Lee Perry's Blog - Posts Tagged "armageddon"
Bless me anyway.
Y2K, remember that one?
I met my best friend in high school, we knew each other in our sophomore or junior year and when her family moved a mile or two away she was in another school district so we didn’t meet up again until junior college. We became best friends, went to the same university, I got her a job where I worked the graveyard shift. She was the elder sister to a bunch of brothers and when I first met her family they were fun-loving Lutherans, not pushy about their religion, you know? Then her parents got involved with a church in San Francisco where they fully embraced the rigid, speaking-in-tongues, evangelical charismatic holy-roller Christians who fervently believed in a “literal interpretation” of the bible and, because it was 1990 or so, the coming Armageddon that would take out the planet on January 1st, 2000.
I am a spiritual person, but about as un-religious as you can get and as time passed my failure to conform to or even feign interest in her Big Truth really bugged her. When I wanted to know why she couldn’t perhaps view apocalyptic beliefs as a projection of a personal crisis she always shut down. I really did not understand her. She insisted that because they interpreted the bible literally, they had the One Truth… to the exclusion of everyone else, including “those other so-called Christians”. If you didn’t believe exactly as she and her family and particular church did, then you were damned, and when Jesus came to save the real, the just Christians, I was surely going to be among those that burned in hell when God set the world on fire in a colossal conflagration…
By her own admission, in college, she lived a less than Christiany-life; she had affairs with married men, and bore an illegitimate child. (I never get that, if you’re lying there in your bassinet, isn’t being present in the world legitimate enough?)
Then her parents found this church and she joined a Christiany-singles group with the intention of finding a marriageable man, and she did. Her church required pre-marriage counseling before signing off on weddings and I remember the shock I felt when she told me how she knew she and her fiancé were meant for each other when she explained her worldview to the counseling minster, and her husband-to-be enthusiastically agreed with her opinion that if Rodney King didn’t want to get beaten by those cops then he shouldn’t have fought back.
If homeless people didn’t want to be homeless anymore then they should get a job.
And how the woman she worked with was so lazy, those people always are… (Insert me asking here, “And who are those people, would they be black?”)
If homosexuals didn’t want AIDS, then they should stop those lifestyles.
By the time she proudly related how her fiancé quickly defended her when the minister said, (surely looking as aghast as I felt) “You don’t believe all that.”
Oh yes, she did, she was proud she did, in her self-righteous little Christian heart, she believed it all.
They did get married; her new husband legally adopted her sweet, scandalous born-out-of-wedlock son, then about 5 years old or so. Her marriage began to fail almost immediately, and when it did she suddenly embraced the whole Armageddon is coming thing. It didn’t matter that people thought the exact same thing back in the late 990’s, they all freaked out too, convinced Jesus was coming on New Year’s eve when their sundials marked the dawn of the year 1000, but clearly, nothing happened back then. She didn’t want to hear about that, obviously. And you know what? I let it go. The friendship, I let it go. We went from best friends who finished each other’s sentences to complete strangers because all she wanted to talk about was the end of the world. She couldn’t accept it was her intricately woven, fragile gossamer-like judgmental world of rigid exclusionalism that was coming to an end. Nope, in her mind, we all had to die so she could run from what her life had become. She needed a big bucket of distracting crazy.
Such a sad way to live, one of the last things I said to her was, it’s one thing to want to embrace such a downer of a religious belief, but how dare you tell your child, “Well honey, you’re never going to grow up. You’ll never graduate from high school, or have a career or a family of your own. Because Jesus is coming on New Year’s Eve 1999 and while God is busy setting the world on fire, we’ll leave this life and go to heaven.” How dare she tell a child such a thing? That’s where I ultimately drew the line.
I don’t know about you all, but I spent New Year’s Eve 1999 with friends, and I remember thinking about her, the ex-friend who embraced vengeance and worldwide destruction because her life and marriage sucked. The clock struck midnight and we watched Peter Jennings on the TV while he paced endless circles in his glass booth perched high above Times Square. While he marked the third hour of the New Year on the east coast, wanting desperately to be the first to tell the world computers had crashed, unable to rollover from 1999 to 2000, causing planet-wide chaos. While he waited for that, we welcomed 2000 on the west, laughing that the Y2K frenzy fizzled with a complete lack of catastrophe. But I also thought of my once best friend, and I wondered how she was doing. How did she take it when the world failed to end? Was she disappointed? What did she think when Jesus didn’t show up to take her and her fellow one-and-only-true-believers straight to heaven?
I remember looking at the clock; it was 12:10 am. I remember wondering what happened when she realized it was January 1st and that tomorrow was January 2nd and, “Dammit, I have to go to work tomorrow!”
Bummer, dude.
I found her in the white pages the other day, her last name is different now, apparently, in spite of her rigid religious dictum that forbade divorce under any circumstance, she managed to find someone else. (Who knows? Maybe she made a special cup of tea for that 1st husband he didn’t survive drinking, wink-wink, so she wouldn’t have to wrestle with the whole divorce issue.)
How miserable was she these past twenty odd years? My life has certainly had its share of ups and downs, but it’s been filled with adventures too, and amazing journeys I never could have anticipated or planned. Living can be a rough business, filled with strife, but I think Tony Kushner said it best in his play Angels in America;
“But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.”
You can wish for heaven or you can wish for hell and apocalyptic Armageddon, but the important distinction seems to fall between those who live for some future moment of either bliss or destruction and those who recognize that wondrous, blissful moments exist in the here and now, and when we suddenly find ourselves walking in the light of its sun… now that’s heaven.
More life.
I met my best friend in high school, we knew each other in our sophomore or junior year and when her family moved a mile or two away she was in another school district so we didn’t meet up again until junior college. We became best friends, went to the same university, I got her a job where I worked the graveyard shift. She was the elder sister to a bunch of brothers and when I first met her family they were fun-loving Lutherans, not pushy about their religion, you know? Then her parents got involved with a church in San Francisco where they fully embraced the rigid, speaking-in-tongues, evangelical charismatic holy-roller Christians who fervently believed in a “literal interpretation” of the bible and, because it was 1990 or so, the coming Armageddon that would take out the planet on January 1st, 2000.
I am a spiritual person, but about as un-religious as you can get and as time passed my failure to conform to or even feign interest in her Big Truth really bugged her. When I wanted to know why she couldn’t perhaps view apocalyptic beliefs as a projection of a personal crisis she always shut down. I really did not understand her. She insisted that because they interpreted the bible literally, they had the One Truth… to the exclusion of everyone else, including “those other so-called Christians”. If you didn’t believe exactly as she and her family and particular church did, then you were damned, and when Jesus came to save the real, the just Christians, I was surely going to be among those that burned in hell when God set the world on fire in a colossal conflagration…
By her own admission, in college, she lived a less than Christiany-life; she had affairs with married men, and bore an illegitimate child. (I never get that, if you’re lying there in your bassinet, isn’t being present in the world legitimate enough?)
Then her parents found this church and she joined a Christiany-singles group with the intention of finding a marriageable man, and she did. Her church required pre-marriage counseling before signing off on weddings and I remember the shock I felt when she told me how she knew she and her fiancé were meant for each other when she explained her worldview to the counseling minster, and her husband-to-be enthusiastically agreed with her opinion that if Rodney King didn’t want to get beaten by those cops then he shouldn’t have fought back.
If homeless people didn’t want to be homeless anymore then they should get a job.
And how the woman she worked with was so lazy, those people always are… (Insert me asking here, “And who are those people, would they be black?”)
If homosexuals didn’t want AIDS, then they should stop those lifestyles.
By the time she proudly related how her fiancé quickly defended her when the minister said, (surely looking as aghast as I felt) “You don’t believe all that.”
Oh yes, she did, she was proud she did, in her self-righteous little Christian heart, she believed it all.
They did get married; her new husband legally adopted her sweet, scandalous born-out-of-wedlock son, then about 5 years old or so. Her marriage began to fail almost immediately, and when it did she suddenly embraced the whole Armageddon is coming thing. It didn’t matter that people thought the exact same thing back in the late 990’s, they all freaked out too, convinced Jesus was coming on New Year’s eve when their sundials marked the dawn of the year 1000, but clearly, nothing happened back then. She didn’t want to hear about that, obviously. And you know what? I let it go. The friendship, I let it go. We went from best friends who finished each other’s sentences to complete strangers because all she wanted to talk about was the end of the world. She couldn’t accept it was her intricately woven, fragile gossamer-like judgmental world of rigid exclusionalism that was coming to an end. Nope, in her mind, we all had to die so she could run from what her life had become. She needed a big bucket of distracting crazy.
Such a sad way to live, one of the last things I said to her was, it’s one thing to want to embrace such a downer of a religious belief, but how dare you tell your child, “Well honey, you’re never going to grow up. You’ll never graduate from high school, or have a career or a family of your own. Because Jesus is coming on New Year’s Eve 1999 and while God is busy setting the world on fire, we’ll leave this life and go to heaven.” How dare she tell a child such a thing? That’s where I ultimately drew the line.
I don’t know about you all, but I spent New Year’s Eve 1999 with friends, and I remember thinking about her, the ex-friend who embraced vengeance and worldwide destruction because her life and marriage sucked. The clock struck midnight and we watched Peter Jennings on the TV while he paced endless circles in his glass booth perched high above Times Square. While he marked the third hour of the New Year on the east coast, wanting desperately to be the first to tell the world computers had crashed, unable to rollover from 1999 to 2000, causing planet-wide chaos. While he waited for that, we welcomed 2000 on the west, laughing that the Y2K frenzy fizzled with a complete lack of catastrophe. But I also thought of my once best friend, and I wondered how she was doing. How did she take it when the world failed to end? Was she disappointed? What did she think when Jesus didn’t show up to take her and her fellow one-and-only-true-believers straight to heaven?
I remember looking at the clock; it was 12:10 am. I remember wondering what happened when she realized it was January 1st and that tomorrow was January 2nd and, “Dammit, I have to go to work tomorrow!”
Bummer, dude.
I found her in the white pages the other day, her last name is different now, apparently, in spite of her rigid religious dictum that forbade divorce under any circumstance, she managed to find someone else. (Who knows? Maybe she made a special cup of tea for that 1st husband he didn’t survive drinking, wink-wink, so she wouldn’t have to wrestle with the whole divorce issue.)
How miserable was she these past twenty odd years? My life has certainly had its share of ups and downs, but it’s been filled with adventures too, and amazing journeys I never could have anticipated or planned. Living can be a rough business, filled with strife, but I think Tony Kushner said it best in his play Angels in America;
“But still. Still bless me anyway. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. I've lived through such terrible times and there are people who live through much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin, when they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the corners of the eyes of their children - they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit; the addiction to being alive. So we live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it, that's the best I can do. It's so much not enough. It's so inadequate. But still bless me anyway. I want more life.”
You can wish for heaven or you can wish for hell and apocalyptic Armageddon, but the important distinction seems to fall between those who live for some future moment of either bliss or destruction and those who recognize that wondrous, blissful moments exist in the here and now, and when we suddenly find ourselves walking in the light of its sun… now that’s heaven.
More life.
