Apocalypse How?

You know it's going to be a day to remember when a friend at breakfast asks the group, "Would you be willing to kill someone to protect your family?"  Generally I try my best to stay out of these conversations, but when I couldn't contain my laughter I had to explain myself.  You see, I grew up in rural Alabama, surrounded by more than a few gun-toting conspiracy theorists.  I can even remember once having it explained to me that Bill Clinton (then President) was single-handedly bringing about the end of the world.

Looking back, I can remember so many facets of my culture that all worked together to create these kinds of thought patterns.  Where I came from, there are many, many gun owners.  Most boys in my school were just as fanatic about deer hunting season as baseball or football season, and rifles and shotguns were a constant topic of conversation and argument in my formative years.  In the Clinton years, there was much right-wing fear talk about the government on billboards and bumper stickers.  You just couldn't get away from the fact that one day, some top-secret world government conglomerate was going to send a team of heavily armed agents to your home to take your guns. 

And there's more.  This kind of doomsday scenario was virtually a guarantee for all of us Southern religious folk, because we were told on an almost weekly basis about the Rapture and the end times.  The Antichrist was going to come to power (or in extreme versions, he already was) and usher in an era of persecution for Christians.  This information was incredibly detailed - in fact there were several movies and books depicting this scenario in all of its gory glory - and accompanied by the assertion of its imminent arrival.  We didn't know exactly when, but we KNEW it was going to be really bad.

All of this ideological structure couldn't help but pin you down to the one, obvious, sobering conclusion:  Sooner or later, everything was going to hit the fan, and everything in the world would come down to the knife's edge of whether (or not) you could protect your family.  And this is where my friend found himself stuck...

It seems that this is one of the more toxic strains in our culture today: the idea that the individual, or the family unit, is the highest priority and the most threatened thing in life.  It runs the spectrum from securing our pleasure and comfort all the way down to defending our very being in the matrix of a competitive and hostile environment.  This is the world view that keeps us all in our cars and houses, afraid of the strangers on the street, and distrustful of any group or community effort (government, for instance).  Moreover, once so isolated, it simply feeds on itself, getting further and further away from community interaction and redemptive relationship.

This brings us to an important function of religion - that of a prophetic voice.  The prophets in the Bible weren't so much about predicting the future as reminding the community of the character of God.  As a spiritual community, part of our ritual duty is to remember - for ourselves as well as one another and, ultimately, the world - this invisible reality we proclaim:  that God is hard at work bringing the whole of creation into the ineffable joy of God's eternal and redemptive love, peace, and justice.  This is why we observe the Sunday Mass - every week is a celebration of the Resurrection reality. It's easy to forget when there are so many other, and louder, voices proclaiming otherwise, but this Truth we have come to know in person is really and actually real.  The world doesn't have to be the way it is any longer:  The Kingdom of God is among us!

But, of course, saying such doesn't make the rest of reality go away.  Things are bad, extremely bad in places, without us even having to imagine it or write novels creating it.  Many folks across the globe live through my friend's worst nightmares on a regular basis.  Knowing this, looking wide-eyed at the cold, hard reality of the world around us can certainly bring on despair and tempt us all toward isolation.  Maybe it is truly harder to gird ourselves up to proclaim the Kingdom of God than it is to fill our basements with guns and dig a bomb shelter in the back yard.  But here's the rub: eventually we all work together to create whatever reality we've accepted in our hearts.  Which story do you want to give your life to?