ORIGINAL FICTION: "Just Moments Before The End of the Age"
I must have been walking across campus when it happened.
It was a small bible college on the edge of Appalachia - pretty scenery, naïve girls, stolid minds. I hated the place, and it hated me, it and I were a poor marriage from the moment we’d met, but I’d made my bed and had no choice but to lie, cheat, and steal in it. I’d gone to a bigger, better state school before a nervous breakdown landed me here, the victim of loving parents who felt a Christian environment would be better for me than a secular one, I’d meet a better class of people, I’d get in less trouble, my mental wounds would heal more quickly here.
Wrong on all counts, of course, and I suspected as much before I’d agreed to come, but among my ailments at the time was a profound crisis of faith. The prospect of a few answers to life’s more profound spiritual questions had no small appeal for me in that state of mine. I quickly learned the truth, however: that you can no more have a Christian School than you can have a Christian Toaster or a Christian jar of Mayonnaise. Schools are organizations, things, and Christianity is a belief. Organizations tend to perpetuate themselves, regardless of what they teach, and beliefs - well, they’re altogether too easily trampled by organizations whether they want to or not. And in this case, their main purpose was preaching to the choir. If you had a crisis of faith, they’d just as soon you left.
I had nowhere else to go, so I stayed and kept my mouth shut, and prayed “Lord, I believe, but help my unbelief.” I suppose I was lying to God: I didn’t actually believe at all. I wanted to, I tried to, I begged to, but I was always a Knower, not a Believer. Whatever trick there is to faith, I never quite mastered it. Not that it matters now.
As I said, I was walking across campus, down hill from the classroom building, and on to the gravel shoulder of the road when I heard screaming, frantic, unhinged screaming coming from the College President’s house. ‘house,’ they called it, really more like a neo-Georgian mansion. Finest building on the campus. Meanwhile, I lived in an eighty-year-old condemned and heavily water-damaged building, and most of the rest of the students lived in tiny little concrete boxes that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Chinese prison camp. Am I bitter? Yes. No point in denying it now. No point in denying anything. I walked on, curious about the bedlam, but not curious enough to check it out. I kept seeing things out of the corners of my eyes, but when I turned to look they were gone, or simply not there to begin with. ‘Great,’ I thought, ‘I’m hallucinating again, just like at the other school’ but as it turns out, I wasn’t.
As I climbed the small hill to my dorm/hovel, the unhinged laugher stopped and I heard a gunshot out of the president’s house. It was muffled a bit by the library between his place and where I lived, so I didn’t really recognize it at the time, but thinking about it since, I realize that’s
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Comments
27 December 2008
5 min 45 sec
Just a heads up: If you enjoyed reading this story, I'm publishing an athology of all my short stories shortly. I hope to have it available before the end of the year. It'll be avaliable on Kindle and as a paperback.
27 December 2008
5 min 45 sec
Strictly speaking Protestants aren't supposed to waste time obsessing over Revelation. From a theological point of view, it's the least important book in the New Testament. That said, we all do it, and we always have. It's just in the nature of any escatological religion to have thought drift towards that final escatelon, you know? I imagine Zoroastrians obsessed about the final battle between Ahura Mazda and Angra Manu and the end of the physical universe, I expect the Norse lay awake nights, wondring if they couldn't see the moon simply because it was really cloudy, or if *this* was the time, and Fafnir had really swallowed it. Has Loki slipped his bonds? Is the fleet of the dead set sail from Hellheim?
It's just in our nature, particularly, it seems, us germanic types. I choose to find it charming and fun.
In any event, there was a period where starting your own cult or denomination was as easy as coming up with a cohesive-sounding theory for what Revelation was actually all about, and some of these were surprisingly successful, the Jehovah's Witnesses, for instance, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Worldwide Church of God (Which I'm 99% sure is what Robert Heinlein based the Nehemiah Scudder movement on in "If This Goes On."), and endless other ones. In the US, a form of protestantism derived from the teachings of a guy named "Cambell" and another one named (I think) "Strong," taught that there'd be a rapture where all the Christians go to heaven 7 years before the end of the age. Though this isn't expressly spelled out anywhere in revelations, and the passages that relate to it elsewhere are ambiguious, it's still the dominant interpretation among 'home grown' American denominations - Baptists, Churches of Christ, Pentecostals, nondenominationalists, etc - and most fundamentalists. Certainly it's the form I was brought up believing in, though my long whacky slide through theological life has made me question it.
27 June 2009
19 min 8 sec
I do not know about other Christian churches but the Catholic church teaches that Revelations is not to be taken literally. It is one of the few things that I agree with but I know many do believe in it literally.
The premise of the story is interesting in that we could be living through what John saw as the end times and not notice because it is just every day news. What a man in the first century would find terrifying might even be cool to us. The world wars of the 20th century the rise of Hitler and Stalin and many other events of the last 100 years seem at a glance to be what John was writing about. Also the idea that such a small number would be part of the elect is an interesting comment on how the teachings of Jesus are being interpreted and acted on.
Just a point about the 20th century being seen as the end times. The events of the 30 years war in Europe could have and was thought of that way. It's one of the reasons that doomsday cults have been popping up so often the last 500 years or so. Our history has not been a very good one, and when looked at with an honest eye not many people have been living what one could say was a good Christian life for a very long time.
27 December 2008
5 min 45 sec
Yeah, I'm interested to see how people like or hate this one. It's an idea that's been bouncing around in my heads for decades - what if the Rapture happened, and so few people were taken that no one even noticed. What if the Tribulation - so terrifying to St. John - is just another day at the office for us, because we're used to it.
27 June 2009
19 min 8 sec
That was interesting but I am going to have to think on it before I can really say anything else other than I liked it. But like I said I am going to have to chew on it a bit, it is a little weird but in a good way.