The humanist/scholar became quite emotional in conceiving of the world devoid of human beings, which was a possibility brought on by one disaster or another, due, it must be said, to our own actions. This would be the worst thing he could imagine––worlds devoid of human beings, even if these worlds were populated by other intelligent and enterprising life forms.

–– Joy Williams, Ninety-Nine Stories of God

 What have you got to worry about? We’re only adrift in an open sea with a drunken captain and an engine that’s liable to explode at any moment.

–– Humphrey Bogart in Beat the Devil

 

The end is near! The world as we know it is on the verge of extinction, according to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.[i]But where is the sense of collective alarm? Where is the will to act? Our house is burning down, but instead of shouting “Fire!” and grabbing some hoses, we carry on as usual, unable to muster a sense of emergency. Perhaps we are just too exhausted by the endless stream of horrors under Republican rule, from children’s prison camps to the spread of American fascism, to have any bandwidth left to address the environmental apocalypse.

As columnist Leonard Pitts suggests,

“So then you read where the planet is melting, dire results expected soon, and you just shrug and file it away with all the other terrible things you’ll worry about when you get a chance. That’s understandable. But it presumes a luxury we don’t have — time. Again, this report says the world has 10 years in which to save itself — and we’ll spend at least two of those under Trump.” [ii]

Don’t ask me to explain why the party in power and its corporate handlers are doing everything they can to make things worse, as if the fate of the planet––and the well-being of their own children’s children––is nothing compared to the allure of short-term power and profit for themselves. Such suicidal selfishness is utterly incomprehensible to me. But we don’t have to approve of it to be caught up in it. We are all participants in an unsustainable culture.

Of course, there are many people, governments and institutions who recognize the climate crisis and are working to address it. Even in the heart of Trumpian coal country, West Virginia’s Charleston Gazette-Mailis sounding the alarm:

“When today’s kindergartners are in their 20s, they may find a devastated world wracked by horrible hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, tornadoes and other tragedies made worse by global warming. Coastal cities may be abandoned, sunken wrecks. Poverty and misery may result.”

The editorial goes on to note that hurricanes Florence and Michael have “inflicted more loss than the entire worth of West Virginia’s coal industry — but conservative politicians still won’t act to reduce the damage.” [iii]

Only ten years left to avert catastrophe! The message is clear: change or die. But given the dysfunctional paralysis of the American government, the iron grip of vulture capitalism, and the enormity of scale required for worldwide transformation, the prospects for success are bleak. The Titanic can’t turn on a dime. And when the captain doesn’t even believe in icebergs, it’s time to strike up “Nearer, my God, to Thee.”

On a recent trip to France, I beheld, for the first time, the extraordinary Tapestry of the Apocalypse in Angers, whose 84 large panels depict scenes from the Revelation of St. John the Divine. This riveting medieval visual sequence­­––the largest wall-hanging ever woven in Europe–– extends in parallel rows for 104 meters down the length of a vast, dimly-lit hall. It’s like a gigantic textile comic strip. Although the 700-year-old dyes have faded over time, these visionary scenes remain compellingly vivid, dense with iconography and narrative.

Theologian Austin Farrer described their source, the book of Revelation, as a great work of religious imagination.  “It is the one great poem which the first Christian age produced, it is a single and living unity from end to end, and it contains a whole world of spiritual imagery to be entered into and possessed.” [iv] Gonzo journalist Hunter Thompson added his own appreciation. “I still read the Book of Revelation,” he said, “when I need to get cranked up about language.” [v]

The meaning and value of the Bible’s last book have long been debated. Was it a mystical vision, a theo-political critique of the Roman Empire, or a quasi-liturgical dramatization of eschatological themes? The violent imagery of Revelation has been misused by religious cranks and maniacs in notoriously unhealthy ways, but the text has also––more than any other biblical book––given us many sublime prayer and hymn texts. Often neglected in times of contentment or complacency, it speaks loudly in times of crisis. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that the book never made much sense to him until the rise of the Nazis.

“Babylon” is Revelation’s code name for the Roman empire, the oppressive and sinful social consensus whose claims of absolute totality were grounded in seduction, deceit and the enforcing threat of violence. And while that particular empire is long gone, Babylon is still around. “Bellicose, selfish, self-deluded, icy, absurdly resolute––behold the Rome of the book of Revelation,” said the Jesuit prophet-poet Daniel Berrigan. And, he added, “Behold also America.” [vi] Forty years after he wrote that, it seems truer than ever.

The Babylons of every age want us to believe that resistance is futile, because “this is the way things are.” We’re all implicated in the system. Even if we don’t like it, we can’t imagine living without it. Try preaching an exit from global capitalism next Sunday and see what happens! We may dream of the “New Jerusalem” of justice, peace and universal blessedness, but it seems impossibly distant. “If the Babylon of our time is already, from God’s perspective, a smoking ruin, how and where do we find the New Jerusalem? Is it really possible to ‘come out’ of empire when it surrounds us so completely?” [vii]

Like all apocalyptic literature, Revelation is pessimistic about the present age and where it is headed. But it is also full of hope about the age to come––the unexpectedly redemptive future emerging from a time of emergency. “The apocalypticist sees meaning where the uninitiated sees only chaos or catastrophe.” [viii]

Revelation insists that Babylon’s “reality” is a lie: there is an alternative to its culture of seduction and death. This alternative, the New Jerusalem, is not to be sought in some unreachable elsewhere. It is here among us, though only visible to the eyes of faith. And in every moment, every time we choose life over death, we begin to make our exodus, however small and tentative, out of Babylon’s prison into the space of divine blessedness.

The Tapestry of the Apocalypse was created by inhabitants of their own medieval Babylon, an exitless world fraught with anxiety and doom. As half of Europe was being struck down by the Black Plague, Revelation’s harrowing images of a death-haunted, perishing world struck home. The obsessive immensity of the tapestry project testifies to a depth of existential engagement with ultimate concerns, as if the artists and weavers were driven to create a comprehensive record of their longing––and their dread––before they themselves ran out of time.

As I processed slowly, contemplatively, through the crepuscular vastness of Angers’ tapestry hall, the strange images flickered before me like an old silent movie, as though their colors and forms were signaling across the centuries with the light of a long-vanished past. Whatever these visions first said to John the Divine in his Patmos cave, whatever they meant to the fourteenth-century French weavers, they were now pleading for my attention.

See! God is making all things new.
Death will be no more,
mourning and sadness and pain will be no more.
The world of the past is gone. [ix]

 

Babylon is fallen. The gates to God’s eternal city are open wide. And the urgent question for believers today, in the face of a climate apocalypse, is this:

How do we hold fast to the redemptive vision
of the New Jerusalem
through the long dark night of catastrophe?

 

In the short term, we can practice both personal and collective environmental ethics, foster alliances with environmental changemakers, and incorporate a deep love and respect for the planet––and all who dwell therein––into our worship and our spiritual formation. And, setting aside for now our differences on a multitude of political and economic questions, we absolutely need to unite in casting our votes for defenders of the earth and against every climate change denier and pollution enabler. When the Beast is on the ballot, vote no!

In the long term, people of faith may face an even more daunting challenge––to cling to hope amid almost unimaginable destruction and loss: the disappearance of coastal cities and large land masses; countless millions of climate refugees; a horrific number of human deaths; mass extinction of species and habitats; economic havoc from fires, storms and floods; an endangered food supply; global conflicts over migration and dwindling resources; and the strain on political systems as they try to cope. How shall we declare God’s blessings then?

If we fail to change and the worst does come, our greatest enemy may be despair. I don’t need to contemplate the whole catalog of loss to feel the weight of immense sadness. Just picturing a single High Sierra meadow choked in smoke, or withered into a lifeless desert, is enough to make me weep.

Save us from the time of trial. That’s what the Lord’s Prayer really means by the more familiar “lead us not into temptation.” But the prayer is not asking to be spared from difficult challenges. That would make it irrelevant in the face of planetary apocalypse. We are all going to be tested by an uncertain future. But if we can beseech God with all our hearts to bring us through the experience of loss, despair and doubt with our faith and hope still intact, then “save us from the time of trial” may prove, in the climate crisis, our most earnest and necessary plea.

Meanwhile, get out of Babylon while you still can.

All photos by Jim Friedrich

 

[i] Summary and links to complete report: http://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/climate-change/

[ii] Leonard Pitts, Jr., “We only have 10 years to save ourselves from climage change,” Miami Herald, Oct. 12, 2018: https://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/leonard-pitts-jr/article219870680.html

[iii] Editorial, “Like a weather report, with time, climate change projections closer, more ominous,” Charleston Gazette-Mail, October 16, 2018: https://www.wvgazettemail.com/opinion/gazette_opinion/editorial/gazette-editorial-like-a-weather-report-with-time-climate-change/article_26d13b8a-47e3-517a-9882-037b9bff6d70.html

[iv] Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John’s Apocalypse(1949), q. in Richard K. Emmerson, “The Apocalypse in Medieval Culture,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Richard K. Emmerson & Bernard McGinn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 293.

[v] Hunter Thompson interview in Atlantic Unbound, August 26, 1997, q. in Unveiling Empire: Reading Revelation Then and Now, Wes Howard-Brook & Anthony Gwyther (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 2 n. 3.

[vi] Daniel Berrigan, S.J., The Nightmare of God (1983), q. in Unveiling Empire, 44.

[vii]Unveiling Empire, 260.

[viii] Bernard McGinn, “John’s Apocalypse and the Apocalyptic Mentality,” in The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, 9.

[ix] Revelation 21:4-5.