This Is The Way The World Ends
A Lenten Meditation
Fr. Larry

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men 1927

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The Last Discernable Sound

I think I was a high school freshman when I first read T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men.” It’s depiction of those who live empty lives––split between thought and action, unable to either cross the swollen river into hell itself or to plead for redemption, living lives of “neither infamy nor praise,” roiled my adolescent fears of living a pointless, meaningless, “hollow,” life. But I found Eliot’s notion of the world ending in a “whimper” rather than a “bang,” somewhat puzzling.

The church in which I grew up took all biblical images of the end of the world rather literally, and so I imagined the final cataclysm would be deafening as the whole universe collapsed and dissolved in cosmic fire. Later I thought God might choose to let human beings destroy themselves, not something without biblical precedent, and annihilate the world in a nuclear conflagration, which I also suspected would be pretty loud. I read somewhere that Stephen Hawking considered an “impact event,” a collision with an asteroid, to be the biggest threat to the survival of the planet. I imagine that would be earsplitting; or, as my mother used to say: “So loud you can’t hear yourself think.” And certainly, if in five billion years or so the earth is pulled into the sun it will make, although no one will be around to hear it at the precise moment of occurrence, a rather horrific noise. But more and more I find myself wondering if Eliot was not right:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Eliot was an Anglo Catholic Christian (Church of England), and his poetry and his plays were serious looks at the struggle of the individual, society, and church to live out the reality of faith. Humanity’s failure in these three dimensions of its existence apparently suggested to Eliot that far from climaxing in anything spectacular, the last tick of humanity’s final hour will be nothing more than the feeble sound of inarticulate impotence.

Silently Comes the Apocalypse

As I write the global Climate Change Conference (COP26) has just concluded, and the international media has begun to chronicle humanity’s paralysis between “thought and action”–– its inability to boldly cross the river into hell or courageously seek redemption: From all over the world the report is the same: “Still on the Road to Hell,” “Cop Out!” “World Remains off Target,” “Climate Change Poses Existential Threat for Democracies,” “Our Leaders Fail Us At COP 26.” Not only the constantly escalating climate crisis which will render large parts of the world, including vast regions of North America, uninhabitable and create levels of starvation and human migration of apocalyptic proportions; but, also the spiritual and disastrous social and economic effects of racial inequality, poverty level wages, growing wealth inequality, the continuous erosion of democratic norms, the inability to deal with COVID 19, as well as probable future more lethal pandemics, sanely and pragmatically, the carnage in Ukraine, and the growing malignancy of pathological violence at every level all indicate the demise of humanity––whimpering in its long dystopian march.

Few people expect any help to come from the institutional church or religion whether of the conservative or liberal genre. They are not likely to be disappointed in their expectations. The Pew Research Center has found that a significant number of people with a white protestant background have (since 2016) adopted the evangelical label because of its association with conservative Republicanism, and as a declaration of support for Donald Trump rather than because of any theological or spiritual affinity they have for the Christ. In fact, many Americans who embrace the evangelical identity are people who hardly ever attend the religious services of any denomination. They have simplistically melded quasi-religious beliefs and political ideology to create a movement that is about neither politics nor religion but pathological anger, fear, and power.

Liberal Christianity offers a way out of the often-un-kind, un-thinking un-Christian attitudes associated with contemporary evangelical-fundamentalism, but not a way out of the dead-end reality in which humanity is trapped. Mainline, or progressive churches, prefer a buffet spirituality with lots of choices––choices that are smooth and go down easy. In spite of all the talk of a new and exciting form of Christianity emerging among them, mainline churches and their tofu faith are rapidly disappearing from the buffet.

The Human Situation and a Question

My point is simply this, the signs of our time, including those of a religious and spiritual, or ecclesiastical, nature, indicate that we are rapidly moving toward a dystopian world that will end: “Not with a bang, but a whimper.” This is not a Nostradamus like prophecy, and it may yet be that somewhere humanity may find the love, the wisdom, and the will to preserve itself and the planet longer and at a higher level than what now seems possible, but at the moment things do not feel that optimistic. After all, we do live in the golden age of moral and spiritual stupidity. Somewhere among my saved cartoons I have one of a man crawling across the floor of a vast desert. From the tracks behind him it can be seen that he has already crawled a very long way across the burning sand. His beard has grown, his clothes are in tatters, he is perishing from thirst. In the distance a camel is crawling across the same barren desert toward him. From the tracks of the camel, it is obvious it too has crawled a very long way, but from the opposite direction. In the caption the man is saying to himself: “This is not an encouraging sign.” This is the current human situation. Facing this “existential threat” (the end of our existence), raises for each of us the question posed by the Apostle: “How, then, should we live? What sort of people ought we to be?”

Christians in Apocalyptic Time

The Canadian theologian J. M. Tillard asked, “Are we the last Christians?” He answered his own question by saying that we are not the last Christians, but we are the last of conventional Christianity, that Christianity which has been culturally and institutionally accepted but not lived. Tillard’s rhetorical question was aimed in the right direction, but I think the point needs to be sharpened. The one question is not where or why I am placed in a particular moment of historical time, but what does this moment require of me? Faith itself is not so much intellectual assent to one proposition or another as it is a response to God. No matter what the situation the question for both the church and the individual Christian is always the same: What does faith require of me in the here and now? What is Christ asking of me in this present moment?

In 1 Peter 1:1, The Apostle alludes to his fellow Jews living in Greco -Roman cities outside their homeland as scattered exiles, dispersed aliens, and strangers. They were Jews of the dispersion, or diaspora, because they were scattered or dispersed far from their true home––strangers in strange lands. Peter uses this language of the diaspora, this image, as a metaphor for Christians––particularly for those Christians living in the cities and Roman provinces of Asia Minor. He is urging persecuted and oppressed Christians in their small communities of faith to think of themselves as foreign immigrants, resident aliens, scattered throughout the Roman Empire in the larger centers of humanity and worldly power. Karl Rahner, whom many believe to have been the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, recognized that what those Christians and communities of faith were called to be and do in the early centuries is what both the present and the near future require of us; that, quite simply, we are urged to live in the world as resident aliens and as the community of the diaspora. All that will mean is not entirely clear, but certain characteristics as well as questions are beginning to emerge and can be outlined as follows:

1) Karl Rahner was right when he said: “The Christians of the future will either be mystics, or they will cease to be Christians at all.” By “mystic” Rahner meant a man or woman who has experienced the depths of God (the presence of God) within, someone who has discovered immediate communion with Christ, who has, so to speak, had a first-hand encounter with the Spirit. Whether in the world as presently constituted or in the more apocalyptic form taking shape on the horizon, Christianity as an ideology, or as the notion (as an Episcopal priest once told me) that “it’s a pretty good way to live,” or as an intellectual belief or doctrine, or philosophical system will simply not be sufficient to sustain either the spiritual life of the individual or the church
2) Communities of faith are likely to be small in the future. For one thing the numerical growth of believers will not keep up with the overall growth in population. For another, the spiritual path of Jesus will prove increasingly too difficult for many to walk. Certainly, the growing psychological dysfunction of individuals and families, the moral and ethical dissipation of society in general, and the debilitating problems rooted in addiction make a genuinely spiritual life based on the teaching of any faith tradition a less and less likely choice. In short, the freedom to choose the Good becomes more restricted all the time.
3) How will the church, passionate but with few human or financial resources function?
4) What pastoral care and spiritual direction practices will be best as life in the United States and Western Europe approaches third world conditions or worse?
5) How are qualified pastors and priests to be trained as the whole seminary system, already financially unfeasible for both students and institutions, continues to collapse and disappear?
6) What needs to be done to prepare laity in the skills, theological understanding, Biblical knowledge, and spiritual wisdom for what will inevitably be a greater role in leadership, worship, and ministry in a dystopian world?
7) What forms of ministry will best serve the needs of the church and the larger society?
8) What will it mean to be a confessing Christian or church where there is persecution? How can the faithful be prepared for such times?
9) How can we minister effectively to the displaced, to climate and war refugees, and to people in the midst of mass migration?
10) What will it mean for the American church to witness to peace and justice in a world of catastrophic need and perhaps autocratic power.
11) How and/or can Christians become churches that are arks of safety in a violent and chaotic world?
12) As a final question I will pose this one: “How can the Christian and the church of the future be genuinely and courageously moral without being moralistic or clichéd.? How can they be “in the world, but not of the world.”

This list is, of necessity, simple and incomplete but I hope suggestive of the preparations the company of the committed ought to already be considering.

Conclusion

Every attempt to look into the future is obviously fraught with problems, and like the ancient people of Israel we want to believe all is well, that all will be well, even as the city walls are being pulled down and the gates set on fire. As Rahner noted: “The basic tendency with us is to defend what has been handed down, not to prepare for a situation which is still to come. But a look into the distance is necessary if we are not to be whimpering cowards.”

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.