There's so much I could talk about this morning including, oh, I don't know...how hot it is, but really I just sort of want to talk about the Rapture. For some reason, the idea of the Rapture has been fascinating me lately. For those of you blessed not to know what the Rapture is, it's an endtimes fantasy that certain Christians hold dear which says that Christ is surely coming and that when he does, the true believers shall be snatched up off this earth in the blink of an eye, even the dead ones, I think, and taken up to Heaven, leaving the rest of us non-believing sinners here to be stunned and awed.
And left to our own sinning devices and please- could we just get on with it already?
I got a new perspective on the Rapture just now when I google-searched for a picture of the Rapture. A guy named Daniel Sweet has this to say about the Rapture:
When we go, it's off to Boot Camp. Be ready for that too. We're not going to be sitting around on clouds playing harps... we are preparing to go to WAR! Remember that. Your new job will be a soldier being trained to understand your new body, your new powers, the spiritual universe around you... then come back to Earth to kick butt and take over control. Then we can chill for a while but the Earth is going to be a messed up wasteland by the time we get done with it. It's going to be a really hard time. Lots of re-building. But at least we'll on the WINNING TEAM. I think the victory of it all will be severely tempered by the weight and sadness of all the carnage.
Sorry if I seem to come off as a harbinger of doom. I really do have a positive outlook for the end result. The Earth will be purged of evil, cleansed and God will be in power again putting us in charge. That's cool. I just want believers to be braced and ready for the utter shock and horror of what is to come.
Italics are mine and here's Mr. Sweet's picture:
He purports to be a Biblical scholar and has a church called God's First Word Christian Ministry.
What a fucking hoot. I wouldn't buy an insurance policy from the dude, much less an entire world-outlook and religious philosophy but that's just me.
Anyway, once when I was a kid I was walking down a road and it was around sunset and I looked up and the clouds were in the strangest formation I'd ever seen. They looked exactly like a giant archway and were lit with that incredible gold-colored light that sunset can bring and there were rays shooting all over the damn place and I stood there and trembled in my flip-flops. Surely, dear god, this WAS the Rapture. It had to be. I waited for Jesus to come through the archway but he did not. As I waited though, I wondered, having already learned in school about how the earth rotates daily, how the people on the other side of the world would know it was Rapture Time.
I still wonder about this. Will the Rapture be televised so that if we get the live event here in North America in the Eastern Standard Time, they will get the live feed in Australia? Maybe that's what's taken Jesus so long to come back. The technology had to be developed. Makes as much sense to me as anything else having to do with this bullshit theory.
When Kathleen and Judy and I were in the hospital the day Kathleen's cancer was diagnosed, we suddenly found ourselves in a hallway and we were the only people we could see or hear. It was an eerie moment because just a few seconds before that hallway had been a busy place. We all looked at each other and one of us said, "Maybe it's the Rapture!" and we giggled and not out of nervousness, either. Well, we were nervous about the outcome of all the tests Kathleen was going through but we were not nervous about the Rapture.
At rehearsal the other day, one of the actors was talking about a huge storm which had suddenly come up the night before. I said, "Was it like the Rapture?" She said, "Exactly!" I asked her if she'd called her saintly grandmother to see if she was still here and she said, "No, but I did go check to see if my aunt was there because when the Rapture comes, she is definitely going."
I'd been joking. I'm not sure she was.
And then yesterday I was holding a sleeping Owen and I heard a distant, low, deep grumbling sound and it wasn't thunder and it was too prolonged to be a truck crossing the tracks and there was no whistle so it wasn't our train and part of my brain wondered if it was the Rapture but because Owen's been baptized and he is completely without sin if you don't count that lamp he broke the other day and he was still lying asleep in my arms, I figured it wasn't.
I have no idea why I'm so obsessed lately with thinking about this upcoming mythological event. Maybe because I wish it would get the fuck here and take up all these people who are just waiting to be transported to Heavenly Boot Camp to train for the battle. I hope they have to train for a couple of millennia, leaving the rest of us here to spread out and have more to eat and less guilt to deal with without all those holy people telling us what god wants us to do and not do. Let us plant bigger gardens and go around and pull up all those Ten Commandment signs in people's yards and go into their houses and get all the cool stuff out of them that they won't be needing any more and take them home to use ourselves. They won't be needing diamond necklaces and Sub Zero refrigerators or really good lawn mowers up there in Heaven now, will they? Nah. We'll leave all those Left Behind books though because we WILL be left behind and we'll have no need of that bullshit. We'll be reading banned books and dancing to the devil's music and eating off the fat of the land and growing our hair down to our asses and turning the Vatican into the World's Coolest Art Museum and Bar and visiting all the National Parks and not having to wait in line because there will be so few people there and oh yes, having picnics in graveyards without having to worry about stepping on the dead.
It's going to be so awesome.
Well, that's what I think, anyway. That's how I imagine it. Which is why, I suppose, I keep waiting for it to happen. I'm pretty sure all my friends will still be here and my family too. I'll make Owen do something sinful so he can stay too. Maybe I'll make him not honor the Sabbath or lust after one of Waylon's toys. Shouldn't be too hard.
Wait. I just realized that if I can make a baby sin then what hope is there for the rest of humanity? Who among the throngs of us is truly holy enough to be taken up to heaven by Jesus? Shit. Probably about four people which ain't gonna make one damn bit of difference.
Or maybe it's one of those things where even if you're imperfect and have sinned, as long as you accept Jesus Christ as your savior you're cool.
I feel better now because there are a LOT of people like that. People like Daniel Sweet. People who spend an inordinate amount of time trying to make sense of Revelations which is a big fat waste of time if you ask me. In fact- that's one of the main things I don't understand about religion and certainly not just the Christian one. All that trying to determine what god means and meant and how to get around the rules or how to force other people to follow them or trying to convince other people that you and you alone and your church and your church alone know the Answers.
Hell. I don't even worry about the questions any more. I'm too busy just trying to keep the baby off the stairs and the bed made and the diapers washed and the husband happy and the toilets clean and the plants watered and I'm not doing a very good job at any of those things. The only rules I want to worry about are the rules of gravity and sunrise and sunset and the chicken flock and when it's best to plant your late-summer tomatoes. The rules of good writing and tasty reading and how weight loss depends on calories in versus calories out and how in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
Yep. That'll do it for me. And the sooner the Rapture happens and takes up all the people who are getting in my way and harshing my mellowing, stepping on my buzz by not recognizing the very miracles which inspired religion in the first place, the fucking better. Me and the butterflies and the hawks and the bluebirds and the stars and the sun and the moon and Keith Richards will be just fine right here without them. The miracles of homemade bread and babies being born and people stepping over that rainbow into death and not reporting back and the womb and the spirit and the rain and the night and the sleep and the waking up and the glory of it all just as it is will continue on and that's what I have to say today.
It's Sunday here at the Church of the Batshit Crazy and it's my job to talk about these things and it's also my job to try and go pull some weeds.
And let me end by saying that if you're pretty sure the Rapture is going to happen soon and you think you might be one of the ones who are Taken and you have some cool stuff you think I might like that you won't be needing anymore, drop me a line and let me know. I could use a good vacuum cleaner and I sort of lust after a fine emerald ring. Ruby would do too. And a Porsche. I really want a Porsche.
Just saying.
Thanks in advance.
Love...Ms. Moon
