To see the origin of this post, go here. Today, I continue to lay out a positive vision for what I would like my community and nation to become.
I envision a nation that embraces apocalypses.
In the first essay in this series, I described Donald Trump’s presidency as destructive. His intentional and reckless destruction of trust in people and critical institutions has made us sicker and less prepared to face future pandemics.
However, we must also acknowledge the valuable service Mr. Trump has rendered to our nation. More than any other recent historical figure, Mr. Trump has revealed us for who we are.
As commonly understood, an apocalypse is an end-of-the-world event that indicates destruction and hopelessness. Apocalyptic literature describes world-spanning scenes of destruction and mayhem.
And yet, that form of literature, and early use of the Greek term αποκάλυψη, comes from St John’s letter to a cluster of Southwest Asian churches and was meant as an encouragement to them.
It was a revelation—an uncovering. In John’s case, it was an uncovering of the vapidity and bankruptcy of the Roman Empire and an appeal to early Christians to consider who was really in charge of things.
Exposing, revealing, uncovering…
As a people, we need those things.
It is easy to believe that civilization progresses in an inevitable march toward an improved human condition. Technological advances, in particular, lead us to believe we have thrown off the small thinking and limitations of the past and found our way to a better world. We look at the people of the past as less knowledgeable, less aware, and less progressive in their understanding of the world and people—stunted somehow in ways that we are not.
But much remains hidden.
It turns out we are every bit as violent, racist, misogynistic, and uncouth as our less enlightened kin. Maybe not all of us, but as a nation, surely.
In the haloed years of the Obama administration, it was possible to believe that we had finally moved beyond our racist past. In the aftermath of 9/11, we claimed noble suffering on the world stage and basked in the (finally) new-found solidarity with other nations. We believed that mere court cases could secure eternal rights for gay people and women.
But, the hidden truth about all these things could not remain so.
In the years since Donald Trump began his first candidacy, it is as if there has been an inundation of and speeding up of the unveiling of many hidden truths. In the last days of this year’s campaign, the revelation has reached a fever pitch, and it is now fashionable in some circles—apparently large ones—to overtly call for assassinations of political rivals, mass caging of immigrants, and dismantling of critical national institutions. It is funny to call women the most vulgar names, to elevate and extol lawbreakers, to threaten violence at elections, and to glory in anti-semitic and racist suggestions (wink, wink, nod, nod). It is acceptable to lie—about apparently everything, all the time.
Oh, that’s not you. Yes, I know, that’s not you.
But it is “us.” And the apocalypse Donald Trump has brought concerns all of us. It requires a response from each of us. It demands a fundamental reconsideration of who we are and what we want—collectively, as a people.
This Apocalypse shows us the brutalized landscape that lies around us.
It lays some important choices before us.
It poses some important questions.
- Where DO we go from here?
- How do we confront the hate and exclusion?
- What do we do with the ruin of our social engagement?
- How can we rebuild things like truth-telling, integrity, concern for our neighbors?
And there are many, many others.
Maybe this time we won’t go back to the “just-so” stories of our national youth—when everything had a happy ending because we were all basically good people—indeed, perhaps a “chosen” people. We can’t pretend that the sins of our past will stay ensconced in another era.
Because we have lived through an apocalypse.
(Final note: I wrote this and all the other pieces in this series as a white man—who grew up in a country designed by and for white people. I realize that for many people, our national apocalypse has been permanent. I know that the lies and hatred experienced by many are fixtures—as they say, features, not bugs. What I have written, especially here, gets more to our chosen national narrative about ourselves—what the dominant white culture has comforted itself to believe. Donald Trump has put a definitive end to these fairy tales.)
Traveling at the Speed of Bike 
AFTER THE ELECTION, DRAFT for writers group. FYI
Stunned if not surprised, and rendered mute. I was grateful Wednesday morning when none of the other Master Gardener’s who showed up to work in the demonstration garden at Patrick’s Ranch mentioned the election results. Maybe they, like me, could find no words. Maybe they too found some solace in simply putting hands to the work of tending the earth as we could in that moment.
Everyone I knew felt anguish. Anguish, anger, anxiety, agitation. Many, unlike myself, finding lots of words. Analysis. Advice. Too many words for me. I was hungry for silence, stillness, solitude. Hoping to get my bearings, grounded in a larger perspective, I tossed the car mattress, comforter, camp table, lantern, thermos of tea, journal and recliner chair into my car and headed up to the dark sky territory of Mt. Lassen. I’d already researched it as a potential place for an impromptu getaway for an unobstructed view of the stars. For $5 I could camp in the Kohm Yah-mah-nee visitor center parking lot, which had a decent unobstructed view of the night sky as well as 24 hour warm bathrooms, water and wifi.
Including my stop at JollyCone in Red Bluff fora milkshake, it took me a couple hours to get there. I set up a spot on the perimeter of the parking lot next to a bank of snow. It looked out across a forest of trees, many of them nothing but charred trunks and branches since last summer’s Park fire that started in Chico then blazed northwards into Lassen. The sky was cobalt blue and cloudless with a quarter moon visible to the south. Night came. I was the only one there.
When visiting the eastern Sierra’s last year I lay out under the stars, a swath of the Milky Way radiant across the expanse of universe. It felt like I was home and the stars were my tribe. So tiny yet somehow expanded too because a part of something so infinitely huge. A sense of belonging. And perspective. And peace. I was hoping for that visceral experience again.
As I lay wrapped in the comforter alone under the night sky in Lassen, I felt close to God. Space does that for me. Memories came.
Four decades ago I was sent to train midwives in eastern Sudan. I took with me the battered copies of “Where There is no Doctor” and “Myles Textbook for Midwifery” I’d used training midwives in Somalia. There seemed no crisis at the time, but before I could start my work training midwives, the hundreds of thousands of starving Ethiopians that would cross the border into eastern Sudan began arriving. And somehow I was designated responsibility for them although I had not food, nor water, nor medicine, nor shelter….And still the people kept arriving, half dead and actively dying and there was nothing I could do but calculate the mortality rate and quantify the degree of malnutrition. I prayed “God, what can I do?”
God replied with God’s still small voice, in words I remember verbatim to this day “Be present, with compassion, with the truth of what is, without flinching. Bear witness.”
So that is what I did. After a couple months, the United Nations came, Maybe my statistics were useful in getting them to come. They gathered their own statistics and finally help arrived. Food, water, medicine, shelter.
The agency I worked for expanded from three expatriates with one-year contracts to over 70, rotating through with 6-week contracts because it was deemed an extreme hardship tour. People were still dying and there was more work to do than could be done, even with 70 expatriate staff on six week contracts scurrying around all hours of the day and night trying. I was not so much a scurrier. I’m grateful I was there on a long contract. I’m grateful that I was able to be present in a different way. Long enough to see hope in spite of the overwhelming devastation. To see seedlings planted and nurtured by people who would never see them become trees that bore fruit or provided shade. To sit in vigil after a death with people for whom something carried more weight than death, that death did not overcome. It was the thriving seedling, protected from the sun by a shelter of twigs, that became for me the icon of my Sudan experience, not the death mask(particular expression on the face of a child who will most certainly be dead within 24 hours no matter what one does to try to save the child) of a child.
As my time in Sudan went on my sense of God wore down. So much suffering, accompanied by the awareness that human behavior, from indifference to evil, was a major contributing factor. I could only pray “God, I don’t even know if you exist, but I’m listening.” For more than a year it was the only prayer I could pray. Finally I received what I took as a response from God. The image (NASA) of earth from space. Beautiful and whole. Containing everything; evil and suffering, but also kindness, courage, joy… I understood God’s perspective is not human perspective, that I might never grasp the mystery, but that I could trust it.
I needed to lay under the dark sky and be reminded. I need in dark times to be quiet inside so I can discern the still small voice of God. To continue to act on previous clarities, refrain from reacting to outer agitation, and wait on the Spirit for what might be next.
I am wrestling with the idea of evil in ways I haven’t in the past, and feeling a desire to have some mooring in a faith community that has not succumbed to the heresy of “Christian Nationalism”. I suspect evil to be a real force in ways I have not suspected before. Maybe a shadow energy active in the world, and in the USA in a particular way, that is evil. That has become inflated, distorted and inflamed, and that, along with the lofty ideals of what ‘America’ is about, has been here all along. It has plotted carefully it’s current ascendence, but it is not something new. Whatever else our country was built on(that we may take pride in) our country was built on genocide and slavery and the desecration of the natural world-all for economic gain. The veil is most certainly lifted. We are who we are. Everything is connected. I don’t know how to grapple with ‘what now’ other than spiritually. To to be light the dark can not overcome.
I re-read books with something trustworthy to say to concerning these times; Bonhoeffer, Thurman, Mandela. A new memoir by Navalny. Edinger on the Apocolypse. I keep quiet, my hands in the dirt; propagating plants, sculpting clay, listening.
I have enough lived experience of something I call God that I am not wondering if God exists. I understand apocalyptic literature is considered the literature of hope in times when it is too late to alter the course and disaster is inevitable. A course on Revelations noted that it is essentially a message that no matter how awful things get, God ‘wins’ in the end. I am not as sure about that as I would like to be. One current thread of Christian thought refers to an evolutionary aspect of God and the cosmos and how our participation, what we align with, impacts the direction things evolve. I’m not sure where these theologians stand on the idea of God ‘winning’ in the end, but it might be less of a given. For now all I know is to live as if the walk I walk matters, because to me, it does. To be present, to be kind, to be prepared for who knows what. AMEN