Awakening Faith in An Alternative Future - Part 1

I was asked to deliver the keynote presentation to the Sea of Faith in Australia (SOFiA) Conference 2012. In this and the posts that follow I will reproduce the commentary I prepared for SOFiA after the event.

To see the presentation that accompanies this address see:

http://prezi.com/bq9cuhninz0f/awakening-faith-in-an-alternative-future/  (you can make the presentation fit the full screen by selecting that option under “more.” Use the arrows to move through the presentation.)

 

Here is the first snippet of the commentary:
 

The title for the presentation was chosen by the conference organisers after consultation with me about the items I would be addressing. Such a choice showed some significant wisdom as the words “Awakening,” “Faith,” “Alternative,” and “Future” are indeed central to the presentation.

My presentation was a journey through the process of “presencing” which is essentially a set of practices for attending to the challenges of the world from highly creative perspectives.

“Awakening” reflects the fact that humans have been experimenting with these practices for very long periods of time and what I was presenting wasn’t “new” so much as an attempt to recapture the meaning behind such practices.

“Faith” is a word I understand with respect to “trust” – I am naming the fact that I have great trust in our ability to transcend the rote solutions and prescriptions of past times (as if they were meant to named and practiced in the same way forever) and to name and practice creative options that reflect the problems and opportunities of our time.

“Alternative” and “Future” reflect the creativity I have mentioned previously. We are not bound to live out a destructive future based on past prescriptions and dogmas. We can rely on the contemporary messages that “the world” is sending us to redefine past practices “as if the alternative future is already a reality.”

This does not mean that the process of presencing rejects the lessons of the past in some kind of blind, “live for the now” philosophy. The lessons of the past are part of the information we have at our disposal to create the future. But those lessons and other information will hopefully mean that we recreate current and future practices rather than holding on to past practices out of fear of change and automatically negative judgement of “the as yet unseen.”