Dear Friends in Christ,

One of the things I have pondered as we all watch the dismantling of various arms of American foreign policy such as USAID or Voice of America is really a simple question.

How will this matter a decade from now?

I don’t know exactly, but it doesn’t seem like enough strategic, long-term thought is going into the rapid changes underway. This doesn’t just cut one way politically.

We are still digging out from rapid-fire church, school, business, and other closures mandated during COVID. It will take decades to know the consequences of decisions made under real pressure but without much consideration for the substantive long-term impacts of those decisions.

Some social, political, or other phenomena pop up and fizzle in a moment. Things that seem intensely important flash and make lots of noise and then seem to vanish almost overnight. Some of this is the nature of politics and our desperate non-stop news cycles.

But it reflects something else, too: What will matter when we are gone? What will our legacy be? What risk are we exposing those who come after us to by a choice we make today?

We don’t seem to ask these questions much. Long-term or even medium-term thinking has given way to short-term gain.

When I play chess with our kids I always ask them “Why am I giving you this piece?” Then I tell them, “Look at the board again.” Strategic thinking is something we have to practice but our culture gives us few opportunities to practice it anymore. We live in a reaction economy where profits are driven by how many people react to any given story, picture, or outrage.

How will this matter a decade from now?

It’s a question I often ask when we are considering changes here at the church. I try not to react to any decision or feedback or note without asking about the long-term implications of any given decision or choice.

This should always be our Christian orientation.

What is the long-term impact of any choice on our spiritual life?

What is the long-term implication for our children’s and grandchildren’s lives?

What is the impact on our neighbors’ lives?

What is the impact on their children?

The Christian ethical, social, and moral orientation is always and necessarily outwardly focused and future-oriented. This is where our concern for tradition and history and institutions comes into play, too.

When we change a liturgy, the question isn’t whether a change reflects our modern day better but instead, we ask what the impact of this change on the next generation and the one after them will be.

We conserve things and are a conservative institution precisely because we cherish what we inherit. We respect the movement of the Spirit across previous generations, and we value the gifts we have inherited enough to be thoughtful about how we will leave them for the next generation.

The Church doesn’t ask how any change will matter a decade from now. We ask about centuries. That’s a hard thing in a move fast and break things culture. It’s even harder in a self-interested, attention-starved, short-sighted one, too.

One thing the Church can model for the world is a deep sense of further horizons. We can model looking further ahead and looking further behind, as well. We can model taking into consideration the decades ahead of us and the millennia behind us.

We are not a tyranny of the living but a democracy of the dead and a republic of those yet to come. The voices of the past still cast a vote and the voices of those yet to come are our constituents, too.

As much as the concerns of any given moment are our obsessions we must be steadfast in keeping up with the past so we can better shape the future.

Whether it’s in matters of liturgy, theology, music, art, and so much more the Church is a conservatory not because we hold on to dead things but because we believe that death is not the end. The past speaks through us so that what wisdom that once was hard won might not be lost in the echo chamber of the moment.

It’s a losing fight.

The future will always win out. But we continue to give voice to what was once great because that is at the heart of what is eternally good.

We give voice to changeless values and eternal truth because the temptation of the day is to convenience and expedience. The future will win out—the question is whether it will be a future informed by timeless hope or misinformed by media-driven fear that satisfies our every itch for outrage.

That pursuit of deeper wisdom comes at the expense of being hyper-motivated to react to every outrage of our day. Asking what will matter a decade or a century from now means that sometimes we take a pass on pretending we have an opinion or an answer to the day’s news cycle. But sometimes it means that we see more clearly what will truly matter. We see more clearly what choices we are making and how they will shape the future.

But having the wisdom to speak clearly means listening to the still small voice that has spoken across the centuries. We learn from the past not because God once spoke but because he still speaks. And he speaks across the ages calling us to go deeper so that we might be a well of wisdom for the world and not another shallow pool unable to give true, lasting life.

As the pace of change seems to accelerate we need more institutions and communities that stand athwart the dismantling of tradition and offer another path. The future will win.

But what kind of future? What will changes mean for our children, for our neighbor, and for their children’s children? Few are asking these questions these days, which means the Church must ask them all the more faithfully.

Yours in Christ,

—Fr Robert