Yesterday, I explained in this post, A Change of Heart–Truly, how I intend to bring my whole self–my whole heart, my whole soul and my whole mind–to my work as a professional futurist. In the coming days and months, I intend to use this blog to both share my thoughts as well as crystallize my own thinking. (Often, I don’t really know what I think and feel about a topic until I write, erase, rewrite, and edit it multiple times. So please consider this blog as a rough draft of my thinking for a forthcoming book I intend to write entitled, “The Future Has an Ancient Heart.”)
To begin sharing my “whole self,” it’s important you understand a little bit about my faith. I was raised a Catholic and attended a Parochial Catholic school and then for high school went to St. John’s Prep in Collegeville, Minnesota, a Benedictine boarding school. I was never particularly devout but Christianity is my first spiritual language and it remains the spiritual tradition with which I am most comfortable. (I have also always found the Divine in nature and continue to take great solace among the trees, forests, lakes, rivers and open skies.)
Having said this, I am ecumenical in my approach to seeking wisdom and have come to accept that peoples of all cultures and faiths, including agnostics and atheists, have insights from which I can grow and learn.
My faith, which I express here with the utmost humility, is best summed with this passage from 1 John 4:16: “God is Love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in Him.” To put a finer point on it, the mystics and Hippies were right–Love is the answer. The passage, however, goes on to say “There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear.” It is this belief in the power of love that now drives and motivates my work as a futurist.
I have long quoted Peter Drucker when concluding my many keynote presentations: “The only way to predict the future is to create it yourself.” I still believe this, but now I’ve come to understand my responsibility as a futurist is to remind people, businesses and organizations of the truth, beauty and power of love.
We are living in times of both incredible promise and peril. I am choosing to focus on the promise of the future and I have come to the conclusion that if we don’t learn to love one another–truly love one another–our future, the future of our children and grandchildren as well as the future of all our future descendants will be neither prosperous nor fruitful. I refuse to accept that fear will be the operating principle of the future. Instead, the operating principle, as all great spiritual leaders, mystics and prophets have stated, must be love! For only perfect love can–and will–drive out fear.
Jack Uldrich is professional futurist and the author of 14 books.
