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Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini died Friday at the age of 85. The current Roman Catholic pope, Benedict XVI, is said to be between a rock and a hard place when it comes to Martini's burial Monday: If the pope shows up, it may signal an openness to Martini's sometimes outside-the-fold assertions and opinions; if he doesn't show up, it may signal the kind of lock-step intransigence about doctrine for which the pope has been known in the past. What to do? What to do?
Martini has been quoted as saying that the Roman Catholic Church is "200 years behind" the times. He has taken a gentler approach to AIDS and condoms and divorce. He has implicitly questioned the well-dressed and self-serving hierarchy of the organization to which he belonged. And he was quoted as saying, "The Church is tired ... our prayer rooms are empty." Reading about him makes me feel as if I were meeting a thoughtful man skating on very thin ice.
The imps of debate may bounce up and down, throw lefts and rights, support hoary tradition or bright new days for the Roman Catholic Church, but what pops up in my mind is ... prescience, the ability to see into the future, to predict and prognosticate.
Hot damn! Who wouldn't give a nickel and a dime to know for sure what the future holds? I suspect that the magnetic quality of prescience is based on simple human experience ... who hasn't planned and planned and planned some more only to see the object of those plans slip into a revised or reconfigured reality? Sure, it's good to plan, but the fact is that time and time and time again ... well, it doesn't work out exactly as planned. Not necessarily worse, of course, and not necessarily better either ... but just not exactly as planned. And as a result, prescience takes on a wonderful wishful glow. Men like Nostradamus or even Madame Zuzu with her crystal ball acquire a kind of magical stature.
I too have been the beneficiary of predictions and have been wowed by their accuracies. Yessiree -- now that's something to write home about!
In Buddhism, Gautama (the guy credited with giving 'Buddhism' its liftoff) used to counsel his students not to involve themselves with the "imponderables" -- the stuff for which there were no sure-fire answers and even if there were, so what? I can't remember them all, but I imagine they included things like, "what happens after death?" If you knew what happened after death would that change the need to get to the store for a quart of milk?
Part of the delight of the D.H. Lawrence story, "The Rocking Horse Winner," is that a small boy can, in fact, predict the outcome of horse races by riding his rocking horse. The reader is transported to a place in his own life where ... "what if I could predict the future?! How kool would that be?!"
I'm not trying to suggest that Cardinal Martini is in any sense prescient -- that he sees the future more clearly than others. I do think he is a man with two brain cells to rub together, someone who collected facts and drew a conclusion I happen to agree with to the extent that I know anything about that conclusion or those facts.
But I do think there is something to be said for setting prescience aside. Not to pooh-pooh it and not to embrace it, but just to set it aside. Facts support such a course of action, I think. If every time a best-laid plan results in a close-but-not-exactly outcome, then the beckoning wonders of prescience are just that ... beckoning, perhaps and wonderful perhaps, but just not worth the time and energy. For example, if you practice meditation in hopes of some "enlightenment" or "relief" or something similar ... well, it may seem reasonable based on testimony from the past, but who's to say that the same activity won't lead to an ever-more profound ignorance or a worse set of aches and pains? Better, I imagine, is just to practice and find out.
Prescience is for sissies and ne'er-do-wells.
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