5/21/2011 - a heaven out of hell. . .

New Zealand seems to still be standing in good health and has not been transformed by cataclysmic earthquakes into a post-apocalyptic S&M chamber full of atheists and gays, so I'm going to take a leap of faith and say that we in heathenous San Francisco will be alright come this evening when the prophesied (by an Oakland cult leader?) Rapture comes a-calling.

For that, I am glad.

I am not tremendously religious, though I respect those who find comfort in it.  I am also not superstitious, though I did read up on The Secret a little bit once and sent all of my positive energies into the fortune-yielding universe after buying a 300 some-odd million dollar lottery ticket.  (Obviously, I didn't think positively enough.)  All in all, I would dare say that I am a mostly well-adjusted, rational person.

But over the last few days after reading so much on the end of days, information both confirming and refuting it, I couldn't help but let a little bit seep in.  Not in the sense that I started to believe it per se, but I began to wonder and imagine a world in which this could happen.

I know for a fact that Sam and I will not be raptured, not so much because we are those homosexuals that Harold Camping claims is the cause of this whole thing (which I find strange, since isn't the Rapture supposed to be a good thing?  So if gays hastened the coming of the Rapture, shouldn't Camping be thanking us?), but because Sam is actively anti-religious, while I am apathetic about its place in my life at best.  I doubt God (or Jesus or Mary or whoever is the project manager for this little effort) is looking for types like ours.

If 'legend' holds true, then all of those left behind will be subject to months of pain and torture until some months later, when the world will ultimately cease to exist while those raptured will spend eternity listening to harp music and bouncing around on cloud trampolines (which almost makes me want to get raptured, if only for the clouds), basking in the air that holds happiness itself.  Pretty good stuff, and if I tossed a hail mary (the football play, not prayer) and accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior today, like right now, I could go there this evening.

But Sam wouldn't be with me.  Nor would most of my friends, I imagine.  Nor my mother or the majority of my family, or many of those I have known throughout my life and loved.  John Steinbeck in his The Grapes of Wrath said that maybe, if we wade through all the biblical musings and rhetoric of those appointed to 'lead' us, the holy spirit is nothing more than the human spirit, the collection of all of our flaws, the best parts of ourselves, our capacity for boundless good and our weakest moments.  If so, then my post-Rapture world couldn't possibly be that bad if I could keep company with all of those human spirits, the ones that together become holy.

On the contrary, though, I wonder how one of Camping's believers would feel when 6 PM rolls around (or whenever it is supposed to hit given the time zones, which was so sagely accounted for in a prophecy written before time zones) and he still remains on this planet, can not hear harps and is still bound to this Earth in his stupid body and all its oppressive weight.  Traffic still crawls down the highway, smog looms in the skies and cancer still kills one person every single minute.  And the people!  All the people that still surround him, us people with our petty problems, our anger management issues, the very smell of us, and if he ever read Sartre, these words would echo in his head: Hell is other people, and he'd sit, wondering what he did to lose his spot in Heaven.

Either way you look at it, looks like we're here for a while.  And who knew an impending Rapture would make me so literary all of a sudden, because the first thing I remembered when I learned of this Rapture was this quote from John Milton: "The mind can make a heaven out of hell or a hell out of heaven."

I think it's going to be a beautiful day.