End Of Times

I suppose it is time to write on End of Times again. I had a friend once. A long time ago, he read the Book of Revelations, talking to Evangelicals, and spoke long about the coming end of times. Within a space of 3 years, his wife had a stroke, leaving her unable to take care of two young children. After rehabilitation, she took the children from him after a very nasty divorce. So my friend's end of times did arrive, destroying his family and everything he held dear. It just took a form he was not expecting. He had not imaged it properly, using an old shop-worn image of the end of the world as we know it, when it should have been the end of his world, a much smaller ranger of disaster. If you catch my drift, this is what I have been writing about all this time: the images we have created about End of Times, how they are shaping our lives and futures, and how it will all come true, only not like we thought. The infinite Future has come and suddenly presented us with the potential destruction of our way of life. This is all just less than 5 years after our leaders were bragging how great our Empire of the Sun was. Our readings of Revelations is true, just not the way we thought. The Rapture is correct, just not in the way the simple thought, for those who believe in the simple old-fashioned ways of our corrupt culture of power and compulsion will indeed be left behind. And Tim LaHaye is right, only he did not have the courage to face the horror that wanted to describe itself in his mind. He rushed back to the old and safe images of organized religion. Notice how the Evangelicals take center stage here. They are indeed prisoners of the old Image. All the movies of monsters and violence are going to come to pass, for we have intuited our Future: a future of hatred not love, a future of blood not peace, of exclusivity not community. We see ourselves in movies as zombies, because we are zombies. We are mindless when it comes to things that matter: Shall we have a symbolic and mythic and ideologic structure of life that is Life Enhancing, filled with Love and Charity, or shall our structure of consciousness be nasty, brutish, and short; all too short? Reality is what we make of it. Wall Street and the Rich made a cleavage between themselves and the rest of the people; they created a consciousness of Something from Nothing, wherein they were the creators of wealth, they were the gods of society, they were the absolute leaders of God's world. As happens in every myth and story and narrative we have ever read or heard, they fell. All of mankind's consciousness tells us what to expect from such "Tower of Babel" imagery: reversal and destruction. The Future is the Past, intermediated by the Present. The Present is Real, the Future is symbolic Probability, the Past is symbolic Memory. Thus the importance for making the Present the time of choice: God is good. The Goodness of God will then accept the symbols of the Future and create our wonderful memories of past events. If not, if we insist on blood thirsty images: Columbine, Shock n' Awe, Virginia Tech, Hostel movies glorying in blood, we shall create a future of horrors, and a history of imperial evil. We shall have run from Caligari to Hitler to Falluja to Wall Street and the cycle of disaster will be painfully clear in each step of the way; clear that the evil was remedial if we had changed our consciousness.