You may not be reading this, because as I write it is still not clear whether we are all still going to be here once the clock strikes the midnight hour, or whether the prophets of doom will have been proven right - 'puff of smoke' theory.
It is also still open to debate (despite the government's reassuring leaflet) whether the technology will have risen up in desperation and snookered the civilised world - "I can't see how he's going to get out of this one, John".
Judgement is reserved on the Dome, will it be a place people want to see, or avoid; and I am having a good deal of anxiety about doing my Neil Armstrong impression and coming up with a suitably well honed phrase to offer as one millennium passes into the next. What do you think of "things seem pretty much the same to me"? I'm not sure that quite does it.
In one way things will be the same.
The pace of change is fast but yet change is often imperceptible. Dates are important because they allow us to plot change accurately. 1914, 1939 are dates that divide up the last century. 1969, when Neil put his foot down on the moon, is another. These dates are significant because of the events they are associated with. 2000 is significant because it marks the passing of time, in a rounded kind of way, but there isn't an event to hang it on.
That's why the Dome and the Wheel have come about as potential experiences we will remember the date by.
For Christians 2000 AD does have the significance of an event because it is, or about, the two thousandth birthday of Jesus. Singing "Happy Birthday, Jesus" always makes me feel a bit embarrassed, but I take the point. So that the Millennium has Christian significance and we can legitimately join in special services and prayers to mark the occasion.
One of the best bits of television I have seen in the last year was Stephen Poliakoffs Shooting the Past. It is set in a picture library which has 10 million photographs in store. They preserve the past in black and white by the evocative images they recall. But a new business management school takes over the premises and wants to sell off the past to make way for the new, top management speak and thrust in all its glory.
The film works on different levels but it is in part an analogy of our attitudes and values when it comes to the past, and our direction and intention when it comes to the present and the future. People say you can't live in the past, and you can't, now. But you need to, that is exactly where we did live. It is the only certainty because it has happened. It has made me who I am now.
I increasingly feel that to understand myself I must understand my past, the influences and the events in which I was caught up. But change is also certain. The future cannot be denied. The differences between the years 1900 and 2000 are extensive, socially and technologically, for example. To allow change to run its course is to allow the newness and greatness of life to unravel before our eyes.
Unfortunately that's not all that emerges. Shooting the Past is a blow for valuing the good things of the past. The things which make us human. But we know that in the past there was also the trivial, it has dropped away now. The art, music and writing that we admire is the best that has been, the rest is unknown. In the present we get both the great and the trivial. It is difficult and sometimes impossible to say what will endure and what will not.
We celebrate the Millennium by the anniversary of the birth of Christ and the Christian Church. We do so as a religion that has endured. The Christian faith has run the whole span of that period. Other great world faiths have done the same. In Britain church going is at a low ebb. Statistics released in December suggest the usual number of people in Church of England churches on any one Sunday may have dropped below one million for the first time. (The number of people who actually attend church is greater, it's just that we are not all there every week).
So the question arises: does the church have a future? Is the church being shot by the present? What kind of church will emerge in the next century?
These are exciting questions because it means the church must do two things. It must value and preserve its tradition: the story of Jesus, the lives of the saints, the worship and teaching that make up Christian Faith.
But it must also adapt and change to meet the future. It must be willing to change its worship and the way it relates to today's world.
Watch this space.
David Eaton
see also
Special Millennium Services
Millennium Cope
Millennium Resolution
But is it? - from 100 years ago