By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
It’s the Big Day. Perhaps you’re reading this just prior to the 6 pm upheaval-slash-earthquake-cum-devastation heading our way. Well, prepare yourself for another of those impending “last” days for the True Believers. Surprisingly, a lot of otherwise-reasonable people seem anxious to jump ship today, anticipating that glorious grand-slam of religious extravaganzas, the Rapture.
With a Disneyesque panache that reminds me of Mary Poppins, bumbershoot in hand, the saved (both dead and alive) will be lifted up into heaven to side-step the horrors of the five-month tribulation ahead. As I traded my fundamentalist credentials for an ephemeris decades ago, I don’t expect to be leaving, myself, but then again, from the larger perspective, it’s doubtful that anyone else will be either.
This is another of the end-of-days prophecies that we seem to delight in, a-twitch with secret shivers of anticipation. I don’t understand the need for such things-that-go-bump fear-mongering, but it’s easy enough to recognize what ignites it. We knew the heat would be turned up under that scenario when the fish began to die mysteriously and birds dropped out of the sky by the thousands. These qualify as signs and portents, especially to a culture that has scrapped its respect for scientific theory; such dramatic signs and portents dovetail nicely with the latest prediction for doomsday, despite an earlier version (1994) that failed to manifest due to “fuzzy math.”
An elderly radio-preacher in Oakland, CA named Harold Camping has reconfigured the calculations according to his own version of Bible code and convinced his followers that today’s the day, to be followed by five excruciatingly hellish months until the world’s final end on October 21, 2011. Maybe he’s just trying to best the 2012 predictions. Today’s prophecy is not officially sanctioned by mainstream fundies, who are more in line with Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth — the apocalyptic vision that jump-started the evangelical movement in 1970 and can justifiably be blamed for much Christocratic politics today – as well as with Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of end-times fictions. Hal and Tim won’t give an exact time for Christ’s return, although they do suggest you purchase After The Rapture Pet Care insurance so your household critters will be well-attended by the newly-damned in post-rapture America. (Yes, seriously, and consider that your WTF for the day.)
Polls show that a majority of Americans believe that Jesus will soon return to exact a fiery day of judgment, so this kind of fear-fest is to be expected and never fails to get attention, although this particular prophesy seems to have captured more than its share of eyes and ears. Cable television is studiously covering the event. We can lay some of that to our nervousness about the environment and a decade of weather patterns becoming more and more unpredictable, until now we simply expect them to be extreme, and they seldom fail us.
Indeed, writing this at mid-day, the Midwestern sky is near-black with storm clouds today, thunder rolling again and downpours filling swollen rivers, swamping roads and fields. The last few weeks have given us flood stages unseen in decades, and little towns along the Mississippi levees have been sacrificed to protect larger ones. Not far to the west, Texas is suffering drought, punctuated by over 10,000 wildfires since November of last year. While I have to struggle to feel sorry for Texas, that’s a lot of fires, lost dreams and property damage for folks already put upon by depressed financial times. Meanwhile, months of unseasonal tornadoes have already done billions in damage to the plains and southern states, with accompanying loss of life. Just announced, the pending hurricane season is projected to be the worst in decades. If this is our new reality, it’s easy enough to believe it’s some kind of punishment for past sins, real or imagined.
It would be helpful if we weren’t suckers for these scary projections. Historically, our past is littered with prophets pointing fingers and scaring the children (in all of us.) Way back when the cultured world rested mostly on shifting sand, we had Noah, Abraham and Moses, all qualified fire-and-brimstone prophets assumed to possess a direct link to the deity. Jesus is also considered a prophet (and to his faithful, the Only Begotten Son.). Centuries later, the Muslims give JC a respectful nod, but he yields to Muhammad as their final prophet.
A word about religious prophets as opposed to secular: religions tend to seize on what they think is the final iteration of any insightful transcendent experience, which is inevitably when the authenticity of the movement begins to fade. Less personal faith would be required if we sought our own religious experience rather than trying to reclaim that of another. Church founders never seem to learn that the spiritual experience can not be duplicated and is ever-evolving, which is why prophecy still has the ability to impress and impact us so powerfully.
Nostradamus, Madame Blavatsky and Edgar Cayce are all considered remarkable prophets of their time, their psychic predictions still studied today. There are good prophets and bad, of course, factoring in the influence of cult-leaders Jim Jones, David Koresh, Sun Yung Moon and the like. More often than not, this last group manipulates events to make their predictions happen, with bells and whistles to enhance their own credibility. They’re excellent PR men, if dangerously cynical, but that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it.
Some prophets start out inspired and then get sidetracked. In the 1980s, Elizabeth Claire Prophet and her Church Universal and Triumphant was a growing international New Age movement until Elizabeth began to prophesy nuclear war between the superpowers and moved her group of believers into austere underground facilities near Yellowstone Park. Not long after, Elizabeth was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and retired to live another ten years in a care facility. Four of her five children denounced her work; the fifth doesn’t comment.
We don’t even need a religious context to get ourselves frothed up about dire projections. We all remember Y2K when the predictions flew fast and furious, Wall Street and the banking industry the likely storm-front (and proving just a tad off, an entire presidential-administration early.) The Republican party assumes an air of authority in prediction, capitalizing on anticipation of horrors-to-come to keep their base fed raw meat; of course almost none of its predictions comes true. We haven’t become Socialists, Obama hasn’t changed the national religion to Islam, and their profitable insurance, managed care and pharmaceutical companies have not been devastated by pending ‘Obamacare.’ The Pubs are mostly failed prophets, but their true believers keep right on marching us steadily toward the edge of their ideological cliff.
Suckers. We’re suckers for this end-times stuff; there’s even a word for it: eschatology. We make movies about it, we speculate long into the night about what might happen, Road Warrior-style. We look at what isn’t working today and skim through our memory banks to select an old scenario to cover new possibilities. We’re better at summoning old solutions than creating new ones, which is where we most often fail one another. What if, when hard times assault us, we all worked together instead of pulling into ourselves and self-protecting? A no-brainer scenario, sharing food, shelter, sustenance along with the work to produce it as we did in centuries past, but that’s the last thing we think of. Instead we anticipate chaos and violence, pulling out our survivalist guide and small arms manual to prepare for dog-eat-dog conflict.
Frankly, it’s hard for me not to consider these unsettling speculations part of our ego-need, drama-queenness and never-ending search for entertainment. Think Schwarzenegger and Stallone. We just love to scare the bejesus out of ourselves, shiver in the night, revel in dark imaginings. Alfred Hitchcock, grand master of suspense, understood that we are never far from our childhood insecurities when he said, “Fear isn’t so difficult to understand. After all, weren’t we all frightened as children? Nothing has changed since Little Red Riding Hood faced the big bad wolf.”
Perhaps the understanding that there’s always something out there waiting to eat us is encoded in our mammalian DNA, keeping us twitchy. But what can we say about the perverse pleasure we take in imagining it? Hitch capitalized on our addiction to that pleasure with a string of brilliant movies; teasing us, he said, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” We love the anticipation.
There’s something darker behind that motivation, of course: a self-hatred that is not only difficult to find within our conscious selves but almost impossible to admit. A Course In Miracles identifies guilt as that which quietly drives our projections, our nihilism and our self-judgment. We have designed our entire philosophy of life around a need to cover our flaws, even as our old paradigm religions tell us that we are flawed beyond our ability to fix ourselves, that we are essentially helpless and hopeless unless some outside influence redeems us. The price of that redemption is most often paid in religious obedience and unwavering density of thought. And the prayer wheel spins.
It is only when we begin to consider, and experience, that we are not separate from God, from one another, from every good thing as well as every bad, that we begin to let go of childhood frights and fantasies. Until we do, peace remains just out of reach, and punishing end-times scenarios designed by angry gods fill our guilt-filled thoughts. Our search for ourselves must be rooted in a growing discovery of our own innate divinity.
One last note on the religious aspect of this as well as the psychosocial. Some of us here have discussed the awkward embarrassment of being punked, these last few weeks. Great satire has crossed the boundary into increasingly outlandish realities to make us all scratch our heads from time to time. While it may seem absurd to us, some people have invested their life savings with the Reverend Camping, some have quit their jobs or left their families. That kind of misplaced faith is frightening, certainly, but it requires compassion of us, not derision. We separate ourselves from our human family at our own risk. We need to be very gentle with one another on May 22.
I’ll issue one disclaimer: should the old preacher’s projections prove true in any way, I can’t help but imagine the return of a secular political reality to be a vast improvement over what we suffer today. The relief would be palpable, like kicking off too-tight shoes. Under those circumstances, I wouldn’t mind being left behind in the least. I much prefer the Baha’i vision of our collective future, shared by many of the New Age philosophies. And as always, love must lead the way.
As to the enormous bullshittery of a philosophy that leaves your pets (not to mention your neighbors) behind, I endorse this classic and beloved Twilight Zone that puts the matter squarely to rest. Take the time to load these YouTubes and give your heart a little massage today, as we all get Left Behind.
A second chance at rapture?!:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_apocalypse_saturday
Judith – I am so glad you are OK. Kat
I’m peeking through a weather window here in Southern Missouri, yesterday my server was up and down. The downpour we’re experiencing now is also pounding what’s left of Joplin — down the road an hour or so — making rescue attempts more difficult. It WAS Armageddon for 89 of my neighbors, and counting. God/dess bless us all.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/22/tornado-southwest-missouri-joplin-minnesota_n_865338.html
As you say, Carrie, deforestation and other stewardship issues on planet Gaia are responsible for our weather woes, as our social and political choices are responsible for so much mayhem. So since we are free to change our minds, along with our activities, we can choose to leap into actual cooperation with the environment, with one another; loving the planet, ourselves, and those we share it with enough to actually do what it takes to create the world we yearn for.
It is suggested that our current evolutionary curve — some think reconnecting and activating dormant DNA — has to do with birthing our actual humanness, coming into our authentic power and leaving behind the energies of fear and violence that have kept us balanced on the edge of fear-obsessed shadow-humanity too long. That’s a worthwhile goal for the 21st century, eh? Fully finding our heart and stepping into our power? Divine!
Zoey, yes on much you added, and Jere, pink is a wondrous color, much more powerful than given credit for. It’s association with love on a 3D level makes its healing properties very effective. As for the rest of the circumstances you list, I understand your concerns and I’ve come to the conclusion that each of these challenges simply … is what it is. The solution to all of them is to love one another more — and since it’s obvious on all levels that that’s what YOU do with your time, I wouldn’t be too hard on myself. You’re meeting and exceeding your sense of responsibility. I wish more of us felt it; it’s very clear to me that each of us came to fulfill that very contract. Here at Planet Waves, we get to remind one another and spread that circle a little wider.
Kat — THANK you, wonderful information. I will certainly pass it around.
My server window, I think, is brief so I must go attend to the leaks and the puppies,* weather issues and challenges of the day. Thank you all for playing this weekend; your interaction keeps that circle of love and information moving out toward a waiting world.
* http://polwaves.planetwaves.net/2011/05/gratefully/
On furher investigation, I just found out that representatives from the five major world religions created the Charter for Compassion document – not just Christianity, Judism and Islam – but including Hinduism and Buddhism.
I would like to share this link to Karen Armstrong discussing the Charter for Compassion. It is a worldwide call for affirmation of the golden rule and compassion as the central, shared tenent of the three major world religions (Christianity, Judism, Islam). It is born out of the recognition that these religions have been hijacked by funadmentalist factions in all of these religions who do violence to others in the name of their religion. Others are invited to affirm this charter as well.
http://youtu.be/DCG4qryy1Dg http://charterforcompassion.org/
I learned about this charter the UNESCO conference I attended this weekend regarding Prisons, Peace and Compassion. By the way, if anyone has the contact information for Enrico (I may have his name wrong), I would appreciate having it so I can send him the book I promised.
I have respect for those who play their roles here, for whatever the reason. To me, this is nothing more than humans crying out for something to change.
Existence, as the source of it all, was boring. We are an expression of that, as life, to know itself. Evolution is complete and our experience here is about to change.
Weather patterns are responding to the shifting from separation of the earth and it’s inhabitants to creation…period.
We cannot know what hasn’t been before, though humanity continues to hold the flame for love, as it is meant to.
We are dealing with intuitive, speculative, ignorant and educated guesses. Those without connection get it wrong, that’s all.
Let’s exchange the New Age concept of unity consciousness for “Unimaginable Company”….
xxzoey
Yeah! Still here…evidently Led Zeppelin was enough to save me from the Xtian Divine Suck 😉
As for high winds being divine retribution for past sins, deforestation would be the one. The more ancient trees are sacrificed for dollars and replaced with eroded hillsides, roads and parking lots the less resistance there is to slow down the wind. Whenever you see a tree swaying in the breeze, the motion of the leaves and branches is energy that would have otherwise kept on gaining momentum as wind.
..”..’cause as a matter of fact, as we discovered on the train.. tomorrow never happens, man. It’s all the same fucking day, mannn. So you gotta, when you wanna hold somebody, you gotta hold ’em like it’s the last minute of your life babe.”-Janice Joplin: Ball and Chain
Are we dead (or alive) yet? I was plannin’ on headin’ down south for the Apocalypse, somewhere there’s a bit of warmth..
Jude, what do you think regarding the IMF, public awareness, natural resource as commodity, statistics, the color pink, wearing your shirt inside out and backwards ’cause it feels right, the fact that the greater portion of society is still on the teet? Honestly, this shit is way too big for my head to wrap around. I was hopin’ to get a few other heads spread out here, I can work with coverage.
..I feel this insane burden of responsibility on my shoulders for this world. As much as my being fails to accomplish, I still revel in the possibilities that accompany existence.
It’s always a pleasure to read you, Jude. (Hands together, bowing),
Jere
“The question of moment is … if you really thought this WAS the last day, what would you do?”
Hands down: hug my kids. Then if there’s time, hug my husband. Or better yet, group hug all of us together as the clock tips over that moment. I would NOT be sitting here typing on the computer. And I would not be worrying about guilt, clarity or integrity.
Oopsie — that was Rachel Maddow’s cocktail recipe for the occasion; Will Pitt is here:
http://truthout.org/yup-still-here/1305923734
As the Fates would have it, I had a funeral to attend this morning. Funerals are all about hoping the Dearly Departed had the right ticket punched in order to get to the heaven of choice. In this particular case, there seemed to be some question, prompting many reassurances of “victory” and “homecoming” and the like. It was an interesting day to sit with the feelings of those around me and send calming energy to soothe them.
Taking off the tight shoes, there are NO hoops to jump through. None required.
Fabulous snippet, Stormi, and a favorite of mine. Thanks, Len, I got an afternoon of sunshine here and … even should it be my last … I’m a happy gal. Good to know all’s well tomorrow, Brenden — very reassuring.
Will Pitt has an entertaining … if not flattering to the faithful … read here, FYI:
Yup, Still Here
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/21/rapture-2011-maddow-may-21-cocktail_n_865110.html
Yup, me too.
The question of moment is … if you really thought this WAS the last day, what would you do?
Oh god YES. If only they would all leave and take their woman-hating, sex-hating, pleasure-hating, life-hating selves with them.
Ok having said that and gotten that off my chest :::sigh of relief::: I do also want to have compassion for them when it doesn’t happen. I cannot imagine the lives they live each day, trapped in their fear and elitism, never allowing themselves the pleasure of their sexual natures without the attendant shame and overwhelming guilt.
I know guilt only too well, having been suffocating in it these past few days. Yet with connection and loving compassion and honesty, the guilt goes away, is transformed into self-love and other-love, and heals. If we offer them a compassionate hand of love and acceptance, maybe, just maybe, they will relax and come out of their fear and self-hatred and live in light. I am not sure that will work because now science has shown that conservative brains are different from progressive ones and there is no research (at least not that I have seen) that they can change but it is worth a try. And it makes us feel good to spread the love and compassion so why not?
We have to begin with sexual healing; that’s the deepest wound there is and one that everyone has. The darkest taboos are also the very ones we need to shine light on, in ourselves most of all.
It IS all about sex, Eric. Sex and guilt and self hatred and fear of the desires we all have but have been conditioned to suppress.
thanks jude, for working through some of the other angles attending this issue! beautifully done.
“the spiritual experience can not be duplicated and is ever-evolving”
amen to that.
🙂
So if the rapture really happened, would the full-of-fear bullies in the counterculture be swept up along with the full-of-fear fundies? Yes please? If I get to kick those shoes off, I’d enjoy being freed from both sides of the full-of-fear coin. 🙂
I agree that it is part of our culture’s addiction to entertainment.
Jude,
Thank you. Hope your local weather eases up soon so you can enjoy some sun and blue skies.
Dear Judith,
As always your writing clarifies and brings something positive to the miasma-muddle, whether of politics, religion, or the many times unhealthy intermingling of both. And always with the underlying basis of compassion and love.
Thank you!
Where I live we’re not too worried about this particular endoftimes — just another wry comment, or none, on the news of the quirks our more northen neighbors; we have our own groups of doom-seekers. But, if it does happen, I don’t think I would mind being left behind with people of your caliber. (what a weapon-like word… may as in Michael’s sword?).
May you be continued to blessed in all you require and express.
e : exchanging videos with a friend, she sends this one from an old show, seems to (satirically) echo your comment … ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LXuNpF6NVg
i woke up from a dream with my father (and another male) bestowing gifts on me and telling me i’m a good person and doing important work, really helping people. apparently, that’s why i’m still here. definitely a heavenly peace to my mind.
♥☮♫
if the bank accounts are left behind to support food, shelter & medicine for the critters, i’m all up for caring for their animals. st francis would like that.
Great wave (political), really liked it. Perhaps something will begin to end in Harolds world tomorrow.
It’s 1:43AM in Wellington, New Zealand. Tomorrow. Radio New Zealand is still broadcasting, no panic observed. They were supposed to have been hit nearly 8 hours ago, ergo, Camping is wrong. Rats! I was so looking forward to having a nice quiet weekend.
Note, one of Tim LaHaye’s earlier books is about marriage and fucking.
The rapture is really about all the people who want to fuck and/or get off in one another’s faces. I was wondering last night how many fundy kids were going at it thinking today might be the last day — or were terrified to do so, afraid they might be judged.
It’s all about sex and it always was
Thank you, Jude.
– S