The Fullness of Time in a Flat World

In his latest book Thomas Friedman says that we live in a "flat world" of fierce global competition. But the worship of the Christian church in liturgical time ushers us into participation in the fullness of God. For us, both the world and time are round and full. To deal with globalization, we need to move from flatness to fullness, and the liturgical year can help us make this move. Thomas Merton saw this back in the 1960s. As he wrote:

"Today's 'mass man' lives not only below the level of grace, but below the level of nature--below his own humanity. No longer in contact with the created world or with himself, out of touch with the reality of nature, he lives in the world of collective obsessions, the world of systems and fictions with which modern man has surrounded himself. In such a world, man's life is no longer even a seasonal cycle. It's a linear flight into nothingness, a flight from reality and from God, without purpose and without objective, except to keep moving, to keep from having to face reality.

"To live in Christ we must first break away from this linear flight into nothingness and recover the rhythm and order of man's real nature. ... For man in Christ, the cycle of the seasons is something entirely new. It has become a [start italics] cycle of salvation [end italics]. The year is not just another year, it is [start italics] the year of the Lord..." [end italics--emphasis in original]. [Merton, Seasons of Celebration, 1965, page 51]

When life seems like a "linear flight into nothingness"--the flat world daily market competition--it helps to re-orient ourselves in the cycle of the seasons, in the year of the Lord, in liturgical time.

"The Earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein." -Psalm 24:1 [KJV]

from Dr. Scott Waalkes' forthcoming book