Several things stand out for me from the New York Public Library’s outstanding exhibition, “Celebrating 100 Years,” which collects notable historical objects – mostly books, maps and manuscripts, but also other items from the library’s own collection – on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the library’s historic and monumental Schwarzman Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan – yes, the building with the stone lions out front.
First, the exhibition is arranged thematically, not chronologically, the themes being: Observation, Contemplation, Creativity, and Society. This was a creative decision that focuses attention on fundamental human activities rather than on time periods or academic fields.
Second, the explanation of “Contemplation,” obviously the sector of interest to religious folk, is nicely put in a way that has missiological significance:
Whether focused on a deity, a spiritual force, or the individual soul, the search for something beyond the material realities of daily life has always been one of the hallmarks of humanity. From the Bhagavata Purana, celebrating stories of Krishna, to T. S. Eliot’s classic modernist poem The Waste Land, the items displayed here reflect the ceaseless desire for meaning. In their own quests, individuals as varied as Dante Alighieri, Rabindranath Tagore, Virginia Woolf, and Malcolm X have used travel – the journey, the pilgrimage, the search – as a metaphor or organizing principle.
Travel is intrinsic to mission, of course, for mission involves moving beyond one’s own community to encounter other communities. The travel may be literal geographical travel to a distant geography, or it may be metaphorical travel to the very different social group on the next block. For the authentic missioner, travel of whatever kind becomes a pilgrimage, that, is, a journey in which the traveler discovers something more about God. Read More…


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