It’s that countdown time of year. Some will use traditional Advent calendars, others will mark shopping days until Christmas.
But this is not just any old year, as one of my e-mail correspondents reminds me almost daily.
“YOU HAVE 2 MONTHS TO LIVE,” he announces in the header of his messages. After that, he explains, electric power will fail, food will run out, missiles will fly and we will all begin eating one another for sustenance.
Sadly, he believes the rapture will not be signaled by earthquakes and a blood-colored moon and stars that fall to the earth like figs from a tree, but by that most tedious of apocalyptic visions, the Y2K computer bug.
No colored horses, no white robes, no angels or odors or seals. Just binary circuits, changing nines over to zeroes. Could there be a more impoverished– and long since cliched–bit of prophecy?
There are, occasionally, glimmers of creativity in the work of our latter-day apocalyptics. I received an unsolicited manuscript this summer from one man who was certain the rapture would occur during the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah this past September.
The article itself was no great shakes, either as literature or as prediction. But the cover letter was a masterwork of millennial chutzpah, in which the author gave the address to which payment should be submitted after the rapture, to keep his Web site funded in his absence. That is the mark of a dedicated man of business.
For the most part the apocalyptic imagination in 1999 has been reduced to the attempt to inflate a bit of shabby engineering into an event of great meaning.
Fortunately, this irritating chorus of fin-de-siecle whining has inspired several more thoughtful responses to the new millennium, in everything from history books to PBS’ investigative reporting powerhouse “Frontline.”
One of the most appropriate and thought-provoking treatments of things apocalyptic comes from a high-quality, low-profile magazine produced in Chicago, “Christianity and the Arts.”
In his introductory letter to the fall issue, guest editor and Wheaton College Professor Leland Ryken points out that secular doomsaying, while in some ways aping traditional Christian apocalypticism, has become almost an entirely different genre–bluntly literal, rootless and spasmodic.
“Something . . . that sets off New Testament apocalypse from contemporary eschatological musing is that it is a continuous spiritual hope, not a submerged religious belief that revives when the problems of civilization become overwhelming. . . . The apocalyptic imagination is thus central rather than peripheral to the Christian faith itself,” he writes.
In another article, author and film director David Impastato points out that for more thoughtful Christians, the apocalypse is not so much an event planted in time as “a horizon that continuously transforms the present moment.”
Ultimately, the apocalypse is a concept that has received some of its best and fullest treatments at the hands of artists, and that is where the magazine excels.
Discussions of William Butler Yeats and Walker Percy, of architecture and music and film, are interspersed with a wealth of visual images, from old masters to new folk artists.
In reproductions of Albrecht Durer’s 15th Century woodcut “The Apocalypse,” avenging angels sling their swords over the tortured rabble of human faces below, kings and princes and false prophets meeting their just reward.
Yet Durer’s contemporary, Hans Memling, who managed to paint the entire Book of Revelation on a single wooden panel, makes it all look rather serene. In Memling’s vision, the chaos and destruction fades into the background as St. John the Evangelist focuses his gaze upward at God.
At the center of each of these wildly divergent views of the apocalypse is a rich sense of humanity, and a belief that humans have a greater destiny than the messy and mundane business that makes up so much of life.
That is what seems utterly absent in the myriad attempts to graft religious meaning onto Y2K.
An apocalypse that is not part of a larger story is not an apocalypse at all, just more senseless mayhem. And we don’t have to wait for a special year to see that.
So I remain, at this late date, entirely unconvinced by my millennial correspondents. Of course, I could be wrong, in which case I encourage Y2K believers to send me e-mail headed “I told you so.”
But please, wait until after the rapture.
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E-mail skloehn@tribune.com
