Advent begins this year with these verses:
Luke 21:25-36
Jesus said, "There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see 'the Son of Man coming in a cloud' with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near."
Then he told them a parable: "Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
"Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man."
But you tell me over and over and over again my friend
Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction.
- Barry McGuire, lyric by P.F. Sloan
The fire burned intensely hot that night, sweat formed in droplets like prayer beads on our faces. It might be Arizona on a warm evening, but a bonfire was necessary for the ritual, this confessional for evangelical teenagers.
We stared into the flame like medieval peasants transfixed by visions of hell at the portal of a great cathedral, sweltering with fear of an eternity ablaze. Tears mixed with perspiration, sobbing with the crackle of wood turning to ash. Finally, a boy picked up his guitar, softly strumming a familiar tune and started to hum, coaxing forth the words we knew by heart.
Life was filled with guns and war
And everyone got trampled on the floor
I wish we'd all been readyChildren died the days grew cold
A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold
I wish we'd all been readyThere's no time to change your mind
The son has come and you've been left behind.
Our hope for salvation was not in a penance offered by a priest or through the sacramental comforts of an ancient church. It was in the Rapture.
We believed that history was ending and soon the entire planet would be destroyed in a fiery conflagration between good and evil. Judgment was at hand. The Kingdom of God was near. We were vaguely aware that Christians had always thought this to be so, but no previous generation could really imagine the end of the world. We could. It was our birthright, those of us born under the long shadows of Hiroshima and Nakasaki, raised with the omnipresent threat of a Communist Bomb. We were born to early death. There seemed to be more than one reason they called us “the baby boom,” for surely we would know the destruction of all things. Everything was destined to blow.
What choices do you have at the end of the world? Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll? Get as rich as you can and damn the rest? Eschewing both hedonism and greed, some of us chose God instead, a God who promised that the world did not really matter, and that He had a Plan. An escape plan. It was in the scriptures, revealed to the faithful in biblical preaching, at prophecy conferences, and by television evangelists. A paperback on racks at the grocery store called The Late Great Planet Earth unpacked the secrets of the Plan – also known as The Rapture.
There was an out. Even though things were very, very bad, God would rescue the faithful before the worst of the global crises broke forth. The born again, those who kept themselves pure from sin, would be taken up to heaven in an instant – “raptured” – to watch the end of humanity from the safe precincts of heaven with Jesus, their Lord and Savior. This divine voyeurism would cease when, at the height of the Battle of Armageddon, an angry Christ would return to earth with victorious believers, defeat Satan and all evildoers, and establish the Kingdom of God.
Jesus, however, did not snatch us up. No matter the signs of the times, he tarried. We went from those backyard bonfires to college and work and having families and taking our place in church and society. There was a revival of apocalyptic fervor at the end of the millennium, just as the baby boomers’ children were old enough to understand the terror of living at the end of world. No Rapture. And yet another generation was born. Still no Rapture. Nearly a half century since the fiery confessional in that Arizona suburb. A great disappointment to be sure. It seems we had been forgotten – all of us. Nobody’s getting out of this alive.
Instead of being raptured, we were left behind to muddle through the world.
* * *
Truth is, those preaching the Rapture were not completely wrong. Jesus may not have returned to rescue the faithful, but we do live in frightening, even apocalyptic, times. Myriad historians and cultural critics have tried to describe it – variously called ours as an age of fear, anxiety, depression, chaos, scarcity, or austerity. The point is clear. One need not be a religious fanatic to be alarmed at the array of potential apocalypses we face in the environment, economics, politics, technology, society, and even the nature of truth. In some ways, it was easier in the 1970s when we only worried about blowing up the planet with nuclear weapons.
It is, of course, a perverse historical snobbery to think that our days are the worst ever. Humanity has often seemed to teeter at the edge of total destruction. Indeed, in 406, St. Jerome cried out as barbarian hoards closed in on Rome:
Who could believe this? How could the whole tale be worthily told? How Rome has fought within her own bosom not for glory, but for preservation - nay, how she has not even fought, but with gold and all her precious things has ransomed her life...Who could believe that Rome, built upon the conquest of the whole world, would fall to the ground? That the mother herself would become the tomb of her peoples?
Romans trusted that Christ would save their converted Empire, with its political order of orthodoxy and its landscape of churches. Christian Rome would stand forever as the City of God on earth. When it collapsed, in both bangs and whimpers, many believed that the world had ended and humankind entered a dark age. It may not have been the end of the world, but it was the end of their world. As endings go, that one was pretty hard to take.
* * *
We still have the world, for a time at least, but it is both banging and whimpering. Worlds end when big shocks to institutions and familiar structures, followed by less perceptible shifts of stability and order, combine to erode the ecosystems of existence that we have known. And when they collapse, at the very least, our world ends.
Maybe “apocalypse” is the wrong word to describe these days. Certainly, these are the times of endings. But apocalypse implies some sort of supernatural design, and turns us into victims of some sort of divine intention, foolish mistake, or random actor. Perhaps a better word to understand the banging and whimpering in these days is “rupture.”
There is a language of “disruption” with cultural panache – that purposefully breaking things is a strategy for change. Whenever I hear someone proposing disruption, I wince: Hasn’t there already been enough disruption? Everything is already broken. The world isn’t just disrupted. It is ruptured. “Rupture” captures the sense of a sudden break, a breaching of what was. Ultimately however, “rupture” implies a possibility that “apocalypse” does not in the popular imagination: that something may be repaired, healed, and made new.
Several years ago, my husband had a terrible pain in his abdomen. At the hospital emergency room, the doctor diagnosed appendicitis. That did not comfort my husband as his great-grandfather had died from appendicitis! The only surgeon that evening was in another operation, and the emergency physician said that my husband would be next. “Everything will be fine,” he assured us, “as long as the appendix doesn’t rupture.”
Sure enough, by the time my husband was wheeled to the operating room, his appendix had ruptured.
The surgery took much longer than a typical appendectomy. Later, the doctor told me how he had to remove the appendix and clean the infection out of his abdominal cavity. The surgery was more complicated and dangerous then a typical appendectomy as his recovery would also be. However, he did – unlike his own ancestor – recover.
When it comes to our bodies, ruptures are pretty dangerous things. Sometimes they kill you. In other cases, a doctor has to fix the problem. Occasionally, ruptures (like ruptured eardrums) heal themselves. Then there is the odd case of birth. Shortly before a baby is born, a mother’s amniotic sac ruptured. When her “water breaks,” you know that a child is coming into the world. Human life itself begins with rupture.
Rupture: Death, repair, recovery, healing, or birth?
When sitting around the campfire those decades ago, my friends and I feared extinction, the utter and complete incineration of the planet, allowed – and perhaps even directed – by God. Truth to told, the worries of teenagers then and teenagers now are probably not much different. Yet endings rarely happen in a single, sudden cataclysm (although the dinosaurs may weigh in to protest) – or the return of gods coming down from the clouds with a train of true believers. Instead, big crises initiate smaller ones, creating a cascade of calamities - little ruptures and then bigger crises - that become increasingly difficult to address.
Back in the days of Rapture, we examined every news story for signs that the end was near, and we looked expectantly to the skies for Jesus to come and get us. What we did not understand was that crisis had already begun, and the walls of safety had been breached. We searched the heavens for some secret code but failed to see the earthly signs that were all around us. We thought our particular historical place was special - charged with divine meaning and endued with sacred (even if scary) purpose. We could not imagine that we had been born in a longer reality of ruptured times, shaped by broken history and politics and economics of our own making.
All these decades have unfolded following one of history’s most significant ruptures: 1945 when the United States developed and then dropped the atomic bomb. “Now I have become Death,” said Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the bomb, “the destroyer of worlds.” With conflagration and that quote from the Bhagavad Gita, Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds, an ending arrived echoing the words of St. Jerome of fifteen centuries earlier: Who could believe this? That the mother herself would become the tomb of her peoples?
But that was not the only rupture of the last eight decades. Additional ruptures followed, most especially two: the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001 and the insurrection at the United States capitol on January 6, 2021. And, in between those headline events, the less-noticeable shifts and accommodations that occurred along the way.
How does one navigate such brokenness? When multiple ruptures threaten life on this beautiful planet, and as the ecosystems of community and the natural world collapse? No one is coming to rescue us or defeat our enemies. We are here. There will be no Rapture. Our story is living amid rupture.
* * *
Being here does not, however, mean that we live in an empty universe, one devoid of good, without virtue and wisdom, or absent the presence of love or compassion or even God. Indeed, back in the 1970s, the turn toward religion as the way beyond apocalypse was not completely wrong-headed. It is just that we saw faith as an escape from destruction rather than a way of life through a ruptured landscape.
The word religion is believed to have come from the Latin, religare, meaning to “bind” or “reconnect.”
Religare is about mending what has been broken, recovering what has been mislaid, bringing people together, and reconnecting that which is frayed. From the perspective of its definition, religion should not have caused the breaches, it should not itself be fractured, and it should be part of the solution to rupture.
But neat definitions rarely match the messiness of reality. One can rightly claim that religion has always been fractured and fracturing, and it has never embodied its etymological promise. There is another possibility, however. Cicero, the ancient politician and philosopher who lived as the Roman Republic ended and Rome emerged as an empire, believed that religion derived from relegare (not religare), meaning “to re-read” or “to go through again” (as in teaching again or rethinking).
The project of rereading religion – contemporary theologian Catherine Keller refers to it as dreamreading – a kind of reading that awakens new possibilities and leads us to “apocalyptic mindfulness” amid destruction. She asks, “Might facing the Apocalypse in its ancient intensity help ups face apocalypse in our own time? Such ‘facing’ would not mean mere recognition, submission, acquiescence. It means to confront the forces of destruction: to crack open, to disclose, a space where late chances, last changes, remain nonetheless real chances.’”
* * *
Advent, “the Coming,” is the most apocalyptic season in the Christian calendar. And, since Advent marks the first of the Christian year, it is more than a little ironic that Christians begin the new year contemplating the end of things.
In the first Gospel text of the new year, Jesus calls his followers to apocalyptic mindfulness - to dreamread the ruptures visible in the world all around and see their meanings more clearly. To Jesus, signs of the end are harbingers of glory, signaling a world saved from evil, pointing toward the full bloom of a just new creation. In Luke, Jesus implores that his disciples will have the “strength to escape” not the crises themselves but the fear and dysfunction and disorientation that come from ruptures. Fear is the trap, inattention the temptation. Know that the Kingdom of God is near, Jesus urged. See what comes over the Advent horizon.
The nightly news trumpets apocalypse. But ruptures invite us to dreamread this holy season. Light candles against the night. Stay alert and awake. The wounded world sighs and groans for peace and redemption, the water of creation breaks. Late chances, last chances, real chances for rebirth and justice await. May we all re-read the signs of the times amid these tenebrous nights.
DREAMREAD this Advent with me here at The Cottage. Each day, I’ll send out a quote from something I’ve written as a guide to reflect on the signs of the times and offer up some hope, joy, love, and peace through the weeks ahead. Look in your mailbox for the reading every day from December 1-24 — my Advent “calendar” gift to you. The daily Advent calendar is free and open to everyone who is on the email list. No special access required.
INSPIRATION
Urgent God,
breaking through the static
to speak to our hearts:
disarm our love of control
and shake the silent heavens
to reveal you dawning glory,
judging all in the light of love.
— Steven Shakespeare
Awaken my heart,
God’s reign is near;
the Peaceable Kingdom
is in my hands.
If the wolf can be the guest of the lamb,
and the bear and cow be friends,
then no injury or hate can be a guest
within the kingdom of my heart.
Eden’s peace and harmony will only return
when first, in my heart,
there hides no harm or ruin,
for the Peaceable Kingdom is in my hands.
Isaiah’s dream became Jesus’ vision:
"Come, follow me,” Emmanuel’s echo rings.
“Reform your life, recover Eden’s peace,”
for only then will salvation appear.
For Advent’s dream is the healing of Earth,
when the eagle and bear become friends,
the child and the serpent playmates.
Arise, awaken, my heart,
the Peaceable Kingdom
is in your hands.
— Edward Hays
"The Garden of Impending Bloom” Those words were scrawled on a little hand-painted sign I saw last summer. It was tacked on a wire fence surrounding a bit of desolate, apparently toxically compromised land by a parking lot. . . A tawdry scene. Its message won’t leave me alone. Maybe it will come to you too, sometime when you are facing apparent doom. The End?
— Catherine Keller
Either way, we're not alone
I'll find a new place to be from
A haunted house with a picket fence
To float around and ghost my friends
No, I'm not afraid to disappear
The billboard said, "The end is near"
I turned around, there was nothing there
Yeah, I guess the end is here
The end is here
The end is here
The end is here
The end is here
—Phoebe Bridgers, Marshall Vore, Christian Lee Hutson, Conor M Oberst
He will come like last leaf’s fall.
One night when the November wind
has flayed the trees to the bone, and earth
wakes choking on the mould,
the soft shroud’s folding.
— Rowan Williams
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Lord, may we all see with new eyes - this time of so much hurt and destruction so we can become new again - reborn. Amen
Diana, I read your excellent article after hearing from a friend that her parents were listening to an Apocalyptic prophet who is advising them to invest in bunkers and stockpile food so they can survive. My heart sank! So much fear, anxiety and paranoia. I grew up in a church where I heard specific predictions of the final Judgment Day and was terrified. My grandmother followed Herbert W. Armstrong and his son Garner Ted, who asked her to sell her house, give the money to the church, and move to Guinea to avoid the Tribulation. My great grandmother followed John Adam Battenfield to a remote area of Arkansas to avoid the Tribulation. Their prophet was later hospitalized for mental illness, paranoid schizophrenia. We must find a way through this madness. Did anyone in your religious circle talk to you about the failed predictions of prophesy you experienced?