It’s an old familiar feeling, the end of the world. At least for some of us.
As the son of a Baptist minister, I found that this past Saturday’s non-Rapture brought with it some weird tingles in the back of the braincase. (And not just because, days before, I hit my head so hard on a low-hanging shelf my brain still buzzed unsteadily.)
When I was a kid, newly arrived in Greenville, Mississippi from the wilds of Louisiana, I tried to make sense of the rigid social order in my new hometown. I knew something was not right when a new friend, all of nine years old, proudly told me about his major Christmas haul: a pile of new Izod and Polo shirts. My new Battlestar Galactica ship was apparently kids’ stuff. A couple of years later, more of those Mississippian kids gazed out the window of a Sunday School room and laughed at the non-namebrand clothes and primitive manner of the kids bussed in from the poor part of town.
I came to understand that the Delta clung to a hierarchical vision of the world steeped in, even at that late date, the antebellum ways of a gone century. The church where my father held forth on Sundays was a major force in that structure, and the church had a structure all its own.
One of the roles that needs filling in many a Baptist church is the latter day prophet. Said prophet might be an electrical engineer by day, an avid numerologist poring over obscure parts of the Bible by night in search of clues. Or maybe an aged belle with a stiff upper lip, a frightening stare and a devoted following of aspirants to Rapture. Such figures exist on the fringes of Christianity, ignoring Jesus’ admonition that no one knows the time or the hour that the world will end.
It is, of course, orthodox Christian belief that Jesus will return. The details prove troublesome, considering the opaque prose and uncertain purpose of the Book of Revelation, a thicket of words steeped in obscure references. It’s wide open to interpretation, and only one of the apocalyptic prophecies in circulation in the first centuries of Christianity. There’s also the Bible verse in which Jesus says, in apparent reference to the end times, “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”
Those self-made prophets of the current church exist in a strange tension with their fellows. My father, like many a minister, found their divinations occasion for eye-rolling. Such things are tolerated in part because they must be: there are always some faithful church members who sit at the feet of such prophets, enraptured if not Raptured.
Thing is, there’s that orthodox belief bit—the world will end, even if it’s impossible to know when or how. For a nine-year-old, that’s a heavy piece of information to carry around. It’s impossible not to wonder what such a thing would be like—would Jesus arrive on a massive cloud, riding down like a UFO? Would everything blow up in an instant, only to be replaced by some sort of heaven?
It’s hard at any age to carry around that kind of angst. When last weekend’s non-apocalypse hove into view, I felt a heavy bit of head-shaking dismay. Such dates have come and gone for two millennia. But I remembered, too, what it felt like to wonder about such things as a kid. A little spark of “what if” kindled for a second like the itch of a long-forgotten scar, then blew away in the pleasant here-and-now.
People like Harold Camping, the man responsible for the most recent failed prediction (his second—the first was in 1994), are no doubt far-gone in a raging version of that existential fear and need for the lifeboat their extreme beliefs provide.
The problem is that such kooks, in the Mississippi Delta or the larger world, do tremendous damage. Their failed predictions fuel the fire of those who wish to dismiss Christianity entire, its good and bad, as though the madmen and madwomen on its fringe represent the whole. It’s an easy trick to use, on purpose or not, for any religion.
Harold Camping, as the many stories about him in recent days attest, infected his followers with such fervor that some of them planned to run out of money on May 21. To do less would be unfaithful.
He leaves in his wake an uncertain number of shattered lives. Many of them will, like the taunters of Camping who set up shop near his headquarters in California, find further occasion to dismiss the whole enterprise of the spiritual. It makes one wonder just what eternal fate might await Camping, at least if his kind of apocalypse eventually arrived.
There was, really, nothing to celebrate on May 22, no matter your viewpoint on Camping and his fellow prophets. Only another day of the world’s implacable silence and whirling around the sun. The only thing that seems easier to predict is the failure of “absolute” human certainty, and the trail of disaster it leaves behind.