"An ancient Chinese proverb teaches: 'If we stay on the road we are on we shall surely get where we are going.' It is a sobering thought. This generation is on the road to ozone depletion, global poverty of unprecedented proportions, massive concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of a few, technological explosion, biological cataract, and theological upheaval if for no other reason than that new science demands a new dimension to old theologies. In the future, we cannot teach the concept of 'taking dominion' of the Garden of Eden the way we have in the past, or we stand to destroy the earth and ourselves with it. We cannot teach the sanctity of life without teaching the immorality of war. We cannot teach the notion of heaven without teaching the unknowns of quantum physics as components of the faith. In the face of a changing world, a shifting culture, a global perspective, we cannot teach the glories of man without teaching the equality of women. We cannot make tradition more important than ongoing revelation. We cannot use theology to obstruct thought, to deter human development, to make church a place rather than a people, nor can we use the idea of 'authority' to justify oppression.

"There is no doubt about it: The twenty-first century will be a difficult and a dangerous one. Whatever shall propel us through it?

"Old answers will not do it. Old politics will not do it. Old economics certainly will not do it. Old church cannot do it. This book says that only the image of those who have themselves bridged equally wide fissures of the past can give us the sight, give us the hope, give us the courage that it will take to face population increase, institutionalized greed, and theological decadence with aplomb.

"This desert is our desert. This time is our time. This challenge is our challenge. This sin is our sin. It is we who hold the future in our hands.
    We need a new image of God.
    We need a new respect for the poor and exploited.
    We need a new model of women.
    We need a new kind of man.
    We need new models of holy madness and wisdom and justice and fire.
    We need new models of holiness.
    We need a new kind of conscience and a new sense of God's righteous anger.
    We need a commitment to non-force and a sense of gentle strength.
    We need to look eye to eye into the Face of Truth and come brow to brow with the prescience of God and stand face to face with the heart of God.
    We need exemplars of all these things — or how shall we ever come to them ourselves, in our time, at our age, with our great needs?
    We need to stand up together, to link arms with the Great Ones of the past in order to find within ourselves the Great Heart it will take to shape the future.

"May the simple people here who have walked through time before us — lay and religious, male and female, Christian and non-Chrisrian — lead us together into the mind of God.

"Then, together, may we find a passion for life and become ourselves, for the next generation, fragments of the face of God.

"Thank you for being the way."