Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): let the sun shine (1968)

Inscriptions and Marks
Signed: l.r.: Corita
(not assigned): Printed text reads: LET THE SUN SHINE IN
the creative revolution—to take a chunk of the imagined future and put it into the present—
to follow the law of the future and live it in the present. Waskow
inscription: l.l., in graphite: 68-69-E

"We experience dying."

NextWorld is most assuredly not the present world and never will become it. It exists only as promises never intended to be fulfilled. It exists only as a placeholder to attract and hold attention away from present tensions, which true believers insist will prove to be only as temporary as necessary. We wonder how provisional that might prove to be. They tout the oldest excuses, insisting that nobody bakes cakes without breaking eggs when they're neither baking cakes nor breaking eggs. These are real people involved. Now! They do seem to be cooking up something, though, and it doesn't smell much like dessert. It smells distinctly fishy and not in any alluring way. It stinks! The promises are supposed to separate us from those senses, to fill us with satisfying hot air. It lacks substance, nourishment, and anything even distantly resembling truth. It only tastes sweet if you believe. Those who cannot or will not believe cannot receive the blessings only such belief can bring. NextWorld is nothing and never will be. It still wrecks plenty of havoc.

Those who somehow manage to believe baffle the rest of us, for belief never requires any sort of verifiable basis. Once entranced, nothing seems to shock the believer. They witness the same petty cruelties, but they do not seem to register. I doubt that justification ever even enters into their experience. I suspect they're somehow anesthetized by FutureTensions as if their nervous systems had been transported into some far-distant future and so no longer register whatever actually surrounds them. This seems like a pure Confidence Man ploy. The story entices some listeners so much that it overrides their senses. They no longer feel for themselves but for their storyteller. They stop believing their lying eyes in favor of what he tells them they see. They must experience that future more convincingly than they sense whatever surrounds them, but it's beyond me.

I suspect this future sense might be no different than what any saved Christian senses about Heaven, for Heaven, as envisioned here by even the truest True Believers, only ever exists in their future, too. Thanks to a curious human capacity, though, belief can transform such future sense into, by far, the most alluring present. Those infused with such belief willingly endure anything. Their present circumstances fade into utter insignificance in the light of that future promise. Accepting such promises is to fulfill them, for the immediate effect of such acceptance seems to be to render the present moot. Once one perceives that light, darkness no longer seems to have much effect. People walk barefoot across hot coals without raising a blister. They perform acts of unimaginable heroism unscathed. They seem saved from stuff that hasn't even happened yet, as if they, too, exist in that promised future. Such promises seem self-fulfilling.

The rest of us, clearly lacking such True Belief, see right through the ruse. Our NextWorld seems catastrophic, lacking even the barest shred of logic, and rather stupid. In our NextWorld, a tariff holds no promise beyond retaliatory responses. In our NextWorld, the stock market sure seems to lose five trillion dollars in the first six weeks. In our NextWorld, a lawless incumbent thumbs his nose at our Constitution without seeming to suffer many consequences. Our NextWorld seems fueled by stupidity, but then we unbelievers have not been transported through and into those promised FutureTensions. We still inhabit the present and, increasingly, an emotionally defensive past. We pine after regular order. We ache for sanity. We cannot see Heaven patiently awaiting our arrival, but just the struggles of persisting against an insistent, putrid headwind. Our FutureTensions portend much worse than we've grown accustomed to. You might insist that this is just a temporary stage necessary to finally reach Heaven. We experience dying.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #NextWorld, #PureSchmaltz