from such leaders as Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Pope John XXIII, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and the present Dalai Lama, to name only a few, has helped to redeem this century from its bloody hatreds. These individuals have enabled us to take away something valuable from the century despite the awful slaughters of these last hundred years.
One likes to think that the merciful God raised up these men and women so that, amid the carnage, we could salvage vital values. They all looked across barriers of race and ethnic origin and saw brothers and sisters who belong to one another. All met resistance from those who found profit in stirring people up to fight one another.
I will never forget what one such person said of Martin Luther King – “He was always stickin’ his nose in other people’s business.” Fortunately for all Americans, he saw that social justice was everybody’s business and he had the courage to act on this basic spiritual insight.
Like the other leaders mentioned above, Dr. King stood solidly in the tradition of nonviolence. Despite this past century’s unimaginably large expenditures on weapons of mass destruction and the unleashing of these weapons on so many innocent people, these spiritual leaders insisted that only nonviolence could ultimately bring about peace and justice.
Who will be the spiritual leaders in the global society of the next century? No one knows, of course, but we can hazard some predictions about them. Certainly they will meet unrelenting opposition. Like several of those mentioned above, they may face imprisonment for their attempts to change society. But time spent behind bars often turns out to give people time and motivation for spiritual growth. Nelson Mandela transformed his twenty-seven years of imprisonment on Robben Island into a kind of monastery for self-discipline in the arts of forgiveness and love.
Probably, more of these new prophets will be women than was formerly the case. As we move into an age when women take their rightful positions as leaders of nations, we can expect them to exercise widespread influence. Some evidence suggests that women turn to spirituality more readily than do men. Perhaps the world will see a greater number of women emerge to provide leadership in justice and peace.
Finally, one can expect the new spiritual leaders to reach beyond their own local or even national communities toward the whole global village. New communication technologies whereby information is passed from one end of the world to the other instantaneously will extend the influence of those who show outstanding leadership. In this way women and men in the future will be well positioned to make a spiritual difference in the whole world.
Richard Griffin