Scene: The Focus Room in Energy Station 213b, 5000 metres below ground, day 364, year 513 (2999AD in the old calendar). The work of the energy station is to tap geo-thermal energy from below the earth’s crust. The station co-coordinator, Seamus Ochumbo, is taking a break in the focus room to remind himself of aspects of his core values in the midst of a busy shift. The techniques he uses to relate to these values, and to the reality under-pinning them, might be recognised by his ancestors of 1000 years earlier as prayer. The Focus Room is one of the most-used recreational facilities in the station.

I start with this science-fiction scenario as a reminder to myself that the world of 1000 years from now is literally unimaginable. How could anybody present at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 have envisaged contemporary society? So the exercise this paper calls for is one of extrapolation into the darkness, pointing to current trends which might, in some possible future worlds, bear fruit.

As the Director of a spirituality centre and retreat house, I’ve based my own extrapolation around developments in spirituality. My sense is that this is becoming increasingly incarnational, that the sense of a natural / supernatural distinction is lessening. In my work, I can even now invite Christians of denominations other than my own Roman Catholicism, and indeed all those referred to in Vatican documents as “people of good-will”, to approach a level of reflection and prayerful awareness where these differences cease to be barriers. Knowing ourselves summoned to work for a society where people look to the good of their neighbours, and particularly those most marginalized; recognizing the need regularly to take time to re-connect with the levels of my deeper motivations; coming to see that the universe has a “friendly face”; these and other aspects of faith unite very diverse people at a fundamental level. A millennium from now, I could hope that ways of life that support such awareness would be common-place. Seamus’s resort to the Focus Room in his break from work is aiming precisely at this.

At the same time the polarised choice of “greater unity or greater division” may perhaps be overcome. For I do not foresee an ever-increasing homogenisation of religious outlooks, so that we all finally come together in the worship of an impersonal One. Rather, individuals will continue to put down roots more firmly in particular traditions, but in a way that is open to the insights of those taking other paths. My own Centre currently proclaims more firmly its Roman Catholic and Ignatian roots than it would have felt comfortable in doing two decades ago; while welcoming more people from other backgrounds than it ever has before. The availability of foods in a multicultural society offers something of a parallel. We don’t, at best, end up with a uniform amalgam of world-wide cuisines, but grow in our ability to appreciate what each has to offer, while developing the specialities of the particular region where we live, and working to make these more widely available.

This bright liberal tomorrow will, no doubt, not be without its problems. (There will still be people who just don’t like curry, or indeed sausages!) The successors of the Vatican and the Taliban may well still not see eye-to-eye about how their followers should live. I am not presuming such agreement here. Only that the values of peaceful co-existence and continuing dialogue will perhaps be more firmly rooted a thousand years from now. And that, more than the details of what organisations or patterns of behaviour will survive, is the greatest imponderable in this extrapolation. To look to such a scenario is in itself, perhaps, an act of faith.

So in this “brave, new world” faith is an explicit commitment to those deepest values I have. One role of education will be leading people to be able to make these values explicit. It will thus be strange for someone to be without faith in this sense; and yet unlikely that my faith will be precisely the same as that of my neighbours. Nor will there be pressure for a sameness. The Church is here that body of people who affirm their faith in Jesus Christ, although they do so in a huge variety of ways, and there are no clear edges between this brand of faith and others. If anything, a commitment to dialogue means that such boundaries as there are are continually shifting. Worship is regulated by a sense of whether a particular method or form acts to bring a particular worshipping group more deeply into contact with its professed values. For many, part of what is of use in promoting this would include a sense of continuity with those who have gone before, so that traditional forms and service-patterns persist.

At the end of the third Christina millennium then, faith is seen much more obviously than today to be at the heart of every aspect of life (science, arts, media, education, private life ). For some, this faith is best expressed in Christian terms. What proportion will choose this method of expression is unknowable. It depends on the extent to which, in the time between now and then, Christianity will recognise itself to have at its core ways of helping people explicate and deepen their own fundamental values, and do this in a way that is open to the insights of those of other explicit faiths and none. Without this attitude, it seems to me likely to become the esoteric preserve of a few specialists, or perhaps even a fanatic sect. With this openness, it can perhaps become the leading way of celebrating the human values of 1000 years from now.

Scene: 15 centi-days later, Seamus Ochumbo, having finished his shift, goes off to preside at the Tridentine Mass which is at present the favoured way of celebrating the eucharist in the Christian community of which he is pastor. He stops off to collect his wife, who will co-preside this evening. This Mass is part of a global celebration of the beginning of the fourth Christian Millennium.
 

Programme of the Jesuit Spirituality Centre in Merseyside, England