New England summer has settled down, at least for the moment. The relentless rain of June, the withering heat and humidity of July have given way to a beautiful August—glorious, clear days; temperate, cool nights. Sweet corn is flying off farmstand shelves and so many vines in so many gardens now present bright red tomatoes for picking. Add a little oil, a little salt, maybe pepper, maybe basil, dip bread into the sleek juice, and settle yourself into these waning days of summer.
Take this time for reverie and reverence. Take this time for simple joys. Take this time for the earthly, mundane tasks that must be done before the first frost comes. Take this time for family and friends. Take this time for faith. Take this time, spend this time, love this time, knowing that life may become unsettled in a flash. Take this time, spend this time, love this time, knowing that everything can change with the blinking of an eye. Flood waters have devastated cities in summer. Airplanes have brought down buildings in summer. Take this time, spend this time, love this time, for if everything does change, if things do come crashing down around us in an unanticipated, ferocious moment—or if such a moment has already come—what will save us is not written in any book or housed in any orthodoxy. What will save us—what has saved us—is our capacity for reverie, our reverence for life, and our willingness to do those earthly, mundane tasks that must be done before the first frost comes.
For beautiful days, for cool evening breezes, for New England tomatoes, for summer reverie and reverence we pray. Amen and Blessed Be.
Revelation 1:7
Look! He is coming with the clouds;
every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him;
and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail.
So it is to be. Amen.
by Rebecca Ann Parker
According to popular religion, we are living on the eve of the Apocalypse. A catastrophic cosmic struggle is coming, when God’s forces will battle the forces of evil. Evil empires will be destroyed, and from their collapse will rise a new heaven and a new earth. In place of the thousand years of wrong will come the thousand years of right.
Religious liberalism has its own variations on the apocalyptic dream. Our vision doesn’t imagine that old worlds are destroyed and new ones created simply by the act of a transcendent God. We put ourselves into the drama. We assign ourselves the task of dismantling evil empires, and we go to work hammering together the New Jerusalem. Think of the evil empires whose ruin we have tried to orchestrate: racism, homophobia, militarism, economic injustice, environmental abuse….
I am grateful for the energy, commitment, and service liberal faith inspires, but I have begun to believe that this theological worldview may no longer be adequate for our times. If we can imagine that the Apocalypse is not ahead of us but already behind us, consider how we might regard our religious task differently.
by Philip Roth
At the graves of the young children and infants … they came upon an occasional gravestone topped with the sculpture of a lamb or decorated with an engraving in the shape of a tree trunk with its upper half sawed away, and as they headed in single file through the crooked, uneven, narrow pathways of the original cemetery toward the newer, parklike northern spaces, where the funeral was to take place, it was possible—in just this little Jewish cemetery, founded in a field on the border of Elizabeth and Newark…—to count how many had perished when influenza killed ten million in 1918.
Nineteen eighteen: only one of the terrible years among the plethora of corpse-strewn anni horribiles that will [deface] the memory of the twentieth century forever.
The Rev. Joshua Mason Pawelek
Unitarian Universalist Society: East
Manchester, CT
August 20th, 2006
This past March I preached a sermon about rapture theology, a theology grounded in the Biblical books of Revelation and Daniel and which prophesies not just the end of time, but a destructive, cataclysmic, apocalyptic end of time, a final battle between God and Satan, during which the earth shall be destroyed, God shall judge human beings, and a new heaven and earth shall emerge. I preached that sermon because I believed then (and believe now) that the embrace of rapture theology is widespread and far more influential than we understand. It fosters in its adherents a lack of concern—even a disdain—for the environment; it supports governmental and corporate policies promoting environmental destruction. It feeds a narrowly-conceived foreign policy marked by “us and them” rhetoric, religious and cultural intolerance, a simplistic framing of conflict in terms of righteousness vs. evil, and a far too easy resort to violence and war to solve problems.
This is not just a western, Christian phenomenon. You may remember a very public letter to President Bush from Iran’s President Ahmadinejad this past May. Some saw it as an invitation to more peaceful relations. Others saw it as a a veiled prelude to war. Either way, the letter was consciously written from the perspective of a Muslim world leader to a Christian world leader and it was laden with references to the end times and the final day of judgment. He wrote: “The day will come when all humans will congregate before the court of the Almighty, so that their deeds are examined. The good will be directed towards Heaven and evildoers will meet divine retribution. I trust both of us believe in such a day…. All prophets, speak of peace and tranquility for [humanity] — based on monotheism, justice and respect for human dignity. Do you not think that if all of us come to believe in and abide by these principles, that is, monotheism, worship of God, justice, respect for the dignity of [humanity], [and] belief in the Last Day, we can overcome the present problems of the world — that are the result of disobedience to the Almighty and the teachings of prophets…?” Talk about interfaith dialogue!
I preached that sermon in March to say to Unitarian Universalists and religious liberals, “Look, this theology is operating in the world. It serves as the master narrative in the religious lives of hundreds of millions of people across the globe. People really believe they will be judged at the end of time when the earth is destroyed. And there are many powerful people—some in conflict with each other—who anticipate the coming apocalypse. We need to be aware of this theology. We need to think about and proclaim alternatives to this theology. There is much at stake.”
At this year’s Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in St. Louis I attended a lecture by the Revs. Rebecca Parker and Rob Hardies on Parker’s new book, Blessing the World: What Can Save us Now. Parker is Dean of the Starr King School for the Ministry, a UU seminary in Berkeley, CA. Hardies, the book’s editor, is minister at All Souls Church in Washington, DC. They said religious fundamentalists are not the only ones who believe in the coming of a new heaven and earth. As I read earlier, Parker says, “Religious liberalism has its own variations on the apocalyptic dream. Our vision doesn’t imagine that old worlds are destroyed and new ones created simply by the act of a transcendent God. We put ourselves into the drama. We assign ourselves the task of dismantling evil empires, and we go to work hammering together the New Jerusalem.”
So while we UUs don’t believe in the rapture and we don’t anticipate a divinely inspired cataclysm and we certainly don’t want to see this world end, we nevertheless act—when we act—as if there is some end out there, some time of peace and justice ahead of us. As hymn #121 says, quoting the ancient Hebrew prophets Isaiah and Amos, “we’ll build a land where justice shall roll down like waters, and peace like an ever-flowing stream.” Just like religious fundamentalists who read the books of Daniel and Revelation as literal guides to the future, we promote a certain vision of the future as well. We all assign a trajectory to history. They see a coming apocalypse. We say, ‘the arc of the universe bends toward justice.’ They prepare for judgment day. We perpare to enter the promised land. They look for signs that the ancient prophesies are coming to pass. We look for signs of economic justice, political equality and an end to war. They secretly relish the thought of looking down on our sufferings in Hell from their heavenly post-judgment perch. We don’t believe in Hell, so they’re stuck with us in Heaven.
I’m talking about a legacy we inherit from the western monotheistic tradition, which posits one God who acts in history on behalf of the righteous, and thereby moves the world toward a specific end. We inherit a future orientation. Even those of us who don’t believe in God often still think about the world and our role in it with this future orientation in mind. Atheist Marxists saw history moving in a specific direction, towards a specific utopian end. Social Darwinists saw the world moving via evolution in a specific direction. Both movements inherited the legacy of monotheism’s future orientation. Whether liberal or orthodox in our religious lives, this predilection for the future is deeply embedded in the way we view the world. We see ourselves as part of—or swept up in—a grand movement towards an ultimately glorious future.
Rebecca Parker says “Wait! Everybody, slow down. For a moment, don’t look ahead. Look around you. Look back. Don’t you see? The Apocalypse has already come.”
A number of my wife’s relatives on her father’s side are buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Pittsfield, MA. Once on our way to visit the family gravesites, my father-in-law invited us to stop by an older section of the graveyard where the markers date back about a century. He had to search for a while, but he finally led us to a few rows of small, flat square stones, the engravings so worn and faded we could barely make out the names and dates. After a few more minutes of searching through these stones, he found what he was looking for: Pascetta, his family name. These small stones marked the graves of infants and children. The year was 1918, when by most conservative estimates, fifty million people died world-wide from the Spanish Flu. These Pascetta infants and children were some of Pittsfield’s flu victims.
I was reminded of this experience a few weeks ago when reading Philip Roth’s new book, Everyman. Roth, too, is aware of a graveyard where the bones of pandemic victims rest. From this awareness he hints outward at far greater suffering. “Nineteen eighteen,” he writes, “only one of the terrible years among the plethora of corpse-strewn anni horribiles that will [deface] the memory of the twentieth century forever.”
He hints that the twentieth century has been full of suffering and violence and untimely death. 1918 was only the prelude. This is precisely Parker’s point. She writes: “We are living in a postslavery, post-Holocaust, post-Vietnam, post-Hiroshima world. We are living in the aftermath of collective violence that has been severe, massive, and traumatic. The scars from slavery, genocide, and meaningless war mark our bodies. We are living in the midst of rain forest burning, the rapid death of species, the growing pollution of the air and water, and new mutations of racism and violence.” We are living after the apocalypse. What more evidence do we need than the middle passage from Africa, the Native American genocide, the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Serbian genocide, the Stalinist genocide, the Cambodian genocide, the Iraqi genocide under Saddam Hussein, the Sudanese genocide? What more evidence do we need? Do we need another cataclysm, more ethnic cleansing, more slavery, more rape, more collateral damage, more lost cultures and languages, another famine, another assassination, another invasion based on lies, another civil war? Was not December 29th, 1890 at Wounded Knee a Last Day? Was not June 28th, 1914 in Sarajevo a Last Day? Was not December 7th, 1941 at Pearl Harbor a Last Day? Were not August 6th and 9th, 1945 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Last Days? Was not April 4th, 1968 in Memphis a Last Day? Was not September 5th, 1972 in Munich a Last Day? Was not September 11th, 2001, in Manhattan and Washington, DC a Last Day? What about December 26th, 2004 in Banda Aceh, August 29th, 2005, in New Orleans and July 12th, 2006 in Beirut and Haifa? Were these not Last Days? Has there been no judgment?
I do not believe God caused the Spanish Flu of 1918, but I do note that it occurred at the height of the so-called Great War. Populations become vulnerable to killer diseases when they come under great stress such as that caused by war. It’s the same reason refugee camps are always prone to disease. And it’s the same reason we should be worried now, as a global community, about a pandemic. Avian flu is always present but it doesn’t normally effect humans. Instability, violence, war, fear, intolerance: these are the forces that weaken humanity—weaken our immunities—and make us vulnerable to a pandemic, to what the Biblical writers called pestilence, a sign of the end times. Has anyone noticed that polio is raging through Afghanistan?
I believe it is time to transform the future orientation of our religious lives, to rid ourselves of this legacy of montheism. Let us halt the constant rush into the future, no matter which religious vision we proclaim. Let us pause to look around, look back, recognize the individual and collective scars from our past, recognize suffering, recognize trauma, recognize how much energy we spend trying not to recognize. Let us mourn; let us grieve; and let us believe—really believe—we are living in the aftermath of apocalypse. It’s not ahead. It’s behind. It’s not apocalypse now. It’s apocalypse then.
Biblical literalists will protest. “But what about the righteous ascending into Heaven before the final conflict? If we live after the apocalypse, when did the rapture happen?” My response is to simply ask, “Who is no longer among us? The innocent victims of murderous violence. Haven’t we witnessed their departure from this earth year after exhausting year? Isn’t their widespread disappearance enough to convince you?” The protest might continue: “But they were not all believers! They were not righteous. They were not saints.” My response: “They are gone. And we are left behind. They take with them a profound experience and incontrovertible evidence of the human capacity for evil. If we cannot finally see the depth of violence and suffering we have caused in the name of all our Gods, all our religions, nations, ideologies, and future visions—if we cannot look back and see it and take responsibility for it—we will not heal, we will not learn how to live in right relationship; we will not learn how to truly serve life; we will never see a new earth and a new heaven; and we will never see a time of peace and justice.” The cataclysms have come and come and come in endless repetition. It’s time to figure out how one lives not before but after the apocalypse.
I intend to explore this theme over the course of the next five months—living after violence, after cataclysm, after suffering, after apocalypse; living in the wake of this war in Iraq; living after violent murders in Hartford and New Britain and Middletown. How do we do it? Rev. Parker says the religious task for those living in a postapocalyptic world is essentially an act of salvage. She says, “We must sift through the rubble and determine what needs to be saved. We must become good stewards of history and tradition, identifying vital resources contained in the wisdom of the world’s religions and making them available to people who have lost them, including ourselves.” I believe Unitarian Universalism is uniquely situated to do just this. In fact, I think we’re already salvaging, we just haven’t named it yet.
Our thousand plus congregations have collectively identified six sources of our shared, living tradition. We did not originally identify them out of a felt need for postapocalyptic survival. But for me, after wrestling with Rev. Parker’s ideas, these sources read like a map through the ruins of our time. These sources name the locations of wisdom that can help us heal, rebuild, and live in right relationship. These sources are paths to truths that have been with us all along, but buried and lost beneath the wreckage of violence we would rather forget. They include the Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature; Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of mind and spirit; Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God’s love by loving our neighbors as ourselves; Wisdom from the world’s religions which inspire us in our ethical and spiritual life; words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of love; and Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life.
My sermons through January will focus on these sources of our Unitarian Universalist living tradition. Theses are out roots. These are our building-blocks. This is who we are. And this is how we must live, after the apocalypse.
Amen and Blessed Be.
See the entire text to President Ahmadinejad’s letter at http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_2607.shtml. For a conservative appraisal of the letter as an invitation to war, see http://justbarkingmad.com/?p=720.
For more details on the General Assembly, see http://uua.org/ga/ga06/.
Parker, Rev. Rebecca Ann, ed. Hardies, Rev. Rob, Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now (Boston: Skinner House Books, 2006) p. 17.
Zanotti, Barbara (Isaiah/Amos) adapt., “We’ll Build a Land,” Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press and the Unitarian Universalist Association, 1993) #121.
Zanotti, Barbara (Isaiah/Amos) adapt., “We’ll Build a Land,” Singing the Living Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press and the Unitarian Universalist Association, 1993) #121.
Roth, Philip, Everyman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006) p. 54. Note: I substitute “deface” for Roth’s word “blacken.” In the context of a sermon, the unintended racism of “blacken” is distracting.
Parker, Blessing the World, p. 20.
Parker, Blessing the World, p. 20.
