Apocalypse Never (and what we can do about it)
I grew up in the Pentecostal church. When I was ten, I knew just how the world would end: “the fire next time.” Tribulations. Seven seals. The four horsemen. Rainstorms of blood and fire. And what was more, this was coming any day now: the present terrible state of the world had been precisely prophesied in the book of Revelation in the bible. All you had to do was read it yourself.
Polls indicate that roughly half of Americans are waiting for some variation on this theme. For some, it’s the Rapture; for some the Second Coming; for others the Apocalypse, but roughly half of Americans are waiting for a supernatural end to human history and the earth.
Why do people think that? There a lots of conjectures—people who feel oppressed, marginalized, or poor often hope for an immediate end to their . . . tribulations. I also suspect the fear of aging and death figures in. After all, if the world ends today, I don’t have to go through the death process. And I suspect that it also has to do with the desire of human beings to live in extraordinary times—I’m special; the end of the world is special; therefore, the world will end while I am alive.
Then there is how we deal with the fact that the end never comes. Oddly enough, it appears to be that rather than giving up on predicting the end when the end doesn’t come, believers merely begin to reinterpret and believe all the more.
Odd. Human nature. Something we need to ponder a bit.
Jakob van Hoddis was a young man in the early part of the Twentieth Century. He was a poet. And a socialist. A German Jew. And he had some mental health issues. He began to ponder the end of the world and wrote this poem, “Weltende.”
Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut,
In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei.
Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei
Und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut.
Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen
An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken.
Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen.
Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken.
The hat flies off the pointy-headed bourgeois;
in all the winds there’s an echo, like screaming.
Roof tiles fly and break in two
and on the coasts, one reads, it’s flooding.
The storm is here, the wild sea hops
onto land to crush thick dams.
Most people have runny noses.
The trains fall from the bridges.
(author translation)
Now here’s the irony: as a German Jew, as a “degenerate” poet, and as someone with mental health issues, van Hoddis had three strikes as far as the Nazis were concerned. And, indeed, in 1942, the sanitarium where van Hoddis had gone was cleared of its patients and all were killed.
End of the world, wasn’t it? But van Hoddis shows us the irony of apocalyptic literature: it’s wish fulfillment. In the book of Revelation, the bad people, who are people who persecute Christians, get what they deserve. Justice at last reigns supreme.
As a socialist, van Hoddis wanted the upper-middle class to get its comeuppance, and so in the poem, a wind blows the hat off ones pointy head.
You can see this wish-fulfillment tendency for yourself—take a peek at any apocalypse you like, and what you’ll find is the bad guys punished. Sometimes the bad guys are those who aren’t Christian. Sometimes they are warmongers. Sometimes they are the “liberal media.” Sometimes they are the “pointy-headed bourgeois.”
The upshot is always that a power greater than ourselves sets everything right.
You’ve read and heard the descriptions:
And the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. (Isaiah 11:6 ASV)
(By the way, the lion lying down with the lamb is not in the bible. That phrase is a conflation of two verses from Isaiah, the other being:)
The wolf and the lamb will graze together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox; and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will do no evil or harm in all My holy mountain, says the Lord. (65:25)
Now wait a minute. Wolves and lambs do not get on well together. And lions don’t eat straw. But this is the problem with apocalypse: it is in its very essence magical thinking. The very nature of our world is that lions are not vegetarian.
So, back to my question: Why is apocalypse so interesting to so many?
Because long-term solutions are not interesting.
Long-term solutions are difficult. And boring. And require committees and task forces and lots and lots of charts and graphs and talking, talking, talking.
Who wants to work on a long-term solution when we can have our cake right now: the wind blows the hats from the middle class and snakes no longer do that gross thing when they digest rats. The serpents take to eating dirt. Nice world!
Unitarian Universalists are guilty too. One of our greatest hits among our hymns is “We’ll Build a Land.” I like it too but some of the lyrics go,
We’ll build a land where we’ll bind up the broken
We’ll build a land where the captives go free
Where the oil of gladness dissolves all mourning.
Oh, we’ll build a promised land that can be.
Wait a minute! No—it CAN’T be! Gladness does dissolve mourning, yes, but you can’t bottle that and pour it on everyone’s head. Gladness and mourning have to exist side by side, and wolves and lambs are just not going to “graze together.”
That hymn is a great way to buck ourselves up, but for real . . . it ain’t happenin’.
And quick-fixes in the real world turn more often into Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Pinochet’s Chile.
Lions can’t survive on grass. And we human beings are going to fix the problems that we have created . . . or not.
I’m not a prophet, but I can make a couple of predictions that I”m fairly certain of: One, lions will never eat straw . . . and some people will always choose a quick buck over the collective good; and two, “god” will not smite these people (at least in a timely manner). What those two things add up to is this: we are on our own. If anything is going to get fixed, it is up to us to do it. (And we know that our opponents are very content to have us curl up, get angry, and stare at our navels.)
Yet accepting “apocalypse never”
liberates us to get down to the tasks at hand.
A Scream and a Theory: Natural Selection and the Higher Moral Order
Scientific theories do not occur in a vacuum. Like poems or paintings, theories reflect the times and characters or their authors. Darwin’s theory of natural selection, far from being a stark and cold scientific theory, was—and continues to be—an impassioned cry for equality and justice. A cry far more grounded and stirring than anything available in the religions that human beings then, and into our own time, tenaciously claim to be the only source and grounding for morality.
First, a little family history: Charles Darwin’s family was passionately involved in the abolition movement. Darwin’s grandfather, the Unitarian Josiah Wedgwood—of Wedgwood china fame—bankrolled Thomas Clarkson, the great British abolitionist. Britain, due in great part to the work of Clarkson, outlawed slavery in the dominions in 1807 and the colonies in 1833.
(A bit of historical trivia: One of the chemists working in the Wedgwood factory was Joseph Priestly, discoverer of oxygen, and a Unitarian minister. )
Charles Darwin’s father, hoping to tone down the radical reputation of the family, had Charles baptized into the Church of England. But it is an interesting fact of history that the father of the theory of natural selection . . . married his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, a Unitarian, and considerably more radical, at least publicly, than Charles.
The fact remains that when the 22 Charles boarded HMS Beagle in 1831, he was a conventional Christian considering going to seminary and becoming a priest in the Church of England.
What changed?
For the full story, read Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution. When we look at Darwin’s life from the perspective of the slavery question, it looks almost inevitable that he should call religion’s bluff concerning its monopoly on morality and show a way toward a higher morality.
In 1845 Darwin wrote,
I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country. To this day, if I hear a distant scream, it recalls with painful vividness my feelings, when passing a house near Pernambuco, I heard the most pitiable moans, and could not but suspect that some poor slave was being tortured, yet knew that I was as powerless as a child even to remonstrate. I suspected that these moans were from a tortured slave, for I was told that this was the case in another instance. Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves. I have staid in a house where a young household mulatto, daily and hourly, was reviled, beaten, and persecuted enough to break the spirit of the lowest animal. I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean; I saw his father tremble at a mere glance from his master’s eye. … And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty… .
Darwin knew very well that the appeal to religion as a basis for moral behavior would be one of the first objections to the theory of natural selection. Yes, I think he would have pursued his theory, even if it had meant that human beings had no moral guidepost. But I suspect that Darwin knew that the implications of natural selection point in exactly the opposite direction.
Consider how Darwin framed the discussion:
His first proposal, published in 1859 but written in 1837, was this:
Living things are all one: they are “netted together.” (Darwin avoided the question of the “crown of creation,” human beings, as best he could in his first book.)
Then, in 1871, Darwin dropped the bigger bombshell:
Humanity is all one.
And therefore, we must strive toward a higher morality than that which we have developed thus far. Darwin wrote, “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
Darwin was a naturalist. He observed the “facts on the ground.” He heard the cries of a slave being beaten. He knew that slavery persisted in the United States and many parts of the world. The conclusion was plain: Religion is not sufficient to make individuals or governments behave in moral or ethical ways.
Darwin knew that, despite pretensions, Christianity—and the other human religions— more often underwrite and condone the prejudices of societies than point in the direction of a higher morality, a more good and just society. You don’t have to be Darwin in the mid-Nineteenth Century to see that!
I’m not an extremist concerning the effects of religion because, frankly, I think people will be people, no matter what the religious or political overlay . . . on an individual level, that is. The evidence is all around us: The vast majority of human beings are basically “good,” meaning most of us don’t hurt others all that often. Most of us don’t steal things . . . all that often. Most of us behave in ways that add up to going along to get along.
Most of us aren’t Jesus. Or Gandhi. Or Martin Luther King, but we’re not Stalin or John Wayne Gacy either. Most people—Christian, Muslim, or atheist—go along to get along.
That’s on an individual level. Religions get dangerous in the aggregate—when those systems begin to say who can enslave whom; who can subjugate whom; who can kill whom for what set of reasons.
Consider again what Darwin said about slavery and the treatment of slaves:
And these deeds are done and palliated by men, who profess to love their neighbours as themselves, who believe in God, and pray that his Will be done on earth! It makes one’s blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty… .
It is the aggregate that creates the evil, by “palliating”—by underwriting and condoning—the evil deeds.
But in the face of this fact Darwin saw, as perhaps no other human being had ever yet seen, that adaptations are adaptations, brain cells are brain cells. In humans. In primates. In animals. “We are all netted together,” Darwin wrote.
We are still on the frontier of this way of thinking. William Shakespeare long ago said, “A touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” It took Charles Darwin to tell us just how true this is. And we still don’t comprehend it: We are all netted together.
Where, then, is the uniqueness of human beings?
Consciousness. Not the sort of consciousness that tells us whether the sun is shining; not the sort of consciousness that tells us whether it is good or bad to sleep with particular people. The sort of consciousness that allows us to think about the thoughts of others—other people; other animals. This is the most complex form or consciousness. It is moral conscience.
Before Darwin the answer to the question, “why does consciousness exist?” was, “Poof! It’s magic! Set off by the divine spark . . .” After Darwin, the answer is not so neat and tidy. But the answer we have points the way toward a higher morality. Darwin put it this way: “The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.”
Charles Darwin
This is the profundity of the theory of natural selection: far from making us mere animals, as the religious often claim, natural selection calls us to see beyond the limitations of our time and place. Natural selection posits a mode of being beyond the mere going along to get along. Natural selections tells us to control our basic impulses. Not because those are animal impulses—all our impulses are animal impulses—but because the sort of animal we are can see beyond our selves.
Flying Over the Squares (for small farmers)
The little towns in their squares
light up, as do the scattered
lights of farmyards in the tilting,
fuzzy squares they’re locked in.
I balance a Chilian red
on a bumpy flight out to
one of those squares.
The West is red too,
after we bump to a
cruising altitude through
clouds threatening snow.
I’ve been here before,
but not in this sundown;
in these clouds;
drinking this wine;
in the lines of this poem.
Somewhere out there
I’ve been on the last
cool ride in the back
of a truck at evening,
watching a huge moon rise
and knowing this, too,
would be a last.
We knew that time would pass;
we knew we, too, would pass;
we knew that the land
would not forget us
because it never heard
our cries anyway.
We knew it, but
the terrible wrench
of knowing it
again and again—
the land proved careful
about showing us that,
or perhaps even we
might have rebelled.
Perhaps even we
might have blown out
our little lights
in the squares
and called it a night
with no tomorrow.
Land, what would you
have done without
our fierce burning?
What would we have done,
without our fierce burning?
For now, there is the red.
Then, the darkness,
but for the burning.
Epiphany (Continues)
[More king cakes than you can imagine and only two weeks into Epiphany, I am still tugging on the promise of this season, even as I find myself tugging on clothes that seem strangely tighter…]
Kathleen Norris notes the irony that King Herod “appears in the Christian liturgical year when the gospel is read on the Epiphany, a feast of light…Because of his fear, [Herod] can only pretend to see the light that the Magi have offered him” (Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, 1998).
Perhaps because of our fear, we can only pretend to see the light Universalism offers us. Here is our epiphany. We are loved, each and every one of us, every single atom and molecule. We are loved – not for what we do or believe, but for the divine light that shines in each of us.
We are all children of the same star dust and no distinctions we create can defile our original blessing. In a culture built on hierarchy and scarcity, it is a faithful act indeed to trust that everyone is held equitably in a compassionate heart of love. The scarcity of divine love is a dangerous myth, a tool to control and coerce.
Our work in this world, beloveds, is to proclaim the message of epiphany. We are loved, not for who we are, but because we are. We do not have to prove ourselves worthy of love any more than we should need to prove ourselves worthy of water. Just as we need water to be healthy human beings, so too do we need the knowledge that we – every single one of us, no exceptions, not even the most evil creature you can think of, every single one of us is held with compassion greater than we can imagine. It is a grace we cannot earn and we cannot lose.
Our faith has long valued acts over beliefs, and as a social justice organizer, I often celebrate this fact. But there is one belief that I pray will soak into the marrow of our bones, into our synapse and our blood. No one is left out of the mystery, no one is denied a strand of the interdependent web of all existence. We are all beloved.
May this season bring you sweetness – and the courage to live as a beloved among beloveds.
A Gift, A Letter, and a Drowning Man: The Legacy of “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
There’s an old Zen story that does like this:
Once there was a great warrior. He had never been defeated, and he continued to win every confrontation into old age. He was known far and wide as the only warrior who had never suffered a defeat.
This of course was a challenge to younger warriors, and one day a young man appeared to challenge the old warrior. He, too, had never suffered defeat. His technique had become famous: he allowed his opponent to make the first move, then exploited that move and always won the day.
Despite the concern of his students, the old warrior consented to join in combat with the young man.
On the day of the battle, the young man walked up to the old warrior and spat in his face. The old man did not move. Then the young man began to hurl insults. This had no affect either. Then the young warrior began to throw dirt and stones at the old warrior. The old warrior stood, impassive.
Finally, exhausted by all his effort, the young warrior bowed to the old warrior, admitting defeat.
After the young man had left, the disciples of the old warrior gathered around him. “Teacher! I would have split that young man’s skull open! How could you allow him to hurl such insults at you?”
The old warrior replied, “Consider this: if someone offers a gift and you will not receive it, to whom does that gift belong?”
Nonviolent resistance embraces the techniques of both the old and the young Zen warrior. Like the old teacher, nonviolence does not accept the gift of violence or insults. Like the young warrior, nonviolence provokes a first response, then watches the opponent to see what the first move will be.
On April 12th, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested in Birmingham, Alabama for parading without a license. There wasn’t a great deal of reading material in the jail, but one of the people arrested with King had been allowed to keep a newspaper he had in his pocket. That newspaper contained an editorial written by eight Euro-American Alabama clergy titled “A Call for Unity.”
The editorial began with the premise that, yes, African Americans deserved equality, but—that said—that said equality should be allowed to happen slowly—in the fullness, shall we say, of time. Without hubbub and marches.
King had heard this argument many times—just calm down and let the South change, slowly but surely. He had heard it from Euro-American centrists; he had heard it from within the African American leadership itself.
King began writing a response immediately. He used the bottom of his shoe for a desk. He wrote first on the margins of the newspaper; then on toilet paper; then on scraps provided for him by an African American trusty in the jail.
What he wrote is one of the great documents in US history, up there with the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address. What he wrote is an argument based on the Unitarian thought of Henry David Thoreau’s masterwork, “Civil Disobedience.”
MLK knew that violence was the nature of racism. But it is also a basic human response to threat. In his letter King says this:
In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps:
collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist;
negotiation;
self purification;
and direct action.
We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham.
Besides the moral high ground of nonviolence, King also knew that his cause itself stood for a higher order of morality. In “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau had asserted, “If I have unjustly wrested a plank from a drowning man, I must restore it to him though I drown myself.”
King was asking for that plank back. He saw the higher moral order, as did Thoreau and Tolstoy and Gandhi before him. Rather than getting the plank back, the Civil Rights movement got a small concession: I’ll let you hold onto my plank once in a a while, when you’re going down for the third time.
This is the unfinished business of what King started. And the continuing challenge to those who strive for a higher moral order. Still, today, I must restore the plank that I wrestled from a drowning human being. And there are many, many of those.
King’s letter is there still to remind us: “An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.”
And,
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Saving the music, Saving our souls
Much talk is made of gentrification, but I want to take a moment and lift up the shadow side of all the cool new coffee houses and increased property taxes – dispossession. New Orleanians who managed to return post-flood are finding themselves pushed out of the city by the incredible post-2005 rent & tax increases and city liens on properties.
Now this city is in the process of being dispossessed of it primary cultural expression – music. On Friday, January 17th, a Sound Ordinance will be brought before the City Council. One that requires lowering the decibel levels (on a tuba?!?!?! a trumpet?!?!?).
There is a pattern in this nation of white people being drawn to the soul and spirit of culturally vivacious places – and then beginning to institute laws and ordinances that strangle the life out of the culture that first attracted them.
Beloveds, let us break that pattern in New Orleans.
Bring an anti-racist analysis to the proposed sound ordinance and see how long it lasts. Same with the second line permits. Same with anything that on the surface looks “reasonable” and almost always privileges the dominant narrative, those with institutional power.
Institutional racism is persistently constructing our reality – and dehumanizing every one of us. Let us work creatively to resist the cultural genocide taking place in New Orleans and in other areas of dispossession in these United States of America.
What A Miracle Is
Once I crossed the Sierra Madres
with a bus driver named Arturo
who had one arm
and a stick-shift bus.
Sometimes between the
the shift and wheel Arturo’s
good right arm would
pause to make the sign
of the cross toward a portrait
of the Virgin that banged
the windshield from a string.
The lesson here is that
never is a miracle more than
beating the percentages.
Perhaps Arturo still is
waving down the
twisted camino
at each shrine
along the way.
“What’s your hurry?”
always he will ask—
“Do you think you
don’t have time to
find your grave?”
http://seanmcgirr.blogspot.com/2012/10/mexican-buses.html
Sometimes It Takes A Lie
Sometimes it takes a lie
to keep a religion. “It’s
merely a game,” they
told the priests–“how
we fast for days, then
cut a tall pole to climb.
How we costume and
dance. It means nothing,
how we chant in circles
and bleed chickens.
How we climb and fly
round and around in air.
Come, watch–it’s only
a game that gives us joy.”
(And, they didn’t say,
aloud, keeps the earth
going well, returned
to its right turning again.)
“Merely a game we play,
round and around in
thirteen and thirteen turns.
It’s a game–come watch,
priests. Be amazed” (how
sometimes it takes a lie
to keep your religion.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danza_de_los_Voladores
Joy to the World!
As the Community Minister for the Greater New Orleans Unitarian Universalists, I spend a lot of my time immersed in the injustice of layers of oppression. New Orleanians still trying to get back into their homes over 8 years after they were flooded out, transgender women forced to be housed with and often abused by men in prison and in shelters, a football field of wetlands lost in this state every half hour … Each day there’s more. Family diagnosed with chronic diseases, babies born too soon, people die… and.
AND Christmas comes each year in this country, whether you celebrate it or not. While I often find myself in the position of protesting the dominion of the dominant culture, I don’t fight Christmas. I choose to enjoy Christmas. I think that Christmas can be sweetly subversive.
Hey World – people are ill and homeless and jobless and imprisoned and killed! For most of the year, most of the world ignores these hard truths, pretending that the poor are poor because of poor choices instead of acknowledging a system of oppression that radically tilts the playing field towards some –and away from others.
But come Christmas, pretending stops – at least for a moment. Suddenly we collect coats and toys and feel good stories about providing shelter and hope to families down on their luck.
Suddenly we tell a story about a great leader born in questionable circumstances, sharing his birthday crib with the donkey’s dinner, soon exiled to the immigrant life in Eygpt with his family.
Rumors of premarital sex, poverty, immigration … you name it, the Christmas story goes there…
And tells us – joy to the world. Hope has come.
Let there be peace and kindness and respect among all creation.
It’s a 6th Principle: The Goal of World Community with Peace, Liberty, and Justice for All!
Yes, I know. That’s not exactly how the scriptures or even the carols go.
But I am grateful for the promise of this season…For once a year our deeply embedded cultural story tells the world:
Children are precious.
Where you are born should not predict the quality nor the value of your life.
Women too have the holy within them.
It matters that we bear witness to each other and to the vast brilliance of the universe.
Sometimes knowledge needs to bow to intuition.
Life is a gift, utterly unpredictable, infinitely possible.
There is hope for change.
And where there is hope, friends, there is joy. Beloveds, may there be joy for you and your loved ones today and every days.
Deep South
Planned Parenthood of Louisiana hosted a screening of deepsouth last night in honor of World AIDS Day. Filmmaker Lisa Biagiotti joined the panel after the screening and shared that it was the startling statistics of HIV/AIDS in the south, combined with the SILENCE about this reality – in stark contrast to the national story that HIV/AIDS is “under control” – that drew her to create deepsouth. As Elizabeth Pandolfi writes in her review of the film:
Unlike the rest of the nation, the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the South has not been controlled and conquered. Instead, it’s rampant and largely invisible. Deaths from HIV/AIDS are 50 percent higher than in the rest of the country. The South also has the highest rate of incarceration, the highest number of uninsured people, the highest rate of STD infection, the highest rate of poverty — and the list goes on. Those Southerners who are HIV positive are still mired in many of the same problems that patients faced during the early years of the disease, from discrimination to lack of access to care.
Born and raised in the southland, I often respond to news like this with a Gina Forsyth song:
Oh, I love it and I hate it
Every now and then berate it
Oh, the sweet and sunny south where I was born
And yet I know the South is simply the identified patient in the United States – where every place is suffering from an illness greater than HIV/AIDS, an illness endemic to the structure of this nation from its creation. The dis-ease of racism.
Panelist Deon Haywood, Executive Director of Women With A Vision,went directly to the soul of the matter when asked what can be done to address HIV/AIDS in the South. Address racism. Address poverty. Address homelessness. Address food access and healthcare access and daycare options. Address the internalized racial inferiority and internalized racial superiority that destroys lives.
Beloveds, in this interdependent web of all existence, nothing exists outside of relationship.
Let us shine the light of our faith on these connections. Let us address the root illnesses of our nation – structural racism, sexism, heterosexism – every –ism that privileges anyone and demeans another for the superiority of a few. If we spend our lives addressing only the symptoms, the next generation will suffer even more from this dis-ease.
Let the SILENCE be broken by a multitude of voices rising up with truths, with stories that remind us we are all in this together – and together, we can heal. Only together can we heal.
