People keep talking about “the apocalypse” as if there was or will be only ever one. I can come up with five or six examples without cracking a concordance, and I’m not even Baptist. We’ve built up the idea that there will be one apocalyptic event that spells the end of existence as we know it and that it’s going to suck. And while I’ll concede that there’s a fair bit of scriptural grist for that particular mill, I want to put the idea out there that maybe apocalypses are more common than we imagine and only suck in direct proportion to our level of resistance.
Here’s the deal: apocalypse is just a word that means, essentially, revealing. In the context of biblical literature, it’s the rolling back of the curtain that separates our limited perception of reality from the divine’s expansive view of reality. Another way of saying it might be that an apocalypse gives humanity a glimpse into the Kingdom of God. From the all descriptions we get from all the sources — Gospels, Koran, Vedas, and so forth — that “kingdom” sounds pretty good. So what’s the problem?
Well, we the people, taken as a whole, have a tendency to hold on to what we know rather than trust that what we don’t know will be better. As a people who were told that the Cybertruck would kick ass, we might be right to be suspicious on a certain level. But it gets worse the more we think we have to lose. An apocalypse that might be very good news in a Brazilian Favela might not seem so good in Buckhead. When the curtain gets pulled back, some of us might need a little longer for our eyes to adjust to the light.
So what to do? In his novel The Brothers K, author David James Duncan describes a type of revelation. The narrator, Kincade, is sitting in the car with his father, waiting outside the paper mill where his father works to pick up a friend and co-worker. That paper mill has taken a piece of his father’s hand and with it, a significant piece of who he thought he would be. In the brooding silence, Kade cannot resist needling his dad in the way only a 12 year old can. Having reached the limit of his patience, the father does something he has never done before: he strikes his son.
That moment of tribulation is also a moment of revelation, an apocalyptic vision of what is disordered in their lives. Kade’s father begs his son’s forgiveness. He acknowledges that he has failed to be what anyone, himself included, thinks of as a good parent for a long time before this moment. Kade’s father knows that, having lost a piece of himself, he is in danger of losing his whole self. He pleads with Kincade to tell him how he can right the situation. In his pain and bewilderment, Kade finally replies: “All I want is for you to fight, Papa. To fight to stay alive inside! No matter what.”
If there is any kind of fight that we are called to, I believe it is this. In the season of Advent, the season of the church year leading up to the Christmas, the season we are in right now, the gospel readings are full of apocalyptic visions. They can be scary, and sometimes I wonder why Jesus would say that stuff (much less why we would linger on it right now). But then, you don’t get to live in Western North Carolina right now without knowing that terrifying things happen. You don’t get to live in this world right now without sensing that terrifying things are possible. I hope the whisper in our ears is the spirit of wisdom saying “All I want is for you to fight. To fight to stay alive inside! No matter what.”
Or, in the words of Jackson Browne
Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge