Beyond the End Times

Author: Rose Gallogly

Rose Dowd Gallogly (she/her) is a third year part-time student at SKSM, Religious Educator, and Aspirant for UU ministry. She lives in her hometown of Boston, MA.

Reading

From Why The World Doesn’t End by Michael Meade:

“Sometimes the only place to begin is at the end. Sometimes it seems that the end could come at any moment and we have to face the darkness in order to find ways to begin again. When culture seems about to unravel and even nature seems to rattle and reel, ideas and images of “the End” can occur to anyone. Periods of great uncertainty and radical change can stir our deepest forebodings and awaken the darkest corners of our souls, where fears of catastrophe and apocalyptic endings reside and have always resided. …

Apocalypse represents The End written in large letters; the mother of all catastrophes… Yet there is more to the story of apocalypse, more to the meaning of the word itself. [Its] root words mean “to reveal” and “to uncover;” they can also mean “to disclose” and “to discover.” Apocalyptic events and times are revelatory, but in more ways than one. While raw energies of life may become uncovered and the trouble in the world may intensify, there is also a greater possibility that hidden meanings might become revealed and new ways of proceeding become discovered.”

Sermon

I wonder, have any of you been feeling like it might just be the end of the world?

If you haven’t been thinking about the apocalypse already, it might be time to start. This is not me telling you about the threats of climate change or war, or urging you to stock your pantry or buy a bunker; I am not up here to prophesy doom.

But I do think we should all be getting curious about the apocalypse, and learning about what has shaped our understanding of it — if for no other reason, because the end of the world is very much on the minds of the people who are in power right now.

As wars rage and environmental destruction accelerates, the ultra wealthy elite invest in bunkers and escape plans to Mars, and religious extremists and their allies dominate our government. Apocalypticism — a belief that the world will end — has been a theme in right-wing Christianity for a long time, but it is a particular key note of this moment. Government action on climate change has been stalled in part because of the view that a changing climate and its destruction is part of god’s larger plan. Christian Zionism, the ideology that dominates current US policy toward Israel, supports the genocidal acts of Israel’s government because it sees this violence in the holy land as a sign that a religious vision of the end times is finally coming true.

As Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor wrote in The Guardian a few weeks ago, in an article titled, “The rise of end times fascism”: “To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.”

I have been studying the apocalypse this year as part of my work in divinity school (just to keep things light and fun for myself). I’m always drawn to trying to understand the root causes, the underlying worldviews and ideologies that shape how people act and how history has brought us to this complex moment. What my studies have taught me, in part, is that the world that we are experiencing – in which so much is ending and coming apart – is inseparable from the influence of Western Christian apocalyptic theology.

A little background on the biggest themes of this apocalypticism, as I’ve learned them: the belief that the world will end, within a Christian framework, comes primarily from the Book of Revelation, which is the last book of the Christian Bible. The Book of Revelation describes a prophetic vision that an early follower of Jesus named John had while he was on a Roman prison island. The prophecy is cryptic and many layered, full of fantastical imagery and numerology. It describes Jesus returning to earth with a warrior-like energy, commencing a final cosmic battle between good and evil, in which a limited number of people are saved, the rest are damned, and a new existence that no longer includes death or suffering is created — a final utopia for god’s chosen few. This was a political text from the very beginning: John’s audience was other early Christians oppressed by the Roman empire, and his fiery visions of doom assured his fellow believers that the world of that empire, which felt so all-encompassing, would soon come to an end.

As this story has continued beyond its original context, it has taken on varied meaning within communities and cultures shaped by Christian theologies. One view that I’ve found very compelling is from feminist scholar Catherine Keller, who sees the Christian West as having what she calls an “apocalyptic habit” — an “expectation of doom realiz[ing] its prophecy.” A notable example of the self-realizing nature of a belief in apocalypse that she writes about is the strong apocalypticism of Christopher Columbus, whose own writing details how he believed his conquests to be part of a larger vision to bring about the end times. All of existence did not end in Columbus’ time, but his genocidal actions did lead to the end of many worlds, as whole peoples and ways of existence were destroyed or nearly destroyed by his violence. The parallels between that time in history and the impacts of contemporary Christian Zionism jump out at me, among other connections.

While I could keep going with big-picture stories about the impact of apocalypticism, I want to share that my curiosity about this theology first came from a much more personal realization.

A few years ago, in conversation with a friend, we noticed that, within lefty culture, we would sometimes jokingly (or not so jokingly) reference “The Revolution.” We would reference the idea of a big, world changing event, that would happen at some undetermined time in the future, in which the evil structures of the world would be overturned and good would prevail – all at once. We did not think of this in literal terms, but there was something deep in our psyches that imagined, even hoped, that the world would play out in a way – a vision that is not fundamentally that different from how the religious right imagines the rapture. We had also been unconsciously imagining the apocalypse, just for our own ends.

I’ve now learned that left-wing Christianities also have theologies of apocalypse – which is also to say that left-wing Western culture, shaped by Christian history, is also prone to imagining the ending of the world. The scholarship I’ve read supports the connection my friend and I made about “The Revolution”: on the left, apocalyptic theology largely centers on visions of an eventual utopia, which we have the ability to bring about by our own good work. We often see ourselves as part of a steady trajectory of progress and justice that eventually will be fully realized – never fully settled or satisfied while our vision of a better world is unfulfilled.

There is so much here, isn’t there? How do we even begin to reckon with centuries of apocalyptic imagining that has shaped our wider culture, those in power, and our own psyches?

Part of the problem in answering that question is, of course, that we are in a moment of great destruction. It is not simply religious fanaticism that points towards the world as we know it falling apart; increasing climate chaos is real, as we are living through its effects. Some of the most powerful people in our world are either true believers or entirely wrapped up in the agenda of end-times fascism, and are actively hastening us towards their vision.

This isn’t to say that the whole world is literally ending, but we’re not wrong to feel that on some level, it might be.

As mythologist Michael Meade puts it, “The ‘world as we know it’ may come to an end; that has happened many times before. .. [But] when everything goes out of balance and seems about to fall apart, the issue is not the actual end of the world, as much as what to do when it seems about to end.”

We are in a moment of everything seeming to fall apart, and I believe that our response to these times — our theologies, our embodied presence, our stories — really matter.

There are other ways to orient ourselves. There are other options for imagining how history will play out that do not require a dramatic, all-encompassing change, or that ignore the suffering and destruction that exists here and now.

How do we counter end-times fascism? Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor give us one answer: “…We counter [right-wing] apocalyptic narratives with a far better story about how to survive the hard times ahead without leaving anyone behind. … A story not of end times, but of better times; not of separation and supremacy, but of interdependence and belonging; not of escaping, but staying put and staying faithful to the troubled earthly reality in which we are enmeshed and bound.”

Their vision has strong resonance with the writing of Unitarian Universalist theologian Rebecca Parker. Dr. Parker writes powerfully about a theology of radical presence that counters both the utopia-centered visions of many left-wing Christian theologies, and the kind of apocalypse imagined by the right.

In her writing on Unitarian Universalist eschatology, or end-times theology, she calls us to not center our visions on a hoped-for future utopia. Such visions, she writes, “perpetually condemn the present,” and in times of injustice, make us feel that enjoying life and taking pleasure in our existence is “at best an indulgence and at worst a moral failing.” Her alternative vision is one of radical presence, in which we see this earth, this existence, as our promised land – full of pain, yes, but also full of love and beauty. If we see this complex, messy world as our one world to inhabit, she writes, “our religious framework can shift from hope for what could be—for a “better world” to come—to hope that what is good will be treated with justice and love and that what has been harmed will be repaired. … Our framework of meaning can begin with appreciative and compassionate attention to this world, rather than imagining an ideal other world.”

What we need in these times of disaster and change is to be here. Radically here, fully here – with acknowledgement that we are in a moment of great loss, upheaval, and suffering — when that feeling that things might just end is in the air — but with the insistence that this changing earth is still our home. We will not survive the times ahead by imagining another existence, but by deepening our belonging within this existence, by deepening our love and entanglement with all that is, here and now. This is the new story we can tell, the story that we can grow and create as a new self-fulfilling prophecy: that in these troubled times, we learned once again to belong to one another and to belong to this earth, our home.

There is great hope in a story that does not require an idealized other existence, or the absence of all death and suffering, but that allows us to remake and love the world as it is now, and as it may be through the changes to come. As Michael Meade puts it: “To be alive at this time means to be caught in a great unraveling that strands us near all the loose threads of creation; but it also means to be close to the revelation of the new design and the next paradigm.”

Our revelation, our hope for this world, can be our insistence on love, and on the belonging of all. End-times fascism does not have to be the end of the story — our continued, radical presence, our insistence on love and deep belonging to this earth, can be the story that carries us through all that is to come.

May it be so.

Benediction

Friends, in these times of upheaval and change, may we remember how much the stories we tell matter. May we remember how much our presence here – our full, embodied, radical presence here, on this changing earth – matters.

May our love for this world, in all its complexity and its heartbreak and its beauty, be the story that we tell in these times. And in that telling, may we learn to weave ourselves and each other ever deeper into the web of entanglement and belonging to all that is, here and now.

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