Nov. 19, 2006






By Harry T. Cook



Mark 13: 14-23


We are now approaching the outer suburbs of the city known as Last Judgment - or, if you will, that season in the church's peculiar calendar during which we sense the rumbling approach of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - one of the abiding images of what our theologians call "end times."


I am forever grateful to my graduate school professors who put all the apocalyptic, end-time stuff under the heading of metaphor. Of course, one then needs to ask, "Metaphor for what?" Whole shelves of books have been committed on that subject. The closer you get toward the evangelical end of the shelf, the less metaphor you encounter and the more dire predictions of catastrophe in real time.


You can tune in to certain TV channels at almost any hour and witness arm-waving, ululating preachers perspiring and gasping for breath between syllables, overbearing on their audiences to repent and believe NOW while there is still time or risk being caught off base when Jesus comes again.


The plot of a short story by the late John Cheever entitled "The Brigadier and the Golf Widow" is his take on apocalyptic. - A New York businessman secretly has a bomb shelter built on the grounds of his suburban home. Meanwhile, he can be heard by his wife each evening rattling the ice cubes in his cocktail glass as he shouts at the television news as it reports this and that about the Cold War, "Throw a little nuclear hardware at 'em. Bomb 'em to smithereens." He seems not to understand what would befall the world if the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb on Russia.


Meanwhile, he is going broke and has begun a tawdry affair with another woman who inveigles him into giving her a key to his bomb shelter. His wife simultaneously discovers not only her double betrayal, but also that her husband is in financial ruin. She realizes that he really wants the world to end, not only for him but for everybody because he is too much of a wimp to commit suicide . . . or too afraid of facing up to his failure.


A certain dominant political strain in 21st Century America partakes in the same kind of socio-pathic behavior. It starts wars, abrogates arms treaties, refuses to abide by environmental pacts to reduce the effect of global warming. One asks why, when all evidence points to dangerous nuclear proliferation and ecological degradation. They don't come right out and say so, but people of that persuasion evidently believe what their preachers tell them, to wit: That the end is near anyway. God is in charge, and those who believe in God through Jesus Christ will be spared and raptured into heaven. So why worry?


Charles Darwin in teaching us about the evolution of Earth's life forms also taught us about time - not that it is running out, but that it is running on, and that only those species that adapt to their environments will survive. The only end to time is that which human beings may make for themselves: by abrogating treaties, starting wars and ignoring the obvious causes of global warming. Earth was here and in the making eons and eons before closed-minded conservative politicians and rightwing religious zealots started spreading their idiocy abroad. And Earth will be here long after their noisome pestilence has run its course.


It is not for nothing that in the grand sweep of evolution it is our species, Homo sapiens, that has figured out some of how we got here and some of how we could wipe out ourselves. Homo means "human" and sapiens means "of wisdom." So we are a life form that has evolved with the powers of reason, memory and foresight. We are not doomed to anything except what our negligence, ignorance or studied unawareness may set in motion.


I was shocked when I read a recent New York Times analysis of United States government spending on environmental and energy research and development: It's down to about $3 billion a year, while the U.S. military budget is more than $70 billion and on the way up.


Those figures mean that we are spending our way into homemade oblivion while at the same time despoiling largely by neglect the only planet we know of on which our species can live. I don't see what's so all-fired sapiens about that.


So we can step up to the responsibility of being Homo sapiens, or fall back down on all fours and regress along the path whence we came, letting our knuckles scrape the ground as we go.


There are two Christian doctrines that are worse than worthless: One is the doctrine of original sin, at least in the way it is usually expressed and applied. The other is all this end-time business. The latter distracts us from what we should be doing, and are able to do, in the time we have to do it. It would be nice to leave the Earth at least as good a place as when we came into it. While it will surely outlast us, it would be even nicer if we didn't destroy so much of it in the process of destroying ourselves.


Despite what obedient Catholics and Episcopalians recite in the words of the Nicene Creed every Sunday, Jesus isn't coming again to judge either the quick or the dead. The judgment that is upon us is the judgment our commissions and omissions will bring in the natural course of things, which judgment we can influence for the better by taking charge here and now or, for the worse, by saying, "Oh, well, God's will be done." That's passive-aggressiveness writ large, of course; and we know it.




© Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.