Forgive the crassness of that declaration, but the widespread news coverage of the impending Rapture on Saturday night has me envisioning a bit off lower-case rapture. And I realize how pathetic that sounds that a grown man would feel compelled to invoke the end of the world in order to foster carnal pursuits, but there it is. Or is it?
In case you somehow missed it, an Oakland minister has quite effectively spread the word that the Rapture will arrive this Saturday, May 21. I guess there’s a lot of mumbo jumbo to explain how his giddy group came to the conclusion of this particular day, but I’m more interested in the event itself than precisely how folks determined the ETA.
I’m not sure exactly how this will color my behavior on Saturday, though I have kind of informally resolved to put virtually any purchases on a credit card, just in case there’s a chance I won’t have to ever come up with the dough. There are apparently lots of “End of the World” parties slated around the country, which I suspect is more of a function that our mischievous minister had the foresight to schedule the festivities for a Saturday night, rather than say Tuesday.
Just about everybody seems willing to go along with the gag, but I have genuine concerns that this kind of unambiguous prophecy holds the potential to seriously undermine the more widely embraced view that the kind of mayhem ¬– or ecstasy, depending upon your standing at the moment of truth – detailed in the Rapture is perfectly acceptable as long as we don’t presume to be able to put a calendar date to it.
A rather significant number of citizens are willing to go along with the underlying premise of the Rapture just as long as we don’t have the temerity to be able to plan for it. That would seem to undermine the whole process, to say nothing of discouraging the kind of good behavior that ostensibly goes along with the prevailing uncertainty. Yeah, that’s the problem all right. The orchestrated genocide of a whole planet by an otherwise merciful God is something we’re more than willing to swallow without much of a strain just as long as we keep the date open on the calendar.
Having just suckered the whole national media into five or six weeks of “covering” Don Trump’s bogus presidential campaign, it’s easy to see why the 24-hour news cycle would gleefully embrace a wacky notion like this. I just hope the media follows up a bit and gives the minister and his sad minions an opportunity to explain on camera Sunday morning just exactly why there is a Sunday morning.
And how does God decide which time zone will be Ground Zero, so to speak? I’m all for American exceptionalism, but stretching it all the way into affairs of the hereafter seems like a reach even for us.
-T.S. O’Connell
