God in a Conversation about End Times

Are we as a human race coming to ~The End ~ of the story?

One day, a few years back, a Jeep pulled up in our driveway with three strangers in it. No one ever drove up our long driveway, through thick green woods, unannounced. When a youngish woman, and a somewhat older woman, emerged from the Jeep with brochures clutched in their hands I knew at once they were Jehovah's Witnesses. My heart moved, by habit, into a state of hardness. But I thought, as I always do when faced with Christian evangelicals, be polite, be respectful.

And, more than that, I told myself, you need to do some deep listening, that would be the truly respectful thing to do. It was what you taught and preached about, all the time.

So I invited them onto the porch for ice tea. The two women looked at each other, confused and doubtful. I didn't press it. Instead we stood there, the engine of their get-away vehicle running, while a third person, a man, remained behind the wheel.

After introducing themselves, the younger of the two, Alex, asked "What do you think the future holds?" I liked that she opened with a question. Points for that.

“I don’t know,” I answered, “because I’m not God.”

“I know I’m not God,” she countered, “but the word of God could tell us what the future holds.”

Oh boy.

She went on to ask me what I thought about the state of the world.

“It’s a mess.” We nodded simultaneously, but eyed each other warily. “I think it's possible we’re in the End Times.” This was not the language I use with my friends. But really, what IS the difference between saying we’re destroying the planet and the human race is f—-d, from “we’re in the ‘End Times’?”

Alex and her friend looked surprised. I vaguely quoted climate science. They, un-vaguely, quoted the Bible. I asked them if, since Jehovah's Witnesses believe the end is coming soon, they believed in the rapture. I apologized for not knowing if their church did, saying, “I have trouble remembering which denomination believes in what.” Alex asked what the rapture was. I was shocked. Who doesn’t know about the rapture? Even if only through the bumper sticker. You know, “when the rapture comes, may I have your car?”

We went on to talk about the Bible. “Do you believe the Bible is the word of God?” Alex asked. Ah, sigh, another familiar trap. What does that mean anyway? I said I loved “the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament,” but thought we Christians didn't always know how to read it; that the Jews argue about the texts, and have had lively discussions about them for thousands of years. And, that since the Hebrew scriptures were written by Jews, we really should learn how to understand it as it was meant to be read, in its historical and cultural context.

Alex, appearing a bit dazed, said "was it the Jews who believe in the rapture?" She turned to her friend. The friend’s face remained a blank slate. I hid my shock. Successfully, I hope.

She paraphrased my earlier words. “I have trouble remembering who believes in what too.” There was a glint of something sharp, maybe even cynical, in her eye. My eyes glinted back. We smiled.

I explained about the rapture, why it couldn’t be a Jewish belief. They asked me about my beliefs. I said I didn't count only on beliefs to maintain my faith, but instead relied on the experience of God's actual Presence in my own life. I took a breath and prepared to witness to them about how, one day, long ago, the Holy Spirit appeared to me on the Cape Cod Bay in Provincetown MA (see the piece “Jesus on the Beach”).

“I was twenty-nine,” I told them, “and I still tear up when I talk about it, so hang on just a second.” We waited for a grief/joy wave to pass through me. Then I told them, very briefly, because the engine on the Jeep was still running, that it happened one Easter morning. That I was walking on the beach and saw Christ's spirit animating each and every living thing, me, the water, the sand, some fishermen working on their boats. They weren’t connecting, or maybe I sounded wacko to them.

Alex quoted from the Bible again. What exactly I don’t remember. I said, “I can't take the Bible as an absolute blueprint for living, or for the future, the way you seem to be able to.”

She asked if I thought the Bible was "just a story." Again I recognized the question.

“I don't think it's ‘just’ a story,” I said, “but neither do I think it's all fact. Both the Old and New Testaments are, in fact, full of poetry and stories, and some legends, and history too. Poetry and stories and legends are, I think, meant to be felt and experienced in a different way than everyday life is. I think the Bible is a living story, almost like a play where the audience participates. It's like the stories are always in motion, and God wants us to step into them, and be tossed around and taught something new every time we go in there. They’re pretty mysterious, those stories. Think about Jesus’s parables! I sure don’t get them.”

Alex nodded. “I learn something new every time I read a Biblical passage.” She gazed off into the distance, where she seemed to be re-gathering herself, unsure how to continue. As we waited, I checked in on my ego. Was I hoping I’d changed her just a wee bit, that I’d planted a seed? Check. Hey, they’re not the only ones who get to evangelize, I told my superego.

Alex then circled back to the question of where things are headed. She told me about God's Kingdom and how it would replace the man-made kingdoms on earth.

“Thank God,” I said. She then read out loud some details from a tract. “That is very beautiful,” I told her. “I wish I could grab onto those images to replace the ones we live with every day, right? Like school shootings, sexual violence, violence against women and people of color, immigrants fleeing rape and certain death in their home countries, world leaders in endless pissing contests, the vast islands of garbage floating on the still gorgeous blue-green seas.”

I didn’t say that I would then be able to relax, eternally, instead of finding tiny islands of peace via prayer and reading and meditation and sacred listening in the groups I belong to. I could relax down to my core, if I believed God was about to swoop down, and make everything all right here on earth, any moment. No more work required on our part.

But I believe we are God’s hands and feet, God’s co-workers.

So, no.

I said, “I hope God's kingdom reigns on earth one day, and I hope it will be soon.” Again it looked as if I’d thrown Alex off balance.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

“But may I ask you,” I said, “and this just now occurred to me as being a problem, so thank you for making me think about this, who will make that beautiful vision you have read to me actually work down here? Do you think human beings are ready?” She shook her head, looked confused.

“I mean, who will be the administrators, you might say, of God's kingdom on earth? Someone has to keep it all going. Are there enough people with the skills? The spiritual skills to make peace?”

She looked suspicious now, as if I were making fun of her. I wasn't. It’s just that my brain works like that. It needs to know every detail of how things operate. It's why I can't go on a roller coaster ever again. I braved the Alpengeist at Bush Gardens about thirteen years ago, only because I felt a deep urgency to scream my head off.

Photo by Dmitry Tomashek on Unsplash

Which I did. But afterwards, I had to walk over to the edge of the structure and examine the actual nuts and bolts. Not good enough. There would be no second ride. To ride one again, an expert would have to examine every inch of that massive thing, and then I’d need a report in writing, before I would climb into another one of those little cars. There are simply too many small things that can go wrong, adding up to an eventual catastrophe. Kind of like the one we’re headed toward now, on this planet.

The women were waiting. I said, “I truly want to know how you picture this happening. I do. God is Love, right? The gospel of John tells us that. I don’t think we do love all that well. I mean sometimes, but not enough of the time. Isn’t there an awful lot of work humans will have to do first, on ourselves, and together, before life could be as perfect as that image? It seems to me, whenever human beings are left to run systems we fail, eventually. I mean look how much God has already given us! It’s amazing the gifts! And how are we doing?”

I don't recall their answer, but I think it must have had something to do with faith, and that if you believe as they believed, you’d be one of the ones doing the administrating here on the planet, when it happens. Pardon me if I don’t have that much faith in humanity, none of us, Republican, Democrat, Independent, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, none of us. I said, “I don't have your kind of certainty.”

I didn't say that with a longing for certainty. I believe the power greater than any one of us, and greater than all of us put together, which I call God, is probably working things out, somehow, with us, and through us, and beyond us and beneath us and above us. And is also doing so through other creatures and living things with which we are interconnected. We might even be the least of these. This is, ultimately, God's story we’re living out. They are the writer, and we are characters in Their story. We have much more living and growing and changing and co-working to do to help God out with Their project Earth. You might say the earth is one big Co-Working Office Space. AND. Sometimes I fear there is a deadline (whether it’s the one of science or religion), and that we won’t make it.

I think one of the JW women heard my words as wishing and wanting. She had found an opening. She offered to come back. I felt my heart grow weary. I can imagine her brain was weary of me. Then God moved God’s self around in that Bouncy House heart of mine. The two women were young, vulnerable, trying so hard. They could have been my daughters. I felt protective, tender even, towards them.

“I commend you for going out into the world and trying to make it a better place,” I said. They both looked surprised. “I truly do,” I said. “It's not an easy thing, knocking on a stranger’s door, and you are doing good in the world.” I meant it.

Alex said, “Thaaank yooou,” in a long slow way that made it sound like she was letting out a long breath, and packing a lot of past experiences into those two words. I can imagine many people are either rude, or dismissive, or make fun of them to their faces, or behind their backs, on the regular.

“If you see that car in the driveway,” I pointed to my Nissan, “it means I’m here, just knock on the front door.”  

Then I went in that door myself, and made notes about our conversation for some future time. (Today)

And maybe they did come back. Maybe Michael and I had moved to the Crystal Coast by the time they gathered up the energy to do so. I want to think my words had an effect on both of them. I’m sure Alex wants to think her words had an effect on me.

That day connects with this day because just last week (and maybe Alex planted this seed!), I asked myself: “What if there really is an afterlife?” Actually she hadn’t talked about one, but the future earth her people imagined sounded like one.

I actually let myself fall, as if into deep water, down into the concept as if it were a promise. I let myself feel it, and surrendered. And, for just a few minutes, my body/mind felt an amazing, total, marvelous, sense of deep relaxation and joy. Which makes me wonder: What if I were to cultivate that belief, for awhile, as an experiment, would it change anything in my life? We’ll see.

PART TWO - some ruminations on “The Afterlife”

I’m wondering, could “the Afterlife” be a useful concept, after all? Like a lot of liberals, I’ve always thought it a bit childish. Fear based. I say vague things like, we return to the Oneness of all that is, the Mystery from which we came. In the Episcopal church I attend I’ve heard the priests say, “the Love from which we came, and to which we will return.” But surely what I call me, my Ego, the self, the personality, the body, is not needed in order to swim around in the Great Big Loving Kindness that made me?

Yet, even as I write this, it occurs to me that faith in an afterlife is not just wishful thinking, but evolutionarily useful to humanity. Is the Afterlife a concept genetically bred into the human brain, over millennia, to help balance out the fear needed to warn us of imminent threats to our safety? In other words, did it provide our ancestors with a reason to bother to keep on working so hard to survive? And how much more we have to fear today!

Maybe we need both the concept of an afterlife, and the drive to make this earth a place of peace and justice (God’s Kingdom on Earth). The two do not have to be mutually exclusive, and they are not, in progressive Christianity.

Maybe the brain/mind/soul still need the former, because it’s hard work to do the latter. Much harder than being hunter-gatherers. And because we do the work with no certainty we’ll ever see the fruits of our labors. Maybe the human mind needs faith in an Afterlife as a reward, in order to find the strength simply to go on.

I don’t know about you, but it’s natural for me to want reward for doing stuff that’s hard. Maybe, in the deep, dark recesses of even the liberal mind, there is a need for this reassurance. And maybe that’s OK. We know that enslaved persons in America clung to a promise and a song about the next world. And that this not only helped them survive the attempted genocide in the forced labor camps, misnamed plantations, it helped them thrive as a collective force. In the sense that African Americans brought forth whole new genres of music, dance, poetry, and more.

If a belief in an after-life is a natural survive/thrive technique of the brain/soul, might we do well to play around with it? Maybe it’s not an escape from responsibility here on earth, but a way to act even more responsibly, without falling apart. Because it can give us energy, and peace, in advance, like it did me, if only for that brief moment. Maybe it is even a way of cooperating with some deep, organic, force (the Spirit?) within us that knows what we need to be fully creative and connected to each other.

Remember too, scientifically speaking, that placebos sometimes work as well as the experimental drug. Might a true, deep, relaxation that takes us into the felt sense of a the afterlife, all while working for peace and justice here on earth, give us the much needed strength to keep on keeping on?

Having said all this, some days I think the human race has a collective Death Wish. That vast numbers of us consciously or subconsciously hope to see The End of the story, for ourselves. It sure would be dramatic! And aren’t we a bunch of drama addicts? How much TV do you binge watch a week? I’d be embarrassed to answer my own question on that.

But we can see evidence of a collective shadow of doom right there. I think that, oddly, doom is a kind of inside out hope. Like, the hope you hear from voters that if we just sweep everything that is already set in place away, destroy everything, we can start new. You hear this from the right to the left. As if man-made devastation has ever brought about enlightenment!

Are we just tired of trying to make change by peaceful means? Actually, how hard do most of us even try to do that? Or is it more likely we are all simply working to make others conform to our picture of a future “Kingdom?” Of one kind or another.

You might say, this life is enough. I don’t need another one, or an afterlife. This whole discussion means nothing to me. Neither do I (on an intellectual level) “need” an afterlife. On another level, maybe I do. That moment of peace. Wow, it was amazing, it was beyond me. And it beckoned. I do know I need something to get me moving again.

We are made the way we are for a reason. Myths and concepts and stories exist for a reason. I wonder if accepting some of those so-called primitive parts of our brain, with their seemingly “magical” beliefs, might actually be necessary for our collective spiritual evolution? I wonder if amassing our intellects against them hinders our collective spiritual evolution? And if we don’t evolve spiritually, we are doomed.

I invite you to, experimentally, dip your toe in those ancient waters with me.

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