Beginning of the End?

I've had a generous handful of conversations of late with folks who think the end of all civilization is nigh. And I don't mean in that comical, sandwich-board sort of way where the guy stands out on the corner and rings a bell; no, I mean in that full-throated, last-refuge-of-a-scoundrel sort of way. There is a profound and deepening anxiety welling forth, and we do well to pay attention.

By and large, the people crowing about said irreversible finality aren't the types who are easily dismissed for their inherent flakiness. They don't generally truck in doomsday scenes. They don't fall easily off their posts or flap in the doctrinal winds.

The whole thing gives me uneasy pause, even as I pray for steady words of counsel to grant.

Without a doubt, it's hip to be hopeless. The Obama Thing was so 2008, and with nearly three months under our belt in 2009, we find the bottomless economic debacle of the moment a bizarre kind of counterbalance: so that positive aspirations are positively outre. Maybe it's just the collective theater of imagination, Jung's constancy of the subconscious, sitting on the chest of Hope and poking at his throat.

(I guess I'm not hip, then, as I have long tended to view my own situation as a daily exercise in pragmatic and constructive problem-solving. Even when things may have seemed particularly hopeless, faith and patience have generally won the day.)

Would that it were not so, but some of this appears to be rooted in the year 2012, and of the endless speculation that's already running us up to then. And if we find ourselves in it now, it's surely going to get worse -- er, more intense, over the next three years.

Between now and then, look for end-of-the-world scenarios to garner increasing exposure. Our friends at Columbia Pictures have located the anxiety taproot and are assembling a snappy-looking film called "2012" whose trailer features a Buddhist monastery at the top of the world getting cold-cocked by a wall of water. I know, It's probably only a big-budget, high-effects disaster film like The Day After Tomorrow. But Hollywood can anticipate and package paranoia in prescient ways.

Probably the most responsible Christian response for the moment is to get well grounded in the best-known authorship studies of the apocalyptic literature, even while boning up on the 2012 hubub. We need to have a faithful, generous, and scholarly context laid forth for those of us who don't use things like Revelation and Daniel to scare the beJesus into people. Rationality doesn't win in the face of immediate panic. It takes time to build.

In any event, if you're in ministry, you should expect inquiries.

Joaquin and the Scapegoat Impulse

We love scapegoats - any place, thing, idea, or person we can hang our sins upon and say, There! Look well, and witness both sin and sinner.

We do this, of course, because it's human behavior: built in, hard-wired, inscribed on the collective DNA. Nothing we can do will ever adequately scrub it out. Sin is not local, not "in here"; it is forever at arm's length, in the heart of the other. Rene Girard:

The creature that excited fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand.

"The creature that excited fury." Usually, that's us.

Joaquin Phoenix is the latest in the long pantheon of celebrities to stumble publicly and suffer the mantle of Recent Scapegoat. Some have speculated that he's busily pulling off a stunt with his brother-in-law, Casey Affleck, who's filming the spectacle, and that at some point the gag will be revealed for what it is - a one-man kayfabe in the vein of Andy Kaufman and Jim Lawler.

I hope that's true, because the alternative looks pretty brutal. I've seen the Letterman clips a few times now. My sense is that the photogs and TMZ'ers are sharpening their longest knives as we speak.

Christian compassion cannot end with celebrities just because we think they're out of touch with reality, or because we're jealous of them. They are, after all, people, and God requires mercy and compassion - longsuffering compassion and companioning.

Not to say that Hollywood doesn't excel at creating alternate realities, and not that people aren't complicit in their own undoing; or that showing compassion requires us to substitute one reality for another. If Mr. Phoenix is really in a state of need (either that or he's one of the better actors of his day, and is shortly to pull aside the veil of this conceit), then he certainly helped himself along the way, and in that he's no role model.

But godly compassion requires that we not laugh when we see another in pain. (Again, unless he's joking, in which case we all get a chuckle later on, but it'll be guilt-laced laughter.) We don't pile on or idly gossip.

Bottom line: This man is our brother, and to make him a scapegoat is to take the cheap way out.

We have not so learned Christ.

Have We Been Properly Introduced?

Hi.

The better part of my life has been spent in classrooms and study sessions, group conversations and teacher conferences. In short, I'm a lifelong learner who has found himself (both vocationally and avocationally) standing at the intersection of religion and culture.

That's what this is about -- except without all the manifestos and dissertations.