Thought for the week: Harvey Gillman’s future tense

‘The greatest paradox for me is that the divine is incarnated in people like us.’

by Harvey Gillman 12th April 2019

Some weeks ago a Friend read from Sydney Bailey’s Swarthmore lecture, Peace is a process, which is now Quaker faith & practice 24.57. Sydney Bailey writes: ‘The follower of Jesus is to discover and then promote the Kingdom of God. That Kingdom has two tenses: it is already here, in each one of us; and it is still to come, when God’s goodness becomes a universal norm.’ That passage has been on my mind ever since I heard it, though I prefer the phrase ‘divine commonwealth’ to the ‘Kingdom of God’.