So I'm driving up here on 93 a couple of weeks ago, and there's this small truck all bedecked with big signs announcing that, on May 21, the world will end. Second Coming. Next Saturday. At 3 p.m. Who knew? But there it was: "The Bible Guarantees it." Gosh. Saturday is when a great big earthquake is scheduled to occur. Family Radio, the sponsors of the end of the world, says: "The remains of all the believers who have ever lived will be instantly transformed into glorified spiritual bodies to be forever with God. On the other hand the bodies of all unsaved people will be thrown out upon the ground to be shamed." Harold Camping, the guy behind it, who figured out the secret coding God put in the Bible, says: "we are right at the end. We are at the threshold of being destroyed by fire and brimstone."

So after the true believers get carried off to heaven, there are 153 days of death and horror and then the final end of the world is October 21. That's a Friday if you're making plans.

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Well. One day in 1838, a young poet and teacher at Harvard, who had become disturbed at the sterile spiritual state of the school, and disturbed by the way good civilized people in mid-19th century America were buying and selling other human beings, without any apparent outrage at Harvard — interrupted a meeting of Harvard divinity faculty and students, lifting up his normaly raspy and monotone voice in tones so resonant they hardly recognized it as his, and made the following declaration:

Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand.

Woooo. Apocalyptic language. It worries us. We don't like it. We already feel the fragility of our lives. We already feel exposed. We really don't like that kind of talk. Yeh — Mr Camping and Family Radio have got it all wrong, as will become blindingly obvious on May 22. But listen: never before has apocalyptic language been quite so true, has it? Not based on anything in the Bible, but on the united voice of climate scientists the world over.

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A month after his declaration, upon his release from the McLean Asylum, our crazy poet Jones Very would find he didn't have a lot of friends left. Only his circle of Transcendentalist friends, Emerson and Elizabeth Peabody and Bronson Alcott — seemed to understand. What he was talking about had nothing to do with what the Family Radio billboards are about. He was poet, speaking like a poet. His meaning was metaphorical. His friends wished only that he could get past the biblical imagery and the King James English. His utterance had been misunderstood. And so Harvard had had him delivered to the McLean Asylum, rather against his will.

Mr Emerson wrote a letter to Margaret Fuller asking — his words —

whether he was insane? At first sight and speech, you would certainly pronounce him so. Talk with him a few hours and you will think all insane but he.

A million years ago, our ancestors' experience of life was the life of the herd, and still today, sometimes it's only with very great effort that we can break free from the herd, even when the herd shows no sanity at all. Jones Very was breaking free. He insisted on being what Henry Thoreau called "a counter-friction to stop the machine."

So I wonder if you've ever felt like Jones Very? We live today with the consequences of reckless greed on a mass scale, the pursuit of low-quality of intentions, a culture that is self-absorbed rather than absorbed in the good of the whole.

And not our religious institutions, and not our political institutions, and not our public media, are really reckoning with what's happening.

Maybe the End is At Hand. We already know the scientists' warnings:

First, the scary part.

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Over hundreds of millions of years, life-forms developed, and lived, and died, and became the dark reserves of fossil fuels that, in a very short window of time, humans have extracted and burned, and all that carbon, and all those other greenhouse gases, are now making our planet hotter and hotter. These have been the hottest years on record. The Arctic ice sheet, we just learned, is melting three times faster than anybody thought.

The process has already been set in motion. It's happening. Temperatures are rising, seas are rising, species are migrating, ice caps are melting, storms are becoming more frequent and violent. And the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere will keep on raising temperatures even if we change our ways today. There will be irreversible damage. Is the end of all things at hand?

If we don't turn, change our way of exploiting the earth, the consequences will be catastrophic. The scientists warn us that if temperatures rise more than 2° celsius — that's about 3.6° fahrenheit — the consequences will be irreversible no matter what we do because by then it will be too late. And now we know that even 2° celsius is probably too much.

Coastal cities will be inundated, large areas of the earth will become uninhabitable, farmlands will become desert, millions of climate refugees will fight over land and water.

Now we know that if we are to prevent a catastrophic end, each of us, the earth's human inhabitants, can put no more than four metric tons of greenhouse gas each year into the atmosphere by 2030, and by 2050, no more than two. Four metric tons, and then two. Right now the average person puts out about seven tons. The average European emits ten or twelve tons. The average American puts out twenty tons.

If the end is at hand, it will come first for the poorest, in places like sub-Saharan Africa, to those who are contributing the least to the problem, about a single ton a year.

We know how to halt the processes of destruction. We could do it. Instead we persist in the pursuit of more stuff and status and some myth of what Americans are supposed to be entitled to.

The scientists issue their increasingly urgent warnings, and the small voices that rise in protest are not yet enough to halt the processes that have been set in motion and are sustained by greed. The rest of the world is alarmed. Here, an entire political party is devoted to the insistence that it is not happening and the scientists are making it up. 47% of people in America actually think that by 2050 the environment will be healthier. It won't be. In 1999, 76% of Americans thought we had a problem. The propaganda machine has that portion of the public who know there's a problem down to 66%.[1] This is madness.

America seems unable to look beyond its nose to see what is happening out there. Just because it's snowing in your garden doesn't mean the planet isn't getting hotter.

Like the dead fish in the Gulf, facts somebody hadn't been telling us keep floating to the surface.

As Johann Hari put it in the British newspaper, The Independent: "It's not just the pelicans of Louisiana that are flapping and flailing in an oil slick – it's all of us. We live permanently doused in petrol[eum]. Every time we move further than our feet can carry us, or eat food we didn't grow, or go shopping, we burn more barrels."

He calls it "our crude awakening."

How will anyone deal with rising sea levels? the drying up of agricultural land? super-charged hurricanes?

The end of all things — is it at hand?

Maybe you're worried. Maybe you're angry at the way the earth is abused by those who have learned to forge its beauty into profit and power.

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So. Some will say that the human presence is a blight on the planet; that the earth would be better without us. Ever heard that? Ever thought that?

I grew up in churches that taught that humanity is fallen from an original perfection into a state of depravity so deep that we are incapable of any good. Some days you might be tempted to believe it.

To that, the great founder of our American Unitarian faith would have said, No, no, no! When I encountered him, he changed my mind.

He said:

I have talked of the godlike capacities of human nature, and have spoken of man as a divinity . . . I may be told that I dream . . . Is it only in dreams that beauty and loveliness have beamed on me from the human countenance . . . ? Are all the great and good . . . of past ages only . . . the fiction of my disturbed slumbers ? Are the great deeds of history, the discoveries of philosophy, the creations of genius, only visions? Oh, no. I do not dream when I speak of the divine capacities of human nature.

Mr Channing went on to charge his audience in 1828 to "hold fast . . . that faith which . . . discerns in the depths of the soul a divine principle, a ray of the Infinite Light, which may yet break forth and shine as the sun."
Is the human presence a blight on the planet?

No, no, no!

But we haven't got a lot of time left to understand and deeply to know who and what we really are. And to turn to our highest selves.

Never before has this universe, this roaring engine of creativity that it is — never has never before achieved anything quite so grand as human consciousness. Not, anyway, so far as we know.

We are the Universe aware of itself.

We are the evolutionary urge at the heart of everything — some call it God — aware of itself, and it is time to wake up and understand that the future is now in our hands.

And too often I'm tempted to see only cynical, conventional, low-quality possibilities for the human future.

But to apply our highest moral vision and our astonishing capacities to the work of creating the world that will be — what could be more exhilarating, more thrilling, than this work that is now in our hands?

Whoever you are, wherever you are, in whatever place you find yourself, however humble or exalted: our highest future possibility calls to you, implicates you, commands you. A higher purpose than just our comfort or status or the accumulation of material possessions now needs us. It gives to us a work that will fill your life with dignity and meaning.

I know this: Humanity has the power to turn, to leave the oil and coal still in the ground right there — in the ground. Leave it there, where it has lain for fifty million years. We have the creative brilliance to create a finer world. We have the science already to do most of what has to be done. The magnificent capabilities of humanity are equal to this.

It's just that we aren't doing it. To me, that means one simple thing, just this: There's got to be a spiritual revolution.That is our work. Now it's up to us.

Some things are easy. You can look at what it is you're driving. You could take the train — oh, well, if only there were a train.

You can keep informed. American media won't help you much — I don't understand why — you'll have to follow the European and British press, like the Guardian and the Independent, and the BBC.

But if that's all there is to our religious message — just the social-action bit, essential as it is — something is missing at a deeper level, tragically missing.

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Do you feel like Jones Very yet? Should you pack for a stay at McLean?

But don't get depressed and discouraged — unless you want to. Don't go there. I recite these things so that we can become energized by the knowledge that this Earth that gives us life, this Earth we love, now needs us —

What an honour to be a part of the generation of humanity to which this work is entrusted!

The great British scientist Martin Rees — Britain's Astronomer Royal — said this:

We live at what could be a defining moment for the cosmos, not just for our Earth. . . . [H]umanity is more at risk than at any earlier phase in its history. . . . [W]ill these vast expanses of time be filled with life, or as empty as the Earth's first sterile seas? The choice may depend on us, this century.6

But do expect the Jones Very treatment, because we've got to raise our voices as we've never raised them before, and some people are going to think we're some sort of fanatics. But I'll give the Family Radio folks this: they take what they believe seriously. Just too bad it's crazy. But you've seen their billboards. You know what their message is. Does anybody know what ours is?

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To bury the knowledge of the abyss that stares at us — is neither an easy nor a joyful way to live.

You come here looking for hope. And hope can never be confused with changing the subject. Changing the subject is born of hopelessness and it's born of helplessness. It would only be self-delusion, and self-delusion has an awfully hollow, precarious feeling about it, doesn't it?

Andrew Harvey speaks of a conversation with James Baldwin, who said to him once, "The bomb has already gone off."

What bomb?" Andrew Harvey asked. And James Baldwin's answer:

The psychic bomb, the master bomb. It goes off and nobody notices. It destroys hearts, souls and minds, while leaving the bodies and refrigerators intact."

We live in the face of appalling reality and in our hearts we know it. Hope begins when with our lives we defy that appalling reality. Don't deny it: defy it. Calm inspired defiance.

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A century and a half ago Theodore Parker told his congregation that the age demanded usefulness in its institutions. For a religious institution, a particular kind of usefulness is demanded.

And whatever kind of usefulness could we have? Norman O. Brown has a suggestion, and it's spot on: Start a new civilization, a new culture. How? He has an answer:

To start a new civilization," Brown wrote, "is not to introduce some new refinement in higher culture but to change the imagination of the masses . . . .

The evolution of humanity inevitably begins with prophecy."

Prophecy. Oh, that's our work, isn't it?

To change the imagination of the masses. To further the evolution of humanity with prophecy. That is the work of a prophetic spiritual community. That's our job, our indispensable job.

Brown says that religions that are not prophetic just try to return to some former golden age or impose some rigid and outworn standard or solution, all tragically in vain. And so Norman Brown says this:

Great and visionary religious literature shows us preexistent traditions, Jewish, Christian, Hellenistic, pulverized into condensed atoms . . . of meaning: . . . Out of this dust the world is to be made new.
The old religious mentality Pulverized. Out of this dust — Prophecy.

That is what Theodore Parker meant when he said:

By gaining all the truth of the age in thought or action, by trying public opinions with its own brave ideas, by . . . applying a new truth to an old error . . . the church should lead the civilization of the age. For leaders it will look not back, but forth; will fan the first faint sparkles of that noble fire just newly kindled from the skies, not smother them in the ashes of fires long spent; not quench them with holy water from Jordan or the Nile.

When the end of all things is at hand, the same old holy water from the Jordan or the Nile and the recitation of outworn dogma are not of much use.

This time requires a new and potent Gospel, one only hinted at by the most visionary of previous times.

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What is it that, in that primeval darkness, out of the nothingness, exploded into existence fourteen billion years ago and became this shining Universe of life? Do you understand that that energy and intelligence is embodied in you, in me; the miracle of consciousness that is the light within you is the same Light that in a moment exploded into that darkness? Thou Art That — the revolutionary insight of the ancient Hindu scriptures, the Upanishads. We are this Universe of Life aware of itself, strong to save itself and to go on creating a new future. We'll have to remind each other of that at every step from here on.

It's time for a revolution of Consciousness; it's time for prophecy. It's time for a Gospel that proclaims that this world of Life is one and that the future is in our hands. It's one, there is only one, and that one is you, and me.

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When we know who and what we are in this web of life, — then in the face of all the peril, there will be confidence and there will be joy; there will the ability to laugh a laughter that comes from a place deeper than any cynicism, a laughter that is soul-deep.

And that joyous awareness will take us to places we had not dared to go.

And the world will have a future. And the community of life will have a future.

It's time for the end. Let there be an end to the madness, the greed, the abuse of power, the abuse of the earth. Let that time pass away. Let the new begin!

Bless this world. Bless the life of the world. Bless the future of the world of Life.

 

Pew Research for The Smithsonian. 47% agree that by 2050 "The quality of the earth's environment will improve." 9% definitely; 38% probably; 41% probably not; 9% definitely not; 3% don't know. July-Aug 2010 issue. Survey of 1,546 adults Apr 21-26 2010. Also, 76% agreed earth will get warmer in 1999; only 66% 2010.

© Copyright 2011 F. Jay Deacon

 

 

READING

The great French theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man

From "The Modern Earth": B. The Requirements of the Future; 229-232 excerpted

 

Like sons who have grown up, like workers who have become 'conscious', we are discovering that something is developing in the world by means of us, perhaps at our expense. And what is more serious still is that we have become aware that, in the great game that is being played, we are the players as well as being the cards and the stakes. Nothing can go on if we leave the table. Neither can any power force us to remain. . . .

One thing is clear. We shall never bend our backs to the task that has been allotted us of pushing noogenesis [the development of consciousness] onward except on condition that the effort demanded of us has a chance of succeeding. . . . Man will never take a step in a direction he knows to be blocked.

Having got so far, what are the minimum requirements to be fulfilled before we can say that the road ahead of us is open ? There is only one, but it is everything. It is that we should be assured the space and the chances to fulfill ourselves, . . . to progress till we arrive . . . at the utmost limits of ourselves. . . . . Unique in this respect among all the energies of the universe, consciousness is a dimension to which it is inconceivable and even contradictory to ascribe a ceiling . . . [E]very increase of internal vision is essentially a germ of a farther vision which includes all the others and carries still farther on.

The more [humanity] becomes [human], the less will [we] be prepared to move except towards that which is . . . new. . . .

'Positive and critical' minds can go on saying as much as they like that the new generation . . . no longer believes in a future and in a perfecting of the world. Has it even occurred to those who write and repeat these things that, if they were right, all spiritual movement on earth would be virtually brought to a stop? They seem to believe that life would continue its peaceful cycle when deprived of light, of hope and of the attraction of an inexhaustible future. And this is a great mistake. . . . [W]ithout the taste for life, [humanity] would soon stop inventing and constructing for a work it knew to be doomed in advance. And, stricken at the very source of the impetus which sustains it, [humanity] would disintegrate . . . or revolt and crumble into dust.

If progress is a myth, . . . if faced by the work involved we can say: 'What's the good of it all?' our efforts will flag. With that the whole of evolution will come to a halt — because we are evolution.