“The moments of our life are not expendable,
And the possible circumstances of death are beyond imagination.
If you do not achieve an undaunted confident security now,
What point is there in your being alive,
O living creature?”
- The Tibetan Book of the Dead
“Two others, both criminals, were taken along with him for execution.
One of the criminals said, ‘Jesus, remember me when you enter your kingdom.’
He said, ‘Don’t worry, I will.
Today you will join me in paradise’.”
- Jesus, The Book of Luke
“I’ve got Jesus breathing down my neck,
Angels gather like crows…”
- Nikki Sixx, Sixx AM, “Helicopters”
I’ve got a good friend and we counsel each other.
Sort of.
Loosely.
Openly.
Few holds barred.
Usually these “therapy sessions” involve whiskey, brandy, and a cigar or two.
You know.
To keep the sessions flowing freely.
I think we both find it bettering.
Bettering to our collective psyche.
The talking seasons us.
We open up.
We dialogue.
It’s good for us.
It’s good for me.
Recently we were comparing tales of trauma and perceived trauma in our lives.
Childhood-young-adulthood, even older-now-adulthood scarring moments, at least as seen through our eyes.
Mine - as I’ll unpack in this blog and the blogs ahead - were largely of a religious-spiritual-church-ified nature.
His, not so much.
“I was a little kid”, I said, “Scared to death of the Rapture”.
I was.
I was terrified.
“Scared to death” is putting it mildly.
The Rapture.
The stuff of nightmares.
Worrying every night that I’d be “Left Behind”, tortured and condemned to a burnin’ ring of fire for all eternity.
You know.
Worries and concerns your normal, average 5 to 6 year-old should be fretting about.
The antidote to not missing this celestial-whisked-away-in-the-blink-of-an-eye-event, this Rapture, was simple.
Ask Jesus into your heart.
Read that statement again.
Ask-Jesus-Into-Your-Heart.
Make it make actual sense to a little kid.
I did it.
I asked Jesus “into my heart”.
Repeatedly.
Obsessively.
Couldn’t be too sure, you know.
In whatever way an ancient, historical, religious, iconic figure was going to enter and set up shop in my actual heart wasn’t very clear to me.
It sounded, well, it sounded weird.
But I did it.
I did it.
I.
Asked.
Jesus.
Into.
My.
Heart.
Often.
Repeatedly.
Obsessively.
And that was the easy part.
This Rapture business rocked my little boy world.
I checked on my parents regularly.
Truthfully, Mom more than Dad.
If Mom had been stolen away like a thief in the night when this Rapture deal happened and I was still here, I was screwed.
Eternally.
For-e-ver.
Dad?
Maybe, just maybe, not so much.
I might stand a chance.
Mom was Neo.
Matrix-Neo.
If she was gone, so was all hope.
Anyway, my counseling buddy is listening attentively, taking in all my perceived trauma, absorbing all my baggage, nodding along to my tales of lingering, internal, Rapture-esque dysfunction.
“That’s a lot, bro” he says, in between long draws and longer sips.
“That’s a lot for a kid”.
I taper off.
It’s quiet.
His turn.
“I remember once when my stepdad was being more abusive than normal to me and my mom, and he put a gun to my head” my friend said.
It’s quiet.
“Ever have someone stick a gun to your head?” he asked.
It’s real quiet.
“Yeah, um, no, not that I recall” I said.
Wide-eyed.
“It’s pretty terrifying” he added.
I can only imagine.
This is, we hope, the stuff of collective-psyche-bettering.
I stopped.
Collected my thoughts.
Reserved my words.
Spoke.
Slowly.
“Wow, I’m so sorry. That’s some serious baggage to carry around…” was the best I could do.
No.
Wait.
Shit.
That’s what I said.
Shit.
“That’s some serious shit to carry around”.
Baggage is assumed.
His response wasn’t what I expected.
At all.
He smirked.
He laughed.
Okay.
Help me out here.
Explain.
Please.
“What?” I said.
Maybe the whiskey was kicking in.
Another long draw and another long sip.
“Yeah, that was a long time ago, it happened once, and my stepdad died a year or so ago”.
I’m listening.
Really listening.
He wasn’t finished.
“But you” he said.
“As near as I can tell, there’s a good chance you just might be going to hell and burning forever!”
Oh.
Okay.
Ouch.
There’s just not enough whiskey in the world to drown that thought.
My childhood-Rapture-fright-left-behind-chills roared back with a vengeance.
I was 6 years old again in a flash, silently tiptoeing down a dark, creaky hallway to check on Mom.
Still there.
Next to Dad.
Relief.
The Rapture.
That’s as good a place as any I suppose, to start.
The Rapture was, and is, a defining theological-spiritual-visceral event in the lives of those of us who grew up immersed in the “Dispensational-conservative-Baptist-fundamentalist-KJV” wing of Christianity.
It’s never not been an integral setting on my spiritual landscape.
Perhaps it hasn’t loomed as large, or at all, for others.
But trust me, the Rapture has indelibly made its mark on our culture.
Daniel G. Hummel, in his book “The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical
Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation” notes the distinctive niche the Rapture has carved out:
“In 2018 the largest-grossing film was the
Marvel entry, Avengers: Infinity War.
The plot centered on a villain named Thanos, whose scheme involved assembling a magical glove that could instantly make half of humanity disappear with the snap of a finger.
When Thanos finally succeeds at the cliffhanger end of the movie, iconic superheroes are among the victims of what was dubbed by fans and critics as the "Snapture," a gloss on the dispensational teaching of the rapture.
When I saw the “Snapture" for the first time, a familiar wave of "rapture anxiety" from childhood briefly washed over me.
The creators of Avengers: Infinity War had no interest in the doctrine of the rapture, but its distilled imagery, originally indebted to dispensationalism, still found its way to the commercial apex of American popular culture.”
Snapture.
Pretty clever.
If that doesn’t do it for the uninitiated, Hummel continues:
“Even if you did not grow up with dispensational teachings, it is likely that you have encountered fragments of dispensationalism like the "Snapture."
If you've watched films, read books, or listened to sermons that speculate on a coming one-world government led by the antichrist, then you have encountered a little more of apocalyptic dispensationalism.
If you've consumed dystopian fiction or prestige television, you've probably come across popular vestiges of dispensational themes, from the HBO drama The Leftovers, which centers on survivors of a rapture-like event, to the comedian Marc Maron, whose Netflix special End Times Fun refers to the rapture as if it is common knowledge: "People just shoot up into the air like bottle rockets….”
This.
All of this.
This was the common currency of my upbringing.
My childhood.
My coming of age.
Permanently lodged in every corner of every cortex of my brain.
But make no mistake.
My issues - my sitting-at-the-bar-unloading-baggage-with-my-therapy-session-friend - are with the systems, beliefs and structures I was taught, not with those who taught them.
There’s a difference.
A difference I hope is clear when my dust settles.
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