Upon entering the sanctuary and seeing the mix of familiar and new faces, one feels the group's excitement. We are here to renew our efforts to understand each other and each other's traditions in a challenging course of study. Maybe through our discussions we will even gain some more basic understanding of ourselves. Yes, it feels right to be here. High expectations are obvious from the questions of the facilitators, who are diligently preparing for the 1997-98 year of ICJS programing, "In the End is the Beginning: Jewish and Christian Visions of the Future." For some, these expectations are built upon the sense of accomplishment gained in the previous year while participating in the Genesis Project. For others it is the expectation that among such diverse people the study and exploration of sacred texts with their accompanying layers of subsequent interpretations will bring insights about how we all endure and hope.

To orient the inquiry into Jewish and Christian perceptions of the future, the ICJS program included several meetings to discuss the various writings within our scriptural traditions. In the light of these writings, we then read and interpreted the struggles of our cultures within our community and the mean-ings attributed to human history. The first few meetings for my group were extremely touching because of the sharing of personal experiences of burying a parent, a husband, a child, and a best friend. We reviewed our traditional rituals around death, seeing in each other's traditions something of our own and something distinctly other. We grew in our respect for each other as we shared these painful parts of life. In our group it may be said that the social barriers of race, social-economic status, or religion became irrelevant rather quickly once the core experience of loss was expressed.

What impressed me the most about this aspect of the program were the abilities of our participants to listen, to learn, and to respect each other's way of life. Because respect among us was affirmed and deepened over the course of study, we could openly examine our attitudes about life and death while travelling across time (ancient or contemporary texts) and traditions (Baptist, Roman Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, Meth-odist, Presbyterian, and Jewish). In these first few meetings, we gathered at downtown or suburban locations. At the con-clusion of each session, we shared food and opened our place of worship. It was very inspirational to go into these special places. Often additional conversations would begin, so that we never left a meeting until quite late.

A distinctive dimension of this program emerged through en-counters with artistic creativity. The apocalyptic imagination was powerfully demonstrated at the American Visionary Art Museum, and a slide presentation by Dr. William Noll juxta-posing ancient manuscripts from the Walters Collection with the work of visionary artists provided rich insights into the hopes and fears that continue to preoccupy Western culture. More often than not, the images of "the End" prove unnerving, whether medieval or modern. The detailed portrayals of de-struction and collapse were harrowing, and they reminded us that the obsession with disaster is nothing new.

Although these graphic descriptions of the end made me un-comfortable, utopian visions of a new creation were shaped on the other side of despair. The range of opportunities was invaluable to our efforts to understand a phenomenon that strikes many of us as strange and ominous. "In the end is the beginning" provided texture and points of reference as we ponder the ways in which the future impinges on our present and the approaching millennium gives rise to new outbursts of the imagination.

In the second half of the program, the ICJS provided more texts from modern essayists and poets as well as scriptural sources. Discussions were intense, yet our group moved through the heavy nature and tone of the material with small bits of irony and spontaneous joking. Because we had grown from respecting each other to trusting each other, we could laugh more easily as the sessions came to a close. We acknowledged the degrees of terror one feels when death has occurred to a loved one, or when unexpected or avoidable death occurs in the community, or even to think about our-selves in death. We also appreciated the amount of struggle we had with confronting death so that we may all hope and live enriched lives, and yet have the degrees of variability in accepting the end is the beginning.