For the past several months, a small but loyal group has traveled around the country professing that the end times are near. They have had a heavy presence in New York, and personally handed me their literature. Between the wars and famines, tornadoes and floods, global warming and tsunamis and exploding nuclear reactors and birds falling from the sky, they might not be wholly wrong. But predicting that the God laid forth a date written in code in the bible seems a little risky. The same group got it wrong once already, in 1994.
There have been a series of articles in the last few weeks about those who believe with unwavering faith that today will be judgment day. People have sold and given away all their worldly belongings, given up jobs and time with family, all because they believed with absolute certainty in the coming of the end times.
This type of faith has always fascinated me; I have a hard time believing this absolutely in much of anything at all. The one thing I do understand is the sense of desperation and impending doom that drives one to join a cult or a commune or believe in the second coming. I feel that desperation and I know the pressing weight of doom. The world can be a terrifying place where little is certain except loss and change. Although it is cliche to talk about the tough economic times, but I have felt their weight since long before the recession. Entire towns have lost their livelihoods as manufacturing jobs have been moved overseas. A lot of working communities have had an identity crisis, and I can guarantee that the May 21st movement doesn't include a lot of Wall Street bankers, but it does contain a lot of disenfranchised white people, people so desperate for something in which to have faith.
I have thought for a few weeks about the rapture and end times, predicted to be so near. The image that I have been unable to shake is actually of the day after. Tomorrow morning when the world has kept on turning, when no earthquakes have come, when no heathens are left behind, and no one has ascended to heaven, a man is going to have to walk back into an empty apartment, having given away everything he owns. The one thing this man has believed in with all his soul, energy, and will was, in the end, false. The world did not end. And now he must rebuild his life, and wait, I suppose, for something else in which to believe, for the next rapture to come.
